Well, I haven't written anything about the news in a little while so I guess I'll do that this morning. The big news of the week is probably the leak of Rumsfield's notes from 9/11. As in the notes actually taken on meetings from Sepember 11th, 2001 — they basically come right out and say “awesome, let's use this as an excuse to bomb anyone we want to.”
"Best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] at same time. Not only UBL [Osama bin Laden]. Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."
Not that the average American cares. As long as the dictatorship keeps a little bit of food on the tables, people will tolerate shocking levels of tyranny and evil. The other interesting news as far as revisionism goes is that even though it's been public knowledge for a long time that pretty much every intelligence agency on the planet was warning the US about the details of the attack, now we know that even the Taliban warned the US. Of course, even though now we know it was Britain that acted as the key fundraising and logistical hub of al-Qaida, it's not as if we were bombing weddings in London.
The other big news is more on the fact that the US army will lose the war if it attacks Iraq. Let me quickly run down how the wargames this summer went (click that link for the full version):
In the first few days of the exercise, using surprise and unorthodox tactics, the wily 64-year-old Vietnam veteran [Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper playing Saddam Hussein] sank most of the US expeditionary fleet in the Persian Gulf, bringing the US assault to a halt... [The Pentagon] ordered their dead troops back to life and "refloated" the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings. Eventually, Van Riper got so fed up with all this cheating that he refused to play any more.
Just so you know, Saddam Hussein isn't going to look the other way. Yeah, we can probably make up some lies and fire up the propaganda machines and probably convince the public — and maybe even the international community — that it's the right thing to do. But the fact is that it's not going to solve any problems in the region, it's going to make America very unpopular and even more of a terror target, and it's going to kill an awful lot of citizens both in America and in the middle east. This latest bombing in Iraq has already jacked US oil prices to the highest they've been since September 11th, and the US is talking about instituting a “war tax” to make up for it. Yeah, they say it's going to be the rich who get taxed more, but when has that ever happened, and when has a war tax ever gone away after a war?
It's almost a year since this all started — at least in the mind of the average person (it's of course a much longer story than just a year) — let's do what we can to make sure that the atrocities of September 11th, and the even worse atrocities that have followed in the year since, do not repeat themselves.
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