would attempt to interpret the two seperate camps "as if" they worked the same way....

Israeli's are northern European despite their so called holy world roots...they are intellectual and carrying the baggage of having been subjected to "who cares about you" for so long that they've made it a credo that suffering is what it's all about....and they have to do what is necessary in order to protect themselves...

they see themselves as an island _as a point of view_ with everyone against them...

then they place this projection onto the world, create and validate it....

for things to change they need to see that they are no longer the victim but the perpatrators....

this can not be done through violence only through dialouge....northern europeans talk, think....

palestinians are more primitive, they react and expect that others will understand them through the depth of their reactions....the israelis' view them as unconcious primitives....and to a certain extent they are correct....they don't think.

the Palestinian are desert tribal mentality...herd, right and wrong, touchy-feely

they want to be recognized and treated with respect, not trivialized because they can be...

but they need more than gestures and words...

they, since they are tribal, need what tribal people have always needed...solid gestures of respect in the form of physical things....not rhetoric or words....

whether it's food, medical, ownership of homes....it needs to be _real_ something to sit down on or eat...

I can agree with some of the the above poster's assessments of the situation.

The Isrealis have the right to defend themselves. The History of the Jews has been marked by humiliations, persecution, and dissappointments. The Palestinians also have a right to a stable social fabric, a country to call their own, and respect they believe they don't have. There is no single solution to the problem, and we can see the roots of their struggle through history.

Since the fall of the Judea until the present creation of the State of Isreal the Jewish people are neither respected, tolerated, or accepted into the societies they try to assimilate with. Rome never truly recognizes the importance of Jews and the benefit they provide to the empire. The Europeans during the Middle Age and the Renaissance have always viewed the Jews as inferior and second class citizens while benefitting from the Jewish shredness in business and banking. Even in Modern History Jews are persecuted and hated (Nazis, KKK, etc). With such a long history of being disdained and mistreated it is understandable that the Jews are suspicious of others, and quite protective of their land, reputation, and properties

The Palestinians do not have such a harsh history. They only faced temporary human cruelty during the Crusades of the Middle Age, and maybe during the British domination of the Middle East. After that, however, can be called the period of Palestinian humilation. The British ceded Jerusalem and a large part of Palestine to the Jews whithout inputs from the Palestinian muslim. After WWII the British and Americans decided that the State of Isreal should be established without input from the Palestinian muslims. This is the start of the conflict which we now see today

During the Wars of Yom Kippur and the War of 1967 Isreal has greatly expanded their hold on Palestinian land. Settlements are built to ensure that if any other muslim invasions happen, it will not get close to the hearland of the Isreali State. The land, however, is Palestinian. The Wars were instigated by Egypt, Syria, and others, but the Palestinians are the ones suffering from the consequence. The Muslim world is of course incensed by this injustice (even though they are the ones who started the Wars). The Palestinians, of course, were not extremely excited of their position, and in their view they have no choice but to rise up to this Isreali incursion. The creation of the PLO and other Palestinian terrorist/liberation organization spawned during this period.

Israelis of course regarded this as a danger to their society, and using superior intelligence, superior armed forces, and superior weaponry, crushed the Palestinian Intifada time and time again. The Israelis, however, didn't like this to happen continuously, and Rabin decided to talk to the PLO head Arafat to resolve the issue. We of course, know what happened to Rabin, and the ensuing aftermath of the Peace Accord.

Isrealis now are taking a harder stance, assassinating terrorist leaders and unilaterally withdrawing from the occupied lands while constructing an apartheid wall (lets be honest here, the wall is there to seperate muslims and to that point only. you are welcome to disagree with me on this point of course). This hardline Isreali stance combined with Fatah's inability to rule led to the rise of Hamas.

The Palestinians do NOT want more war, but they believe that they have no choice but to continue their struggle. Hamas represents a new hope to the Palestinians, hardline enough to get perhaps a little bit of land back from the Isrealis, but responsible enough to create the proper social services for the welfare of the people.

As you can see the issues are not simple, and the solutions aren't either. It is easy to label Hamas as a terrorist organization, and that is exactly what the USA and Israel decided to do. This doesn't solve anything, sidelining Hamas will lead to more instability on an already volatile region and serves no purpose whatsoever. Destablizing Hamas will lead the Muslim world to see the West as nothing more than troublemakers, heralding democracy while secretly toppling the regimes that are democratically elected. Fully cooperating with Hamas, however, would indicate the West's weakness in dealing with issues and boost the influence of muslim extremists in the world stage.

Israel and the West needs to recognize that Hamas is a legitimate government. Sidelining the issue and secretly hoping Hamas failing isn't an option. Doing so will just show how inept the West is dealing with the issue. If Hamas cannot deal with the legitimate governments of the world, then it will deal with extremists instead. Iran, Syria, and perhaps in the future Iraq will make sure that if the West doesn't deal with Hamas, they will. The last thing we need is another Muslim Fundamentalist state.

My opinion is to work with Hamas, but with conditions. Isreal will have to make some concessions. Some of them will include: withdrawal back to the pre-1967 borders, destruction of the apartheid wall, and the return of the Palestinian refugees. The Palestinians will have to dismantle all terrorist organizations, disband all militias, arrest all attacks on Israelis (civilian and military alike), and recognize the State of Israel. A LARGE UN military pracekeeping force composed of Turkish, Europeans, Americans, and a non-involved party (chinese? indian? autralian?) to enforce the above rules.

In the mean time diplomatically the West should use the carrot and stick rule. The Palestinian tax money from the Isrealis should not be withheld, it is of the Palestinian property. This money isn't crucial anyways; the money to reconstruct Palestinian land will be much larger than that. The West should be willing to give financial incentives to the Palestinians in exchange for the cessation of violence. The money will strictly be used in infrastructure improvement, social work improvement, and the funding of a fully functional Palestinian Police Authority trained by the UN.

