SubscribeNeither of these things have anything at all to do with the First Amendment. The military has no obligation whatsoever to provide information about their war plans to the media, nor do they have any obligation to allow members of the press to tag along on their missions. If they wish to cooperate with the press during periods when doing so will not be a detriment to their military objectives, such as during the Gulf War when our objective turned out to be about as hard as paving a parking lot, hey, great. More interesting reporting and cooler pictures on TV. But when secrecy is of the utmost importance, the press will just have to live with it. Freedom to report != obligation of the military to have to answer to any and all demands reporters may make.
posted by aaron at 11:21 AM on September 18, 2001
Yes, and Thank God the World Bank/IMF meeting in Washington was cancelled. In this environment, the moment any anarchist tried so much as to break a single window, there would probably be hundreds of people standing on the sidelines literally waiting to beat him to death.
(I'm sorry if anyone objects to my compliments or criticism of Bush. Take this as analysis.)
Legitimate criticism of Bush and his policies, such as your post, is perfectly fine and unobjectionable. It's the haters who keep posting emtpy rhetorical crap like, "Well, we all know Bush is a complete imbecile" and "Hey, why does Bush always have that look on his face that I personally find creepy? Isn't that proof positive that he's a DANGEROUS MAN?" that we are objecting vehemently to.
posted by aaron at 11:34 AM on September 18, 2001
While I agree with you that it would be a lot easier to settle the question once and for all if the feds would do a coredump of everything they've managed to dig up in the last week, but even what little has dribbled out all seems to indicate it's all part of the large fundamentalist Islamic terrorist network we all know and love. Just a couple hours ago CBS News found out that one of the hijacker pilots who flew into the WTC had a nice long meeting with the head of Iraq's intelligence agency just a few months ago. Regular joes with axes to grind generally don't get appointments with one of the highest-ranking members of a country's government to use him as a sounding board (or, more likely, as a source of funds and equipment).
Can you make a plausible scenario in which those who hijacked those planes were the only ones involved? I'd like to know why that's not plausible, and why this operation supposedly took tons of money, and why anyone thinks that the hijackers used their real names, and lots of other questions.
Well, we already know a number of the hijackers went on several "test runs" in the last month or so, taking a number of cross-country flights in order to case out the airports and planes they would be using. That takes a lot of money, obviously. Not millions, but more than these people should have had, since they didn't seem to have jobs at all. The flight training had to run into the tens of thousands of dollars for each of them, and again they were somehow being supported rather generously throughout the several years it took them all to get trained: There have been a number of reports of these guys showing up in bars, brashly annoucing they were "airline pilots" to anyone that would listen, and just generally flashing buttloads of cash to make themselves look like hot shit (or at least arrogant shits) to the patrons of the cheesy middle-class bars and nightclubs they liked to hang out at in Florida. This money had to be coming from somewhere. And what little the press has learned thus far seems to show some pretty clear links back to the Bad Guys in the Middle East.
Again, arrogance seems to be the reason they all used their real names. Once they were able to get into the country under their own names and freely do whatever they wanted to without the government watching their every move, they got snobby really fast. Plus it was a final "in your face" move to have the feds find out after the fact that they'd known these guys all along, could have stopped them at any point, but didn't. "Ha ha, stupid American infidels!" They also appear to have left behind tons of obvious clues - some real, some intentionally planted to throw investigators off the trail ... and why would they want to throw us off the trail if the trail ended with all of them on the planes themselves?
Right now it seems to be coming down to Occam's Razor. Everything we've managed to find out so far seems to indicate that the simplest explanation that makes the most sense is that the vast terrorist network we've known about for years is indeed behind this. And I strongly suspect the Government has far stronger direct evidence that they simply aren't talking about yet.
posted by aaron at 11:54 AM on September 18, 2001
Innocent civilians sometimes get killed in war. That's what war is. Thus far in this war, we have 5,500 dead, ALL civilians.
Rebecca, have you read my response on the other thread yet?
fishfucker: It seems to me that in this thread at least, "peacenik" means someone who is advocating peace as the only response to this attack, who believes that the only correct response is to do absolutely nothing.
posted by aaron at 12:32 PM on September 18, 2001
« Older Scientologists accused of misrepresenting themselv... | A meme tracker... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by rcade at 10:18 AM on September 18, 2001