Gautam wrote:
I'm going to take these as one. The most important figure in the 9/11 attacks (other than Bin Laden) was Egyptian. I don't see you declaring that we attack Egypt. Zacarias Moussoui is German. Why arne't you calling for us to attack Germany? It is true that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis.
There's a common thread, Gautam, let me help you see it. Planning: Saudi's and some others, Saudi in charge. Financing: Saudi. Terrorists involved 15 Saudis, 4 others.
It is _not_ true that the Saudi government was involved. It was not. In fact, one of the _non_ redacted portions of the 9/11 report explicitly stated that the Saudi government was entirely uninvolved.
Sen Phil Graham in a Salon interview: http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2004/09/08/graham/index.html
"You write about the Bush administration's suppression of the joint House-Senate intelligence panel's findings on Saudi Arabian links to 9/11. What exactly was suppressed, and why? Or at least tell us what you can, given that the information is still classified.
In general terms it included the details of why we [on the committee] had raised suspicion that the Saudi government and various representatives of Saudi interests had supported some of the hijackers -- and might have supported all of them. My own personal conclusion was that the evidence of official Saudi support for at least two of the terrorists in San Diego was, as one CIA agent said, incontrovertible. That led us to another question: Why would the Saudis have provided that level of assistance to two of the 19 [hijackers] and not the other 17? There wasn't an adequate attempt to answer that question. My feeling was there wasn't anything to justify that discrepancy, and so there was a strong possibility that such assistance had been provided to others of the terrorists, but we didn't know about it. Then there's another question: If there was this infrastructure in place that was accessed by the terrorists, did it disappear as soon as 9/11 was completed? There's no reason to believe that it did."
Up until about a year ago, the Saudis could probably be best described as passive sponsors of terror.
Oh, well, that makes it OK then. If it's true. And it's not.
Their government did not sponsor terrorism, but did not do much to stop it
either.
I repeat; 9/11 was funded by Saudis. Whether or not it the government was involved is open to question, but the money came from Saudi Arabia.
Since the attacks on Saudi Arabia proper, the Saudi government has been actively participating in attacking Al Qaeda. This is something that is agreed on across the board. The best open source work on the subject has been done by Dan Byman at Georgetown University - if you want more details, I suggest you look at his work. The reason we haven't done anything to the Saudis is because we _need_ the Saudis. They're the only people who can police their own society.
Yes, they policed them so well that 3000 people are dead.
We can't do it.
You're right. We're finding that out in Iraq, aren't we
Demands for doing something to the Saudis are the most astonishingly facile thing in American politics today. What, exactly, is it we are supposed to do, other that what we are already doing, which is persuading them to crack down on terror and liberalize their society? We can't _force_ them to do it.
We can't???? We can force Iraq, a larger, more heavily populated, more politically and socially diverse country to do our bidding but we can't force SA?
I have no idea. Every little bit helps. I love the loaded language here, by the way. The Alaskan oil pipeline was such a catastrophe, after all. The predictions of the environmental movement on such things have been so conclusively wrong, time after time, that it's not like there's a lot of credibility left here.
Ask yourself why the pipeline has been such a success, Gautam. What if environmentalists had not raised a stink and it had been left up to the industry to build it any which way they could? We'd have the cheapest POS they could get away with. The environmentalists are the reason it has had minimal impact.
Nor, in fact, do I care. As I said, every
little bit helps - every bit of oil we get domestically is oil we don't buy abroad. Isn't that what we're supposed to want?
Well, if the political opposition wasn't given strength by political scaremongers who are more interested in winning cheap short term votes than doing what's good for the country, it would be economically feasible. I don't think that such people, are, you know, laudable. As for what the people of Nevada want - Nevada is not an independent state. The question is - what is best for the United States. There is no real question that nuclear power would be very good for the US. It is entirely possible that President Bush might lose the election because of his (courageous) stance in favor of Yucca Mountain in Nevada. If he does so, he will lose because of something he did _right_, as the (Kerry-supporting) New Republic just pointed out.
I don't disagree that Nuclear power might be a good stop gap alternative to fossil fuels, but I think that the political reality is that they will never be accepted by the general public.
Quoting from the Detroit News Auto Insider: "The Bush administration Thursday proposed the first increase in fuel economy requirements for light trucks since 1996, calling for SUVs and pickup trucks to average another 1.5 miles per gallon of gasoline by 2007." That was in 2002. Truly the Saudis must have been thrilled.
The requirements should be much stiffer, and I fault the Clinton administration as much as anyone for this lapse.
As for the California thing - I have no idea about the legal issues, as I've never heard of the case you're alluding to. I would point out that such regulations by California raise significant federalist issues on the regulation of interstate commerce.
Funny that it wasn't a problem for 25 some odd years. Only when Bush took office did it become a federalist issue.
I would also say that the record of "alternative" sources of power is very poor, and the record of nuclear power is _excellent_. So that is a defensible policy. It is certainly _not_ evidence that the President is being bribed or blackmailed.
The evidece that the President coddles big business is legion.
Tell me, Doug, is there anything that a Democrat could do that would bother you?
Of course. I named one above. But this isn't about Democrats (I'm an independant by the way and was a registered Republican until the first Bush fiasco.)
We've already ascertained that when a Republican questions somebody's foreign policy judgment, you think that's unacceptably questioning their patriotism, but when a Democrat explicitly says that Republicans are unpatriotic or unamerican (Wes Clark, Teresa Heinz Kerry) that's okay.
No, what we've established is that when someone critisizes the Bush administrations forign policy they are deemed unpatriotic by the right. This is an attempt to intimidate people and get them to shut up. I don't know about the reference to Kerry, but in Clark's case I believe it was not opinion that was criticized but actions detrimental to the welfare of the nation. There is, IMO, a huge, monumental difference.
Is there any criticism of any Democrat that's ever justifiable, or should we just all shut up and follow the orders of you and Dr. Brin?
Should you expend any effort you would find _many_ critisizms of the left in Brin's writing. You will also find that I have been critical as well, but of course I have expended most of my effort in criticising _this administration_. I deem it a dire threat to our collective success. I'll be busy critisizing the Democrats as soon as I feel that they in power and screwing things up as I did in the late '70s and '80s.
Is there anything that a Democrat could do (say, claiming that we invaded Afghanistan to build an oil pipeline there) that would bother you at all, or is any tactic acceptable as long as your guys end up in power?
I would tell anyone that believed the above thet they were full of sh**, does that count? As far as tactics, the most underhanded by far are conducted by the Bush administration.
In wrapping this up, I'd like to note that while, after asking what I consider to be relevent questions about the Saudi's and energy policy, you felt the need to include insulting personal attacks at the end of your reply. This is particularly interesting after your previous post in which you wrote:
"I can say that at least I'm on the side that tolerates disagreement, is able to talk with people without
insulting them, and is interested in rational argument."
So much for that, eh?
-- Doug _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