The proposal above poses its own risks, and may never work. The current stance of the Israelis and the USA will backfire, however, and WILL fail. Our "democracy spreading" have already failed in Palestine, and may be in the process of failing in Iraq. Continuing our unilateral support of Israel will not give us any advantage in the negotiations; we need to work with both sides. Complex issues need complex solutions, simple slogans mean nothing when people are dying.

Much has been made in America about an intelligence failure that failed to predict the success of Hamas. I don't think their level of success was predictable. I think everyone expected them to do well, but not to take over the Palestinian Authority. I think even Hamas was surprised.
However, Since Sharon marched around the al-Aqsa Mosque and Arafat being sidelined in negotiations, I did expect an escalation of the conflict between Sharon, and now his heirs, and the hardline organizations in the Palestinian Community. Both sides want all the land from the Jordan to the sea for their side. There is no alternative to war unless the land is divided or everyone lives together in one state. The three options are two states side by side, a combined Israeli/Palestinian state, or a war to the death.
Based on the American experience, I rather like a multiethnic single state, but it is highly unlikely when one side seeks to create an artficial majority in a sea of Arabs. If the other side would impose their religious customs, dress code, and values on minority religions that would be a problem. While I don't think their values are that different, the customs and dress codes could be problems.
So the choice is between the two state solution and war or wars to the death. Take your pick and live or die with the result.

A war to the death will be suicidal for Israel. Arab states will unite in this endeavor and Israel will perish. The unity of Arabs (I do not think that all non-Israelis in the region identify themselves as Arab but I won't even try to make all of the distinctions.) will just barely outlast the destruction of Israel but this will not be a benefit to a non-existent Israeli state.

Ultimately, Arabs outnumber Israelis in the region by a wide margin. Israel and (America) certainly have superior military power but I do not believe that can overcome the numerical superiority of Arabs in their native land. No one should want a war to the death, especially Israel.

By enthusiastically giving Israel carte blanche to do whatever it wants, including erecting illegal settlements on the West Bank and the building of an illegal wall that effectively annexes Palestinian lands, and by providing billions of dollars in arms to this outlaw state, Bush and his fellow Republican true believers invited this reaction from the Palestinians. Why is anyone surprised that a people that has been abused, humiliated, and had its lands stolen from under it with the enthusiastic support of the world's most powerful superpower, should choose to elect a radical government that strongly rejects U.S./Israeli plans?
It amazes me that anyone is surprised by this.

Read the bible. It tells us exactly what is going to happen. Why all this debate? This situation has been formed since before the people of Israel were chosen by God. There is nothing we can do. God is in control.

The fact of the matter is that if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world would find themselves in the same state of cultural and moral stagnation that has held their achievements in check for the past 500 years. They will be still be obsessed with their lack of power and convinced of their superiority. And they will be looking for someone to blame for their sad state of affairs.

Offering up Israel would not change a thing.

Just an FYI on transliteration. Fatah is a Palestinian political party. Fateh is a dish made with garbonzo beans.

Sure, we all know what is meant by the context, but it sure makes the phrase, "the U.S.and Israel want Hamas to be Fateh" a whole lot funnier (and more ominous).

What is all that thinking? It makes my head hurt.

- Death to Isreal.

Now I feel better. Short, simple and concise. ^_^

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Who Is Osama? Where Did He Come From? How Did He Escape? What About Those Anthrax Attacks?
A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't Want You to Ask

By WERTHER

The events of September 11, 2001 evoke painful memories, tinged with a powerful nostalgia for the way of life before it happened. The immediate tragedy caused a disorientation sufficient to distort the critical faculties in the direction of retrospectively predictable responses: bureaucratic adaptation, opportunism, profiteering, kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.

As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate it, fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded it, the questions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have created an entire cottage industry of amateur speculation--as did the omissions and distortions of the Warren Report four decades ago. How could it not?

While initially received as definitive by a rapturous official press, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not only because of unsatisfying content--like all "independent" government reports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup masquerading as an exposé--but because we now know more: more about the feckless invasion of Iraq, more about the occupation of Afghanistan and the purported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more about the post-9/11 stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of Rights, more about the rush to create the Department of Homeland Security, an agency to "prevent another 9/11," which, in retrospect, is plainly about cronyism, contracts, and Congressional boodle.

Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based their investigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publicly released video footage, or speculations into the physics of impacting aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closely at the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-time event can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for, as Professor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the Magic Bullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but not outside the realm of the possible.

But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basic higher-order political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do not require knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or the unknowable piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let us proceed, then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to ask questions the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.

1. Who is Osama bin Laden, and where did he come from?

On this point, the report retreats into obfuscation. While acknowledging that he had something to do with resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the report suggests, without explicitly so stating, that the links between Osama and the United States were practically nonexistent. This will not parse: until the present Global War on Terrorism, the CIA's operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan was the biggest and most expensive covert operation in the agency's history. The 9/11 Report provides no convincing documented refutation of Osama's links with the CIA, given that the agency was running a major war in which he was a participant. Similarly, the report's authors did not plumb the informal U.S. government connections with the same Saudi government whose links with the bin Laden family could have provided a cut-out for any CIA-Osama relationship. [1]

2. When were Osama's last non-hostile links with the U.S. government?

Consistent with its view of Osama's relationship with the CIA during the anti-Soviet enterprise, the 9/11 Report ignores the possibility that he may have had a continuing relationship with the U.S. government, particularly with its intelligence services. The report brushes this hypothesis aside with a footnote to the effect that both the CIA and purported second-ranking al Qaeda figure Ayman al Zawahiri deny a relationship. [2]

One may doubt the veracity of Langley's denials of a relationship with Osama bin Laden and his associates, given the lack of truthfulness of its earlier statement to the Warren Commission about not having had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. Or in alleging that an employee named "Mr. George Bush" whom the agency cited in its reporting of the events of 22 November 1963 was a completely different person from the George Bush who subsequently became the 41st U.S. president, after serving as Director of Central Intelligence.

