A curious question

[Ronn_Bman]

Originally posted by tracey: if anyone disagrees with this view, fine. disagree away. i'm not answering any inflammatory posts. mainly i think, because i'ts a pointless and degrading exercise. i'm happy to discuss, debate. but we are all in danger of taking things personally again. i have a right to disagree with death inflicted on innocents in the name of revenge and 'gold'

I hope you don't think I was trying to be inflammatory in my earlier response to your post. I was just stating my opinion based on what you said. Your opinion is fine, I just didn't agree with it.

This forum is for people to share differing point of views and debate them. You are entitled to state you opinion in here like everyone else. If you don't want to debate it you don't have to, but you have an interesting point of view. I don't have to like it for it to be interesting and I don't take it personally

I would be interested in reading the article.

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"Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins."

[This message has been edited by Ronn_Bman (edited 11-02-2001).]

[tracey]

ronn_bmann, you are a perfect gentleman.

i'ts not anything you've said either - not anything anyone has EVER said.

i don't get offended or take things personally even when they are meant to be personal attacks. 'tis true.

i'm merely stating the point now due to the difficulties several of us experienced on this forum a couple of weeks ago. since then, i've decided not to answer in kind or reactively and sometimes i have to think for a while about wording........ so, no. it's not you at all, dear thing. it's a general atmosphere that can blow up when people post in a deliberatly provocotive manner and i can't respond because i'll be banned instantly and i wouldn't like to give satisfaction.

with my boot, it's the others' who are meant to satisfy me, hur, hur. naughty wink



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offended mistress of the illuminati

[tracey]

the link to the writer, john pilger can be found at
www.johnpilger.com

i haven't had time to check out if this article appears there, but it was published on the 29/10/01 in The Mirror newspaper.

if you can find it, could you post it in it's entirety on this thread? i would but have to go out very soon and i'm stupid with computers. get confused very quickly - aaaargh.....

if you don't want to, i shall ask fljotsdale - she's a bit of a whizz (geek, nerd, call her what you will - we call her lots of things - snigger. but only when she's not looking)

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offended mistress of the illuminati

[skywalker]

Originally posted by tracey: the link to the writer, john pilger can be found at www.johnpilger.com i haven't had time to check out if this article appears there, but it was published on the 29/10/01 in The Mirror newspaper. if you can find it, could you post it in it's entirety on this thread? i would but have to go out very soon and i'm stupid with computers. get confused very quickly - aaaargh..... if you don't want to, i shall ask fljotsdale - she's a bit of a whizz (geek, nerd, call her what you will - we call her lots of things - snigger. but only when she's not looking)

Is this the one you speak of tracey?

PILGER: THIS WAR IS A FARCE By John Pilger, Former Mirror chief foreign correspondent






The war against terrorism is a fraud. After three weeks' bombing, not a single terrorist implicated in the attacks on America has been caught or killed in Afghanistan.

Instead, one of the poorest, most stricken nations has been terrorised by the most powerful - to the point where American pilots have run out of dubious "military" targets and are now destroying mud houses, a hospital, Red Cross warehouses, lorries carrying refugees.

Unlike the relentless pictures from New York, we are seeing almost nothing of this. Tony Blair has yet to tell us what the violent death of children - seven in one family - has to do with Osama bin Laden.

And why are cluster bombs being used? The British public should know about these bombs, which the RAF also uses. They spray hundreds of bomblets that have only one purpose; to kill and maim people. Those that do not explode lie on the ground like landmines, waiting for people to step on them.

If ever a weapon was designed specifically for acts of terrorism, this is it. I have seen the victims of American cluster weapons in other countries, such as the Laotian toddler who picked one up and had her right leg and face blown off. Be assured this is now happening in Afghanistan, in your name.

None of those directly involved in the September 11 atrocity was Afghani. Most were Saudis, who apparently did their planning and training in Germany and the United States.

The camps which the Taliban allowed bin Laden to use were emptied weeks ago. Moreover, the Taliban itself is a creation of the Americans and the British. In the 1980s, the tribal army that produced them was funded by the CIA and trained by the SAS to fight the Russians.

The hypocrisy does not stop there. When the Taliban took Kabul in 1996, Washington said nothing. Why? Because Taliban leaders were soon on their way to Houston, Texas, to be entertained by executives of the oil company, Unocal.

With secret US government approval, the company offered them a generous cut of the profits of the oil and gas pumped through a pipeline that the Americans wanted to build from Soviet central Asia through Afghanistan.

A US diplomat said: "The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did." He explained that Afghanistan would become an American oil colony, there would be huge profits for the West, no democracy and the legal persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.

