-- -Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have - -happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ -Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- -individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sun, 16 Sep 2001 23:33:01 EDT From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: A Page from the Little Red Play Book? Osama bin Laden probably IS to blame - but the proof isn't in yet, although President Bush helpfully informs us "No question he is the prime suspect. No question about that." In Bob Woodward's book "Veil, The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987," the author discusses a CIA guerilla-warfare training manual distributed to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua; the manual was disclosed shortly before the 1984 elections and became a debate issue between Reagan and Mondale. It advised the Contras to "neutralize caerfully selected and planned targets." Woodward quotes the reaction of NY's Senator Daniel Moynihan, who "had read a paper on Mao Tse-tung's technique of insurgency: identify the landowner, single him out and have a public trial. Focus the hate on one person, make the people in the village vote and then witness the execution. It was an effective bonding technique. He had seen it in a Green Beret manual during the Vietnam War. It brought the populace into the rebellion, gave them a stake, a feeling of satisfaction, a feeling thtat things were going to be better, that justice would be served." Is bin Laden to blame? Some people may be happier if we never know for sure - taking him out will accomplish many goals, among them to (hopefully) scare the bejesus out of other, less fanatical colleagues. An object lesson requires ... merely an object. The quicker the strike, the more reason to view the selected course of action with suspicion. The United States has never set forth a coherent substitute for its Cold War policy of engaging the Soviets on every front. In the absence of the Evil Empire, what basis do we have for our various and often conflicting policies? It would be a lot more productive to tell the world that "great power" and "great responsibility" go together (thank you, Stan Lee); that part of "responsibility" is the obligation to use "power" to keep the world as safe as possible from germ warfare, rogue nukes, and terrorist attacks; and that with no other gain than that very safety - a benefit for all people of good will - the United States will bomb, invade, or even nuke anyone who refuses to play by these fundamental rules. The challenge, then, would be to live up to that high standard. Fighting Saddam Hussein when low oil prices were threatened and calling off the dogs when the oil fields were secured was a poor start down the post-Cold War Highway. If George II can't do better than bombing Afghanistan back to the Stone Age (irony alert) because he's angry and needs to respond to this outrage, we'll be no better off than before. Keep an eye out for lies and half truths. CNN.com reports, "On Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC that Bush authorized the military to shoot down any unauthorized civilian aircraft heading toward the White House or the Capitol once it became apparent the United States was under attack. Bush said Sunday that 'I wasn't concerned about my decision. I was more concerned about the lives of innocent Americans.'" At the same time, Pentagon "[o]fficials also told CNN that President George W. Bush had not given authorization to the Defense Department to shoot down a passenger airliner until after the Pentagon had been struck. Officials at the Pentagon also said that they were never made aware of the threat from hijacked United Airlines flight 93 until after it crashed in Pennsylvania." Could Mssrs. Cheney and Bush be stretching what really happened in an attempt to make it better fit the way they'd like to be perceived? Would you like to be an analyst at the CIA or the Pentagon this week, giving your elected officials information they don't want to hear and being told to go back and get it right? None of this diminishes the horror and tragedy of what happened Tuesday. The horror and the tragedy exist in their own right, independent of sonorous television commentators, Fox News fascists, cowardly baseball and football executives, and religious fanatics of all stripes. Nothing we do now will alter Tuesday's events. All we can alter is what happens next. [ To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with body "unsubscribe man-bytes-dog" (the subject is ignored).]