Likewise, Mr. Zawahiri's assertion of not having received a penny of CIA funds deserves the searchlight of skeptical scrutiny. What the report describes as Zawahiri's "memoir" is actually a broadside published in a London-based newspaper in December 2001, i.e., after the events of 9/11. It was obviously intended as a call to the Muslim faithful for a holy war against the infidel desecrator of the holy places; would such a person, conscious of the need to gain recruits in a war of pure faith against the Great Satan, have confirmed having been on the payroll of his principal enemy? It is no more likely than for the current President of the United States, in drawing parallels between the war in Iraq and World War II, to advert to the fact that his grandfather's bank was seized by the U.S. government in 1942 for illicit trading with the Third Reich.

Indeed, U.S. intelligence agencies have had, purely as a function of their charters, relationships with most of the world's scoundrels, con-men, and psychopaths of the last 70 years: from Lucky Luciano and the Gambino Mob, to Reinhard Gehlen and Timothy Leary, to the perpetrators of the massacre of 500,000 people in Indonesia in 1965, to the Cuban exiles who blew up an airliner in 1976 [3], to such shady characters as Ahmed Chalabi and his friend "Curveball." Among such a gallery of murderous kooks, bin Laden and his cohorts do not especially stand out.

More dispositive than these speculations, however, are the very real connections between Washington and Islamic jihadists in the Balkans throughout the 1990s. The report hints at this relationship by mentioning the presence of charity fronts of bin Laden's "network" in Zagreb and Sarajevo. In fact, the U.S. government engaged in a massive covert operation to infiltrate Islamic fighters, many of them veterans of the Afghan war, into the Balkans for the purpose of undermining the Milosevic government. The "arms embargo," enforced by the U.S. military, was a cover for this activity (i.e., using military force to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on).

A key Washington fixer for the Muslim government of Bosnia was the law firm of Feith and Zell. Yes, Douglas Feith, one of the principal conspirators involved in launching the Iraq war under the banner of opposing Islamic terrorism, was a proponent of introducing Islamic terrorists into South Eastern Europe. Do the "Islamofascists" of pseudo-conservative demonology accordingly seem less like satanic enemies and more like puppets dangling from an unseen hand? Or perhaps the analogy is incorrect: more like a Frankenstein's Monster that has slipped the control of its creator.

3. How did the President of United States React to the August 6 2001 Presidential Daily Brief?

Although the August 6 PBD had been mentioned in the foreign press since 2002, it did not come to the attention of official Washington until then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice impaled herself upon the hook of 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben Veniste's artful line of questioning in mid-2004. Blurting out the title of the PBD, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," she let the cat out of the bag--or perhaps not. Having opened Pandora's Box, the commissioners displayed no troublesome curiosity about its contents.

What concrete measures did the president take after receiving perhaps the most significant strategic warning that any head of state could have hoped to receive about an impending attack on his country? Did he alert the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, the Border patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration, to comb through their current information and increase their alert rates? Did the threat warning of the PBD (granted that it did not reveal the tail numbers of the aircraft to be hijacked), in combination with the numerous threat warnings from other sources [4] elicit feverish activity to "protect the American people?" Not that we can observe.

So what was the actual response of the U.S. government? Here the 9/11 Report exhibits autism. As nearly as we can determine from contemporaneous bulletins, the president massacred whole hecatombs of mesquite bushes and large-mouthed bass, perfected his golf swing, and hosted various captains of industry in the rustic repose of Crawford, Texas. In other words, he presided over the most egregious example of Constitutional nonfeasance since the administration of James Buchanan allowed Southern secessionists to take possession of the arms in several federal arsenals. The 9/11 Commission's silence on this point is an abundant demonstration of its role as an apologist, rather than a dispassionate truth-teller.

The testimony of federal officials about what they did up to and during the attacks is telling, in so far as the false and misleading statements of witnesses provide clues. Ms. Rice, her tremulous voice betraying nervousness, averred, against the plain evidence of the public record and common sense, that a PBD stating that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the borders of the United States was too ambiguous to take any action.

Likewise, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft may have perjured himself when he denied under oath that acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard came to him on July 5, 2001 with information of terrorist plots--information that the Attorney General "did not want to hear about anymore," as NBC News reported on June 22, 2004. It might be considered a matter of Ashcroft's word against Pickering's, except for the fact that Pickering had a corroborating witness.

4. Who wrote the script for the rhetorical response to 9/11?

The smoke was still rising from the rubble of the World Trade Center complex and the Pentagon when the unanimous and universal cry erupted in government circles, and was relentlessly amplified by the media, that this was "war," not a criminal act of terrorism. How very convenient that this war, declared against a diffuse and stateless entity, would trigger long-sought legal authorities and constitutional loopholes which would not apply in the case of a criminal act. [5] Torture, domestic spying, selective suspension of habeas corpus, all the unconstitutional monsters whose implications are only clear four years after the event, all slipped into immediate usage with the rhetorical invocation of war.

This was not merely war, it was unlimited war, both in the sense of total war meant by General Ludendorff (civilian rights being trivial), and in the sense of lacking a comprehensible time span. "A war that will not end in our lifetimes," said Vice President Cheney on Meet the Press on the very Sunday following the attacks. How could he be so sure during the fog of uncertainty following the strike?

