On 6/13/06, Walt Byars wrote:
Anyway, I think it is really difficult to see how the U.S. government would have had a motive to carry out the 9/11 attacks? To justify the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan? Unlikely.
The Cheney-Rove admininstration would have responded to almost any event in order to invade Iraq. They had to teach their former ally, Saddam, a lesson and grab control of his oil and, perhaps more importantly, a very strategic location in the world of oil. If a cat having too many kittens could have been used to justify the war, they would have used it. The war on Afghanistan might have been justified by 911, but it's clear that the C-R folks weren't that interested in that war at all. (I love the headline in the ONION: "Is it time to forget Afghanistan?")
Weren't the Vietnam and Spanish American wars justified on the pretext of someone attacking ships outside of U.S. borders?
The Vietnam war was justified by the likely-bogus "Gulf of Tonkin" incident in which N. Vietnamese ships attacked US ships. Even if this happened, the US was already attacking N. Vietnam, so any attack on the US ships was a bogus excuse to justify what was already going on. The explosion of the Maine in Cuba was the excuse for attacking the Spaniards (in Cuba and the Philipines, and I presume elsewhere). It might have been engineered by US forces (William Randolph Hearst?)
Why couldn't they have staged somehting like that rather than blow up the WTC? They probably could have justified those wars if they planted a bomb in the statue of liberty with 50 people in it.
yeah, it stretches my faith in hidden forces to the max to imagine Cheney-Rove killing a bunch of people at the Pentagon and at a major financial center. Ravi:
Wouldn't you say that the right and the mainstream probably use quite
similar "conspiracy theory" arguments to dismiss left critiques of capitalism, imperialism, etc.< yeah. They do that. Unfortunately, as with a lot of barbs, there's a bit of truth. Michael Moore sometimes sounds a bit conspiracy-theorist, while I heard a California Democratic Party hancha intimate that Paul Wellstone had been assasinated. On the other hand, those most antagonistic to capitalism and its imperialism are least likely to be conspiracy-minded. Capitalism and imperialism are social systems, not conspiracies. -- Jim Devine / "Mathematics has given economics rigor, but alas, also mortis" -- Robert Heilbroner.