Although the deal fell through, it remains an urgent priority of the administration of George W. Bush, which is steeped in the oil industry. Bush's concealed agenda is to exploit the oil and gas reserves in the Caspian basin, the greatest source of untapped fossil fuel on earth and enough, according to one estimate, to meet America's voracious energy needs for a generation. Only if the pipeline runs through Afghanistan can the Americans hope to control it.

So, not surprisingly, US Secretary of State Colin Powell is now referring to "moderate" Taliban, who will join an American-sponsored "loose federation" to run Afghanistan. The "war on terrorism" is a cover for this: a means of achieving American strategic aims that lie behind the flag-waving facade of great power.

The Royal Marines, who will do the real dirty work, will be little more than mercenaries for Washington's imperial ambitions, not to mention the extraordinary pretensions of Blair himself. Having made Britain a target for terrorism with his bellicose "shoulder to shoulder" with Bush nonsense, he is now prepared to send troops to a battlefield where the goals are so uncertain that even the Chief of the Defence Staff says the conflict "could last 50 years".

The irresponsibility of this is breathtaking; the pressure on Pakistan alone could ignite an unprecedented crisis across the Indian sub-continent. Having reported many wars, I am always struck by the absurdity of effete politicians eager to wave farewell to young soldiers, but who themselves would not say boo to a Taliban goose.

In the days of gunboats, our imperial leaders covered their violence in the "morality" of their actions. Blair is no different. Like them, his selective moralising omits the most basic truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America on September 11, and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else.

By killing innocents in Afghanistan, Blair and Bush stoop to the level of the criminal outrage in New York. Once you cluster bomb, "mistakes" and "blunders" are a pretence. Murder is murder, regardless of whether you crash a plane into a building or order and collude with it from the Oval Office and Downing Street.





GRIEF: A father weeps over his dead son after the bombs blunder in Kabul

If Blair was really opposed to all forms of terrorism, he would get Britain out of the arms trade. On the day of the twin towers attack, an "arms fair", selling weapons of terror (like cluster bombs and missiles) to assorted tyrants and human rights abusers, opened in London's Docklands with the full backing of the Blair government.

Britain's biggest arms customer is the medieval Saudi regime, which beheads heretics and spawned the religious fanaticism of the Taliban.

If he really wanted to demonstrate "the moral fibre of Britain", Blair would do everything in his power to lift the threat of violence in those parts of the world where there is great and justifiable grievance and anger.

He would do more than make gestures; he would demand that Israel ends its illegal occupation of Palestine and withdraw to its borders prior to the 1967 war, as ordered by the Security Council, of which Britain is a permanent member.

He would call for an end to the genocidal blockade which the UN - in reality, America and Britain - has imposed on the suffering people of Iraq for more than a decade, causing the deaths of half a million children under the age of five.

That's more deaths of infants every month than the number killed in the World Trade Center.

There are signs that Washington is about to extend its current "war" to Iraq; yet unknown to most of us, almost every day RAF and American aircraft already bomb Iraq. There are no headlines. There is nothing on the TV news. This terror is the longest-running Anglo-American bombing campaign since World War Two.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the US and Britain faced a "dilemma" in Iraq, because "few targets remain". "We're down to the last outhouse," said a US official. That was two years ago, and they're still bombing. The cost to the British taxpayer? £800 million so far.

According to an internal UN report, covering a five-month period, 41 per cent of the casualties are civilians. In northern Iraq, I met a woman whose husband and four children were among the deaths listed in the report. He was a shepherd, who was tending his sheep with his elderly father and his children when two planes attacked them, each making a sweep. It was an open valley; there were no military targets nearby.

"I want to see the pilot who did this," said the widow at the graveside of her entire family. For them, there was no service in St Paul's Cathedral with the Queen in attendance; no rock concert with Paul McCartney.

The tragedy of the Iraqis, and the Palestinians, and the Afghanis is a truth that is the very opposite of their caricatures in much of the Western media.

Far from being the terrorists of the world, the overwhelming majority of the Islamic peoples of the Middle East and south Asia have been its victims - victims largely of the West's exploitation of precious natural resources in or near their countries.

There is no war on terrorism. If there was, the Royal Marines and the SAS would be storming the beaches of Florida, where more CIA-funded terrorists, ex-Latin American dictators and torturers, are given refuge than anywhere on earth.

There is, however, a continuing war of the powerful against the powerless, with new excuses, new hidden agendas, new lies. Before another child dies violently, or quietly from starvation, before new fanatics are created in both the east and the west, it is time for the people of Britain to make their voices heard and to stop this fraudulent war - and to demand the kind of bold, imaginative non-violent initiatives that require real political courage.