If bin Laden and his followers were merely a limited number of fanatics living in Afghan caves, as we were assured at the time, why did the Bush administration relentlessly advance the meme that a decades-long war was inevitable? Could not a concerted intelligence, law-enforcement, and diplomatic campaign, embracing all sovereign countries, have effectively shut down "al Qaeda" within a reasonable period of time--say, within the period it took to fight World War II between Pearl Harbor and the Japanese surrender?

Four years on, Vice President Cheney, doing a plausible imitation of the radio voice of The Shadow, continues to publicly mutter, in menacing tones of the lower octaves, that the war on terrorism [6] is a conflict that will last for decades. [7] This at the same time as the junior partner of the ruling dyarchy, the sitting president, is giving upbeat speeches promising victory in the war on terrorism (i.e., Iraq, the Central Front on the War on Terrorism) against a papier maché backdrop containing the printed slogan "Strategy for Victory."

It is curious that no one--not the watchdogs of the supposedly adversary media, nor the nominal opposition party in Washington, nor otherwise intelligent observers--has remarked on this seeming contradiction: victory is just around the corner, yet the war will last for decades. Quite in the manner of the war between Eastasia and Oceania in 1984.

In earlier times, this contradiction would have seemed newsworthy, if not scandalous. Suppose President Roosevelt had opined at the Teheran Conference that the Axis would be defeated in two years. Then suppose his vice president had at the same time traveled about the United States telling his audiences that the Axis would not be defeated for decades. An American public not yet conditioned by television would at least have noticed, and demanded some explanation.

So question number 4 concludes with a question: why does the U.S. government hive so firmly to the notion of a long, drawn-out, indeterminate war, when Occam's Razor would suggest the desirability of presenting a clear-cut victory within the span of imagination of the average impatient American--a couple of years at most? Or is endless war the point?

5. Why did the mysterious anthrax attacks come and go like a wraith?

For those in immediate proximity to the events, the September 11attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were frightening in the extreme, but they had not the slow accumulation of dread that the anthrax scare of October 2001 presented. Far more than any anomaly concerning 9/11 itself, the anthrax mystery is the undecoded Rosetta Stone of recent years.

The anthrax attacks were the most anomalous terrorist attacks in history: clever, successful, unpunished, causing five deaths and a billion dollars' damage. Yet never repeated. This alone makes them remarkable in the annals of criminal activity, but there is more--the intended victims (at least those with an official position) were warned in writing of their peril in sufficient detail that they could take steps to administer an antidote. Is this characteristic of terrorist attacks by "al Qaeda," or by any known Middle Eastern terrorist group?

Except for the ambiguous first attack (which killed a National Enquirer photo editor), all the deaths resulting from the anthrax plot were incidental--mail handlers and innocent recipients of mail which had been contaminated by proximity to the threat letters. Evidently the West Jefferson anthrax strain was more powerful and had greater accidental effects than the plotters had intended.

But what did the plotters intend, if they did not will the deaths of the addressees of their anthrax letters? It was pure coincidence, perhaps, that the anthrax scare was at its height, producing psychosomatic illness symptoms among members of Congress and staffers, just as the USA PATRIOT Act was wending its way through the legislative process. This measure, which originated among the same Justice Department lawyers who legally opined that torture was wholesome, was rammed through the Congress after enactment of the authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. Why is this sequence significant?

The then-majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, wrote a curious op-ed in the Washington Post four years after the events just described. [8]. In attempting to refute the administration's allegation that it had been granted plenary wiretap powers in the Afghanistan authorization, he stated that he and his Senatorial confreres explicitly rejected an administration proposal to authorize an effective state of war within the borders of the United States itself.

Given the administration's repeatedly demonstrated refusal to accept any limitation on its powers, it is logical that the rebuff on the war powers authorization was followed by the prompt submittal of the Justice Department's draft of the PATRIOT Act, containing many of the domestic authorities the Bush White House had sought in the use of force legislation. How doubly coincidental that two of the limited number of addressees of the threat letters should have been the offices of Daschle himself, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, then-chairman of the committee of jurisdiction over the PATRIOT Act.

Needless to say, the measure was passed by an even more comfortable margin than that enjoyed by the 1933 Enabling Law in the Reichstag. [9] Notwithstanding buyer's remorse exhibited by many members of Congress, and current efforts to amend its more onerous provisions, it appears we are saddled with the main burdens of its edicts in perpetuity.

How the government placed this perpetual burden on its citizens is bound up with the mysterious anthrax scare of October 2001, an outrage that, unlike 9/11, does not even merit an official explanation. No one has been charged.

6. Why did Osama bin Laden escape?

"Wanted, dead or alive!" "We'll smoke 'em out of their caves!" All Americans know the feeling of righteous retribution that attended the hunt for Osama bin Laden in the autumn and winter of 2001. Yet, suddenly, it fizzled out and became subsumed in attacking Iraq and its oilfields.

We know the explanation. Somehow, bin Laden escaped in the battle of Tora Bora, because "the back door was open." Only after the invasion of Iraq, more than a year later, was there general acknowledgement that resources intended for Afghanistan had been diverted to the buildup for Iraq. The public was lead to believe that supplemental appropriations for Afghanistan were siphoned into the Iraq project beginning about mid-2002.

But the strange apathy about Osama's whereabouts began sooner than that. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then-Senate Intelligence Committee Bob Graham states the following:

"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central Command to go into his office [this presumably means the CENTCOM Commander, GEN Tommy Franks. Underlings do not summon senior Senators into their offices]. We did, the door was closed, and he turned to me, and he said, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get ready for a future war in Iraq.' This is February of 2002 [emphasis added]. 'Senator, what we are engaged in now is a manhunt not a war, and we are not trained to conduct a manhunt.'"

