Good evening tonight, Jay! Jay P Hailey wrote to everyone...
> On November 24, the New York Times revealed that a Defense Science Board > panel directly contradicted President Bush's explanation of the motivation > driving Al Qaeda. They don't hate our freedoms, they hate our policies. I guess I've been saying this exactly to the wind, and no one has listened since 9/11! Wonder why this reality is so hard to digest by Americans. Really, I don't know. > Capitol Hill briefing yesterday, Ray McGovern witnessed that, far from > opening the floodgates of reality, terrorism experts-and the NYT-are > avoiding the real message in the findings, putting us all at risk. Indeed it has put us all at grave risk, and will continue to do so. That's why so many Americans today are coming home in body bags. 'It's US foreign policies stupid' to paraphrase one Congressman several years ago! Such policies in fact predate Al Qaeda -- it goes back even further than the failed policies justifying the Vietnam War! > Ray McGovern's duties during his 27-year career at CIA included daily > briefings of then-Vice President Bush and the most senior national security > advisers to President Ronald Reagan. McGovern is on the Steering Group of > Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS). Now, here's a group I have never, ever heard before, but this sounds interesting... please continue... > Yesterday's conference on "Al Qaeda 2.0: Transnational Terrorism After > 9/11," sponsored by the New America Foundation and the New York University > Center on Law & Security, was a gift to those wanting an update on informed > opinion on the subject. The event also proved to be as highly instructive > for what was not addressed as for the issues that were. The elephants known > to be present remained largely unnoticed. So, what else is new? > The mosquitoes of terrorism were dissected and examined as carefully as > biology students once did drosophila, but typing the generic DNA of > terrorism proved more elusive. Worse, no attention was given to the swamp > in which terrorists breed. Were it not for a few impertinent questions from > the audience, the swamps might have avoided attention altogether. Not very suprising, now is it? > The first panel featured two experts from RAND both of whom touched-very > gingerly-on the need to drain the swamp. The first closed his remarks with > a 30-second observation that less attention might be given to kill/capture > metrics than to addressing the causes of terrorism and breaking the cycle of > terrorist recruitment. Well, for some of us, the causes of terrorism are well know, but that is so plainly evident in the literature of history that everyone should have assumed something had been going badly for the U.S. at least for the last five decades or more! Surprisingly even the media never really picked it all up at all! Politicians never will. > What About The Elephants? > Then came a rude question from the audience: Is it not striking that even > in an academic-type setting like this, elephants must remain invisible? Is > it not ironic, that the U.S. Defense Science Board, in an unclassified study > on "Strategic Communication," completed on September 23 but kept under > wraps until after the November 2 election, let the pachyderms out of the > bag? Directly contradicting the president, a panel of the Defense Science > Board gave voice to what virtually all in that ornate Senate Caucus Room > knew, but were afraid to say. It named the elephants. > > "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies. I'll say that again, as I've said before on countless occassions when given the opportunity -- it's U.S. foreign policy that has largely created the 9/11 event and its aftermath in Afghanistan and Iraq! > "Thus, when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to > Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy... It is, particularly when we find ourselves today living under a virtual police dictatorship, a police state, and most Americans seem to believe this is somehow 'American'! God, this is good! > "...Nor can the most carefully crafted messages, themes, and words persuade > when the messenger lacks credibility." The 'messenger', in this case, if it is the US mainstream media, the politicians that are always prostituting themselves for the latest public opinion polls, and those in the background for creating such foreign policy fiascos as Vietnam and countless others, has been lacking credibility for decades! I'm so glad that you had the balls to even raise these questions again, since no one seems to care or give a damn about the root cause to most of our current international problems these days. Thank you, Jay! Kindest regards, Frank _______________________________________________ Libnw mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] List info and subscriber options: http://immosys.com/mailman/listinfo/libnw Archives: http://immosys.com/mailman//pipermail/libnw