The other day, the parents of Greg Rodriguez, a young man who died in the World Trade Center, said this: "We read enough of the news to sense that our government is heading in the direction of violent revenge, with the prospect of sons, daughters, parents, friends in distant lands dying, suffering, and nursing further grievances against us.

"It is not the way to go...not in our son's name."



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Still The Most Humbly Prideful (?) Member Of The Illuminati!

Mark

[Yorick]

Yeah yeah, of course Pilger is going to write this. It sells. Even-handedness doesn't obviously.

Tanya I'm a little more discerning than to believe the totality of a written opinion in entirety. I prefer to read the drier primary sources and formulate my own opinions rather than read secondary source opinions such as this.

He makes some very good points later in the work, but loses impact with his opening declaration of fraudulance and Talibanese creation by America. This is wrong. America helped fund the Mujahedin - which wouldn't have needed to exist if the Russians hadn't invaded, so both America and Russia should take repsonsibility if so.

The Taliban were a bunch of students from the hills. As they are Wahabists, Saudi Arabia is a truer parent than America. America gave them weapons, but misguided destructionist religious fervor is what brought down the Twin Towers. Weapons had nothing to do with it.

Pilgers assertion of 'gold' motive is pure unfounded speculation based on the mere presence of an oil pipeline. There are no figures which indicate a President with a business degree would make more money from the oil than he would lose from the war.

War is expensive. The war could drag America into recession. This opinion of Pilgers is suprisingly paranoid. I thought him more intelligent and informed than that, but it rings of 'conspiracy theory paranoia', and is totally speculative.

It ignores the obvious, open, given reason for current events and goes delving into the shadows of mystery for speculations and sinister evils.

Why?

Makes money doesn't it?

Call me a cynic but I'm seeing an 'oil pipeline' from this opinion.

Anyone want to buy my author-signed copy of "Distant Voices"? I'll be getting rid of it really cheaply now.

A

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[skywalker]

Originally posted by Yorick: War is expensive. The war could drag America into recession. This opinion of Pilgers is suprisingly paranoid. I thought him more intelligent and informed than that, but it rings of 'conspiracy theory paranoia', and is totally speculative.

I think Amerca is already in a recession if not for the last several months previously. Just because my government refuses to recognize this does not mean we are not already there. It's all politics, the numbers have been there for a while now.




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Still The Most Humbly Prideful (?) Member Of The Illuminati!

Mark

[skywalker]

Just so you all know I posted Pilger's column as a public service and I haven't said whether I agree or disagree with his views! I never heard of him until today.

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Still The Most Humbly Prideful (?) Member Of The Illuminati!

Mark

[Yorick]

Originally posted by skywalker: I think Amerca is already in a recession if not for the last several months previously. Just because my government refuses to recognize this does not mean we are not already there. It's all politics, the numbers have been there for a while now.

No way Mark. The financial effects of the attack are horific. The number of guys I know who've lost jobs, lost work, is enourmous. The state of the U.S. economy was way stronger than anywhere else in the world. There was word that it was unstable but compared to what? Somalia? Compared to Somalia the U.S. is one giant gold bar next to a rotting dead rat.

In any case, the point of this is that there are no figures given for how much America would make from the oil, and how much they will lose from the war. There is nothing that presents a finacial logic that could be followed let alone evidence that such a motive is being followed.

There were billions of dollars of gold bullion in the WTC basement. Do we presume merely because such existed that Al Qa'eda was after the gold bullion?

There has to be stronger evidence than the mere presence of something slightly lucrative.

There is an openness in modern democracy which Pilger is ignoring. It's called accountability. That's why we have politicians in opposition who have vested interests in ensuring a governments accountability. Too many govermental mistakes and the opposition gets a job. And 'gold'.

Trying to claim that all this is for an oil pipeline flies in the face of the abundant information we have about the situation. It is lunacy.

There is a word for people that think the rest of the world is insane and they are the only sane ones. Madness.

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[This message has been edited by Yorick (edited 11-02-2001).]

[Yorick]

Originally posted by skywalker: Just so you all know I posted Pilger's column as a public service and I haven't said whether I agree or disagree with his views! I never heard of him until today.

I know Mark, that's why I quoted "John Pilger" rather than "Skywalker" in my posts. You didn't pass judgement either way on it mate.

No worries.



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[skywalker]

I plus 5 others lost our jobs this past July another 6 lost theirs several months earlier. The terrorists attacks just drove the final nail. The Fed has been in denial over the recession, it had begun (I believe) before 9/11. It has been a very personal recession to me.

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Still The Most Humbly Prideful (?) Member Of The Illuminati!

Mark

[This message has been edited by skywalker (edited 11-02-2001).]