Senator Graham elaborates on this matter in his book, Intelligence Matters, on page 125:

"At that point, General Franks asked for an additional word with me in his office. When I walked in, he closed the door. Looking troubled, he said, 'Senator, we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.'

"'Excuse me?" I asked.

"'Military and intelligence personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,' he continued. 'The Predators are being relocated. What we are doing is a manhunt. We have wrapped ourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. We're better at being a meat axe than finding a needle in a haystack. That's not our mission, and that's not what we are trained or prepared to do.'"

In the first excerpt, the military officer might be ambivalent about the change in mission, merely saying that the U.S. military is supposedly not trained for conducting manhunts. The second excerpt provides more substance, suggesting that Franks himself agrees that looking for Osama bin Laden is a mug's game ("We have wrapped ourselves too much in trailing Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.")

There we have it: as early as February 2002, the U.S. government was pulling the plug. Or was it even earlier? Gary Berntsen, a former CIA officer, says in his book Jawbreaker that his paramilitary team tracked bin Laden to the Tora Bora region late in 2001 and could have killed or captured him if his superiors had agreed to his request for an additional force of about 800 U.S. troops. But the administration was already gearing up for war with Iraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin Laden to escape.

Now, Berntsen is a typical Langley boy scout who buys into most of the flummery about the war on terrorism; but it is precisely for that reason that his testimony is worthwhile. Here is no ideological critic of the Bush administration and its foreign policies--on the contrary, he shares many of its assumptions. Like fellow Agency alumnus Michael Scheuer, he has experienced the cognitive dissonance of dealing with the administration's policies at first hand, and wishes to report on his findings.

Is it plausible that the United States Military, disposing of 1.4 million active duty troops and a million reservists, could not scare up 800 additional troops to capture what was then characterized as a fiend in human form? Perhaps the then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, explained it best in a CNN interview on 6 April 2002, well after the hunt for bin Laden had apparently been concluded:

"Well, if you remember, if we go back to the beginning of this segment, the goal has never been to get bin Laden." [10]

What can one conclude from this series of questions? If the 9/11 mystery is like other great, mysterious events--such as the Kennedy assassination--the course is probable. For a year or two, raw emotion over the event forecloses inquiry; for the next several years after that, the public's attention wanes, and the desire to forget the painful memory predominates.

In a decade or so, though, some debunker will bring new facts into the public arena for the edification of those Americans, then in late middle age, who will view 9/11 as an intellectual puzzle: far from the urgent concerns of their daily lives.

Many people may, by that time, accept that the official explanation is bunk, and suspect that the government had once again tricked the American public, those ever-willing foils in the eternal Punch-and-Judy show. But the majority will neither know nor care about obscure international relationships during a bygone era.

In 1939, the English author Eric Ambler wrote a brilliant and now-disregarded novel whose theme was that the political events culminating in World War II were indistinguishable from the squalid doings of ordinary criminals. Let us quote from that novel, The Mask of Dimitrios:

"A writer of plays said that there are some situations that one cannot use on the stage; situations in which the audience can feel neither approval, sympathy, nor antipathy; situations out of which there is no possible way that is not humiliating or distressing and from which there is no truth, however bitter, to be extracted. . . . All I know is that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade as order and enlightenment, these conditions will obtain."

Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. Werther can be reached at: werther@counterpunch.org

[1] Bob Woodward's 1987 book Veil describes the informal connections between personages in the U.S. government and the Saudi government, including the ubiquitous Prince Bandar. A tête á tête between CIA director William Casey and the Prince supposedly resulted in a false-flag "terrorist" bombing in Beirut to retaliate against the bombing of the Marine barracks there in 1983. Regrettably, the dead were mainly civilians.

[2] 9/11 Commission Report, 23rd footnote to chapter two, page 467.

[3] This is the case of Cuban "freedom fighter" Luis Posada Carriles, who is suspected of sending the jet-borne Cuban Olympic fencing team to Valhalla in order to express his opposition to Fidel Castro. The incumbent administration, otherwise so steadfastly opposed to international terrorism, has been resistant to extraditing Mr. Posada --no doubt the administration is casting an eye on Florida's electoral votes.

[4] To include the Phoenix Memo, FBI agent Colleen Rowley's urgent bulletins from Minnesota, tips from foreign intelligence agencies, warnings from the Federal government to its high-ranking government placemen not to fly by commercial airliner, the contemporaneously noted presence of art students-cum-Mossad agents within two blocks of 9/11 operative Mohammed Atta, and other indicators.

[5] Long sought by Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose formative and traumatic experiences in the executive branch were shaped by their revulsion against attempts by Congress, the federal bench, and the American people, to restrain Richard M. Nixon's assertion that the Constitution does not apply to a sitting president.

[6] The phrase "war on terrorism" is, as many people have commented, a somewhat hazy conception, being a war on a tactic, much as if FDR had declared war on naval aviation after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Significantly, the popular mind has contracted this phrase into "the war on terror," an even more illogical coinage. If the U.S. government is truly at war against a mental state that gives rise to ill-defined dread, it should disestablish itself forthwith, to the benefit of our rights, our bank balances, and our physical safety.

[7] "Cheney Warns of Decades of War," BBC, 6 October 2005.

[8] "Power We Didn't Grant," by Sen. Tom Daschle, Washington Post, 23 December 2005.

[9] The Enabling Law passed the Reichstag by a vote of 444-94, whereas the PATRIOT Act passed the House by a margin of 357-66, and the Senate by a vote of 98-1. Curiously, the Enabling Law was supposed to sunset in four years: on April Fool's Day, 1937, precisely paralleling the four-year expiration of many of the PATRIOT Act's provisions. Perhaps the eerie similarity reflects the influence of Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt on neoconservative lawyers of the Bush administration like David S. Addington, John Yoo, and Viet Dinh.

[10] News transcript: Gen. Myers Interview with CNN TV, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t04082002_t407genm.html

dhimmi:

"The fact of the matter is that if Israel were to disappear tomorrow, the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world would find themselves in the same state of cultural and moral stagnation that has held their achievements in check for the past 500 years. They will be still be obsessed with their lack of power and convinced of their superiority. And they will be looking for someone to blame for their sad state of affairs."

Inaccurate and bigoted.

You are attempting to whitewash Israeli-Zionist crimes in Palestine by blaming it on Arabs shortcomings...

Well, hear is some news for you: just because our nations are 3rd world doesn't mean that the first world, where your land stealing Zionists came from (that is Europe), can rape us in our lands and rights.

So what if Israel is a developed nation?

Wasn't Nazi germany that killed 6 million Jews even more developed, and MORE "CIVILIZED" that your Israel?

Development wise, Israel wouldn't stand a chance with the high efficiency, modernity, and the cheer power that Nazi germany had.

Did that make the Nazi rightful in whatever they were doing? OF COURSE NOT.

The simple truth that pro-Israeli likudists find hard to swallow is that modern Israel was founded on injustice.

No matter how much Israel brainwashes its citizens, and no matter how much pro-Israeli likudists in America try to brainwash Americans with Israeli myths, they will never be able to defeat that ugly truth on which the very foundation of the State of Israel stood.

Karim,

You can heap whatever mythical crimes you wish at the doorstep of the Zionists. It matters not to me. The Arab condition would be no different today had Israel never came into existence, and would be no different tomorrow if Israel were to disappear. In short, Israel is a diversion from the real issues that face the Arab world, which continues to look away.

Just to correct some mistakes by the second poster:

1. The area under Israel's control haven't increased in the 1973 (Yom Kippur) war - it actually decreased as a result of the cease fire agreements.

2. The PLO was formed in 1964 (see Wikipedia about "PLO"), over 3 years before Israel occupied the west bank and Gaza.

3. The arabs were consulted by the Phil and other commeeties, the plan voted on by the united nations designated Jerusalem under international rule. The arabs never agreed to any plan which gave the Jews rule even on areas were they were a majority.

From talking to some people here in Australia I see that many believe that only after Israel was declared in 1948 all the Jews arrived there - they fail to understand that Jews lived in that area for many years before 1948 and were actually a majority in the areas designated to them by none other than the UN itself. They also fail to realize that Jews lived also in Arab countries and were chased away from there around the time of the creation of Israel.

Dhimmi,

"You can heap whatever mythical crimes you wish at the doorstep of the Zionists. It matters not to me."

The following facts are not myths but only part of the ugly truth you are trying to hide:

1-First Israeli prime minister: David Ben Gurion, born in Poland, EUROPE (we are in 1948)

2-Prime Minister Moshe Sharett, was born in Ukraine, EUROPE.

3- Levi Eshkol born in Ukraine, EUROPE

4- Golda Meir born in Ukraine, EUROPE

5- Yitzhak Rabin, Jerusalem, PALESTINE

6- Menachem Begin, Brest-Litovsk, EUROPE

7- Yitzhak Shamir, Poland, EUROPE

8- Shimon Peres, Poland, EUROPE

9- Yitzhak Shamir (again), Poland, EUROPE

10- Yitzhak Rabin, Jerusalem, PALESTINE

11- Shimon Peres, Poland, EUROPE

(we are in 1996. First Israeli PM born in modern Israel):

12- Benjamin Netanyahu, Tel Aviv, Israel
13- Ehud Barak, PALESTINE

14- Ariel Sharon born in PALESTINE (to Russian Settlers)

Source (Israeli government):

http://www.pmo.gov.il/PMOEng/History/FormerPrimeMinister/

Israeli just don't elect European settlers for fun, it is because more than half of them ARE from EUROPE.

This hard fact alone shoots every reason, argument, excuse Zionists can come up with to cover up their crimes against the natives they have conquered (with the help of a colonial power) in a land that was thousands of miles away from their native countries.

Amos:

"The arabs were consulted by the Phil and other commeeties, the plan voted on by the united nations designated Jerusalem under international rule. The arabs never agreed to any plan which gave the Jews rule even on areas were they were a majority"

Balfour was a secret promise from a colonial power occupying foreign lands to foreign people trying to settle the same foreign land.

Arabs were not consulted.

The Natives were not consulted.

When they knew about the plan, they REFUSED IT.

Arabs refused the plan because the proposed UN partition was UNJUST.

This is from the text of the 1947 UN partition plan resolution:

http://www.mideastweb.org/unscop1947.htm

The Arab state: 725,000 Arabs and 10,000 Jews.

The Jewish state: 498,000 Jews and 407,000 Arabs.

Jerusalem (international): 100,000 Jews and 105,000 Arabs

Add up the numbers of the 2 groups and you will find that there were about 1.2 million Arabs and about 600,000 Jews, many of which (70%) were foreign-born settlers (see below).

Even if Arabs accepted European settlers in their lands, how COULD THEY ACCEPT that the 600,000 get 55% of Palestine, while the NATIVE MAJORITY gets 45%?

how could they? would YOU accept it?

Please tell us if the justice and fairness they teach you in AUSTRALIA would accept such blatant disregard of fairness, justice and native rights.

1.2 million natives get 45%,

600,000 (70% foreign born), get 55%.

Please don't insult our intelligence, the plan was nothing but land conquest designed by the British/Zionists and upheld by the rest of the Europeans (in order to get rid of their Jewish problem).

p.s.
For the "70% foreign-born" fact, please read the Israeli government census document:
http://www.cbs.gov.il/hodaot2004/01_04_98e.htm

All,

What I wrote in my previous post is the main reason why many Arabs (including Hamas) would not recognize Israel.

It has nothing to do with Israel being a Jewish state.

It has do with the great injustice of 1948 that Arabs had to swallow by force, and have since being forced to swallow more (more Israeli conquests) up to this day.

Make no mistake that if Israeli were Muslims from Europe, Arabs would have acted the same way

To prove to you that "Arabs only refuse Israel because they are Jews" is simply a myth meant to divert honest people from the real problem (the injustice), consider the conflict in South Morocco between the Moroccan government, Muslim, and the people of the Sahara, also Muslims.

Since 1975, and up to this day, the Sahrawi people still refuse the rule of Morocco over lands, and they consider Moroccans conquerors and colonizers.

Please stand against injustice.

Your family could have a palestinian family today, whose only crime was to be born in that unlucky place called Palestine.

When Palestinian attacks against civilians are condemned (as they should be), don't forget to condemn the long standing Israeli crimes against millions of people (6 million Israeli rule by force about 3 million Palestines).

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the major conflicts that destabilized the region (and the world) and is the conflict that ruined relations between Arabs and America.

Karim,

Where was Yasser Arafat born? Cairo.

Your tropes of stolen land fall flat. Everybody knows that the Zionists who emigrated to Palestine for the 50+ years preceeding 1947 lived on land they bought and paid for. Palestine under the Ottomans and under the British Mandate was ruled by law; stealing of land was not permitted.

Of course, stealing of land was exactly was the Arabs planned to do when they rejected the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan (which the Zionists had accepted) and chose war instead. Chosing war, as the Arabs did, had its risks.

But the Jews suffered as well. The number of Jewish refugees across the Arab world that resulted from the war exceeded the number of Arab refugees. Of course, the Jewish refugees have not received the same attention, largely because those individuals (unlike the Palestinians) were welcomed and cared for by their brethren, rather than become wards of the UN.

But in reality, whether there was war or no war, Israel or no Israel, the fact remains that the Palestinian condition is fairly reflective of the Arab condition. They are no better or worse off, leading one to the conclusion that the existence/non-existence of Israel is a non-factor in their level of human achievement.

At some point, Israel has to make peace with its neighbours. To some extent it already has, but there is one last country that it has to deal with to bring a level of stability to the region - Palestine.

The only way to avoid ongoing conflict is to have a totally independent Palestine alongside Israel.

At the moment Israel has the nuclear advantage. However, no matter what the West does, Arab countries will go nuclear at some point in the near future.

Dhimmi,

Sure...Zionists bought the lands from the Ottomans even though the Ottomans ceased to control the area in about 1910 after the Colonial British took over it.

Zionists might have bought few houses, few farm lands here and there, but they damn well couldn't and DID NOT buy a COUUNTRY with its PUBLIC ROADS, PUBLIC AREAS, PUBLIC BUILDINGS, and so on.

If anyone wants to know what happened prior to 1948, look no further than today's occupied territories in Palestine.

The land theft (what our dhimmi friend call "land purchase") is happening today in the occupied territories by the Israeli government through its army of occupation.

If the settlers in Gaza bought the lands on which they lived, would their government evict them out of them??

The lands on which the immoral settlers lived on in Gaza, or the ones on which the other 200,000 live on in the WB, were mostly illegally confiscated by the Israeli government and handed over to its Jewish citizens.

Actually, the Israeli government leases those lands to the settlers.

In the ENTIRE ISRAEL, the only people, the ONLY ONES (with very few exceptions), who actually OWN their LANDS are Arab-Israeli.

The rest, the Jewish-Israeli, lease their lands from the government of Israel.

The reason is because no one, besides the native Arabs, bought or owned a damn thing in Israel.

Please call any real estate agent who does business in that region and ask them about BUYING LANDS in ISRAEL. They will tell you, it is impossible unless you can find an Arab-Israeli willing to sell their lands.

The JNF (Jewish National Fund) owns 80% of the lands in Israel, pretty much all of it was either handed through the UN partition plan, taken over by force through wars, or confiscated from Palestinian refugees through the "Absentee law".

Am I inventing all of this, Dhimmi?

Karim,

Yes, you are inventing and going way off point. The records for the purchase of land, from Arab/Ottoman landlords, to Zionist settlers pre-1947, are all there. Whether those purchases were made by the JNF or other similar agencies is irrelevant. You don't want to face the fact that these people had every legal right to be in Palestine, they owned the land they lived on, and that they didn't steal a thing.

In 1947, upon rejection of the U.N. Partition Plan, the Arabs fully intended on stealing the land legally owned by every Zionist living in Palestine.

Karim,

That land you seem to claim for moslems was first occupied by the tribes of Isreal around 1300 BC. Mohammed came much much later. I will not go into sordid details but I am sure you are aware of the shameful history of persecution and massacre carried out by Mohammed's disciples in the name of Allah.

Surely you cannot deny that these decendents of the early forecefully eicted jewish settlers have a first claim on this territory? Islam's claim to this region must come second.

Dhimmi,

1- Please answer me this question:

Did the 1,400 settlers of Yamit in Sinai buy any of the lands on which they lived until April 1982, the day of their eviction by their own government that occupied Egyptian Sinai since 1967? Did the JNF buy them?

The Yamit settlement did not exist before 1967.

The Yamit settlement was built by the support of the Israeli government on Egyptian lands. The government built the necessary infrastructure and the army came in to provide protection.

The Yamit settlement, that was later on dismantled, is a good example of how the JNF came to own that much land in modern day Israel.

If "stealing" is too much for you to handle, well let's call it "taking over other people lands".

2- Please post sources for your claim that the JNF bought an entire country which they later on called Israel.

Karim,

You have used the term "land stealing Zionists". The Zionists who settled Palestine pre-1947 didn't steal a thing. The JNF and other agencies purchased their land. If you can find a source to prove me wrong, I'm all ears.

After 1947, when the Arabs rejected the U.N. Partition Plan and chose war, the Israelis certainly came to possess land they did not have before. So did the Arabs. The total number of Jewish refugees exceeded the number of Arab refugees.

On this basis, if the Israelis are theives, then so are the Arabs. And for that matter, so are the Pakistanis and the Indians, whose actions during their partition created millions of Muslim and Hindu refugees. And so are the Russians, who annexed parts of Poland. And so are the Poles, who annexed parts of Germany. Millions of Poles and Germans became refugees.

The Palestinians are hardly the only people to suffer this fate. Are you willing to label all these aforementioned parties as land stealers, or only the Zionists?

Oscar,

"That land you seem to claim for moslems was first occupied by the tribes of Isreal around 1300 BC."

The land is Arab, not necessary Muslim.

Bethlehem, which is still under Israeli military occupation, the birthplace of Jesus, the cradle of Christianity, is an ARAB town.

The mass at the Church of nativity is given in ARABIC on Christmas.

Many of the people of the Middle east, who call themselves Arabs today, were not Muslims in the past.

Many of us were Christians, some were even Jewish, but at some point the majority adopted the religion of Mohammed from Arabia.

We are free to change our religion, to adopt any religion we want, and that will not diminish our right to the lands where our ancestors have always lived because some Zionist, who spent the last 1000 years in Europe, said so.

The New York Review of Books
Volume 53, Number 4 · March 9, 2006

Hamas: The Perils of Power

By Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

In the days following the Palestinian elections on January 25, in which Hamas won seventy-four out of 132 seats in the Palestine Legislative Council, Hamas officials expressed hope that they could join with Fatah in forming a government. They spoke of national unity and referred respectfully to the authority of the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. In statements aimed at the West, they claimed they had never truly advocated Israel's destruction, and they made it clear they were willing to deal pragmatically with both the Jewish state and the agreements the Palestinian Authority had made with it. They apparently dropped, at least from their immediate goals, their demand for an Islamic Palestinian state; and they said nothing about resuming armed attacks. An outsider could be forgiven for failing to realize that Hamas had done quite well in the voting, let alone that it had won, let alone by a landslide.

Dhimmi:
"In 1947, upon rejection of the U.N. Partition Plan, the Arabs fully intended on stealing the land legally owned by every Zionist living in Palestine."

How do you prove intent in this case? Could the Arab reaction not have been in response to a unilateral attempt to take Arab (I know we are still arguing over this but ...) land and divide it? What nation would willingly hand over land to someone else? To not expect the Arabs to retaliate is naive and foolish. I am not arguing against the creation of Israel here, but I do not see how you can vilify the Arabs for fighting what they saw as unjust occupation. Did the rest of Europe not do the same against Germany?

"After 1947, when the Arabs rejected the U.N. Partition Plan and chose war, the Israelis certainly came to possess land they did not have before. So did the Arabs. The total number of Jewish refugees exceeded the number of Arab refugees.
On this basis, if the Israelis are thieves, then so are the Arabs"
What lands of the Israeli's do the Palestinian's possess? What is the ratio of Arab lands occupied by the Israelis to the Israeli lands occupied by the Arabs? Since what qualifies as Arab/Israeli land is still under discussion how about using that U.N partition plan you mentioned to figure it out?

Zain,

What is my evidence that the Arabs intended to steal the land rightfully purchased and owned by the Zionists pre-1947? Their own words:

Azzam Pasha, who was then the secretary-general of the Arab League, is quoted as having said: "This will be like the Mongol invasions. We will utterly destroy them. We will sweep them into the sea."

And they attempted to do this. You ask what lands the Arabs took? In the course of the hostilities 1947-49, the Arabs drove Jews from their land in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

In the years immediately following the war, over 1 million Jews from the Arab world were driven from their homes. This more than doubles the number of Palestinian refugees that were created by the war.

You ask what "nation" would willingly hand over their land to by occupied by another. My answer: the Palestinians. The land that was intended to be Palestine was taken by Jordan, and held/occupied until 1967. Prior to that, the land was occupied by the British. Prior to that, the land was occupied by the Ottomans. So occupation isn't a foreign or unusual concept here. It wasn't the threat of occupation that drove the desire to steal the Zionists land in 1947.

Wow, Matthew, Jethroe, you almost make me want to side with Karim. Yeah, he's being morally reprehensible, but he's being morally reprehensible about a complex issue in a place I've never been. You guys are obviously immoral, and I have to share a country with you.

And, Karim, you'd have a stronger case if it weren't for the existence of Arab-Israeli political parties like Hadash, or the Druze and Bedouins who join the IDF in large numbers to protect themselves from the oppression they've historically faced from other Arabs, or the Arab Christian sitting on the Supreme Court of Israel.

The dirty little secret of the Palestinians is that Arab citizens of Israel not only have the same freedoms as non-Arab citizens and far more freedoms than the few remaining Jewish citizens of Arab nations, but they have more freedoms than Arab citizens of Arab nations. There are even hardline Arab Muslims in the Knesset who have called for an Islamic Caliphate; one cannot imagine a Jewish citizen of an Arab nation calling for Jewish rule and surviving for long, let alone remaining a public figure of government.