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'Al-Qaida on brink of using nuclear bomb'

Catawba said:
You are right, 9/11 had nothing to do with our invasion of Iraq. Regime change in Iraq was planned at least 8 months before the 9/11 attack.

"And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.

“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid and sealed.”

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
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The US wanted a regime change in iraq long before 9/11. Both Bush jr and senior and Clinton wanted it. It wasn't a secret that the US has worked to undermine Saddam since the Gulf War. Is this news to you?
 
scourge99 said:
The US wanted a regime change in iraq long before 9/11. Both Bush jr and senior and Clinton wanted it. It wasn't a secret that the US has worked to undermine Saddam since the Gulf War. Is this news to you?
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No, that is not news to me, but neither Bush Sr. or Clinton was willing to mislead the public in order to take the country to war with a long occupation to accomplish it.
 
scourge99 said:
The US wanted a regime change in iraq long before 9/11. Both Bush jr and senior and Clinton wanted it. It wasn't a secret that the US has worked to undermine Saddam since the Gulf War. Is this news to you?
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I don't know about Clinton, who pretty much had his hands full with the Balkans, but Bush Jr. clearly came into office with regime change in Iraq on his agenda. He said so during the 2000 campaign. I'm sure plans were already on the drawing board for a full-scale invasion before 9/11 happened. But 9/11 DID happen and threw a real monkey-wrench into his plans for Iraq. Now he had to deal with Afghanistan.

Well, if Bush had put someone competent in charge of Afghanistan instead of Rumsfeld, we would have hit Afghanistan with all the military might we could muster, which meant that once we had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, we'd have finished the sucker off permanently. But no. If Bush had done that, he wouldn't have enough military left to implement his invade-Iraq plans. Soooooooo he gave Rummy the go-ahead to put only a quarter of our troops into Afghanistan so that when we trapped bin Laden at Tora Bora, we didn't have enough USA soldiers to seal the deal. We had to use Afghani soldiers to surround the place... you know, the same soldiers that bin Laden knew on a first-name basis... and they just waved as Al Qaeda filed right past them into Pakistan.

The first of many unforgiveable military blunders of the next eight years, blunders which have resulted in us being bogged down in a quagmire of TWO wars for nearly a decade, with no end in sight.

Color me pissed.
 
DiAnna said:
I don't know about Clinton, who pretty much had his hands full with the Balkans, but Bush Jr. clearly came into office with regime change in Iraq on his agenda. He said so during the 2000 campaign. I'm sure plans were already on the drawing board for a full-scale invasion before 9/11 happened. But 9/11 DID happen and threw a real monkey-wrench into his plans for Iraq. Now he had to deal with Afghanistan.

Well, if Bush had put someone competent in charge of Afghanistan instead of Rumsfeld, we would have hit Afghanistan with all the military might we could muster, which meant that once we had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, we'd have finished the sucker off permanently. But no. If Bush had done that, he wouldn't have enough military left to implement his invade-Iraq plans. Soooooooo he gave Rummy the go-ahead to put only a quarter of our troops into Afghanistan so that when we trapped bin Laden at Tora Bora, we didn't have enough USA soldiers to seal the deal. We had to use Afghani soldiers to surround the place... you know, the same soldiers that bin Laden knew on a first-name basis... and they just waved as Al Qaeda filed right past them into Pakistan.

The first of many unforgiveable military blunders of the next eight years, blunders which have resulted in us being bogged down in a quagmire of TWO wars for nearly a decade, with no end in sight.

Color me pissed.
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You can prove all that. Right?
 
scourge99 said:
If you think Saudi Arabian gov't was more of a threat to the US and its interests before (and even after) the war then you are clearly not paying attention,
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Their govt, no, not directly or overtly, but too many of their people, yes, and their govt knows about it, and does nothing. The imans teaching jihad aren't being punished, in fact most of them are paid by the govt.
 
DiAnna said:
I don't know about Clinton, who pretty much had his hands full with the Balkans, but Bush Jr. clearly came into office with regime change in Iraq on his agenda. He said so during the 2000 campaign. I'm sure plans were already on the drawing board for a full-scale invasion before 9/11 happened. But 9/11 DID happen and threw a real monkey-wrench into his plans for Iraq. Now he had to deal with Afghanistan.

Well, if Bush had put someone competent in charge of Afghanistan instead of Rumsfeld, we would have hit Afghanistan with all the military might we could muster, which meant that once we had bin Laden cornered in Tora Bora, we'd have finished the sucker off permanently. But no. If Bush had done that, he wouldn't have enough military left to implement his invade-Iraq plans. Soooooooo he gave Rummy the go-ahead to put only a quarter of our troops into Afghanistan so that when we trapped bin Laden at Tora Bora, we didn't have enough USA soldiers to seal the deal. We had to use Afghani soldiers to surround the place... you know, the same soldiers that bin Laden knew on a first-name basis... and they just waved as Al Qaeda filed right past them into Pakistan.

The first of many unforgiveable military blunders of the next eight years, blunders which have resulted in us being bogged down in a quagmire of TWO wars for nearly a decade, with no end in sight.

Color me pissed.
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IMO, the elder Bush wanted regime change because the Saudis wanted it.
 
DiAnna said:
I don't know about Clinton
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well go look it up for yourself. You've been informed so you can't claim ignorance anymore.

DiAnna said:
but Bush Jr. clearly came into office with regime change in Iraq on his agenda.
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Bush jr and sr and clinton all wanted it. Bush sr and clinton couldn't figure out a way to remove him and get the results they wanted. E.G., assassination was unlikely, and sr didn't want to deal with what would occur after removing him with military force.

As for Bush jr, when 9/11 happened, Bush stated that his perception changed dramatically. He realized his previous ideas of safety and security for America were terribly wrong. America was NOT safe just because it had an ocean between itself and its enemies. That we couldn't just sit by and try to react to our enemies who wished to do us harm. We had to engage them proactively. AQ and Saddam were both topped the charts as such enemies.

DiAnna said:
The first of many unforgiveable military blunders of the next eight years, blunders which have resulted in us being bogged down in a quagmire of TWO wars for nearly a decade, with no end in sight.

Color me pissed.
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You realize we are not "bogged down" in iraq anymore, right?
 
Catawba said:
in order to take the country to war with a long occupation to accomplish it.
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The "ideal" situation was that the regime would topple, the people would rejoice and follow the new gov't. Obviously it didn't turn out as expected. There are many reasons why experts believed it didn't such as bush not committing enough forces to get the job done right and kicking out bathhists from having a role in gov't.
 
scourge99 said:
The "ideal" situation was that the regime would topple, the people would rejoice and follow the new gov't. Obviously it didn't turn out as expected. There are many reasons why experts believed it didn't such as bush not committing enough forces to get the job done right and kicking out bathhists from having a role in gov't.
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Yeah, its funny how a country will resist an armed invasion and occupation with whatever weapons they have available to them. Go figure, huh?
 
scourge99 said:
You realize we are not "bogged down" in iraq anymore, right?
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I realize we still have 35,000 troops there backed up by the most powerful military on the planet propping up our new corrupt regime there and protecting the hard fought access to Iraqi oil that had been denied to us for the last 36 years prior to our invasion.
 
Surely you don't speak for all Texans....most of them aren't that easily stampeded...
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No cousin Bill; I was talking about NY City, DC and Chicago.

I stay vigilant but I can’t find an arrogant muslim any where I go and I look for them. The ones I see around Austin don’t seem to want to make eye contact with me and I’m not that mean looking. I’m not bowing and apologizing for being a great republic either and I am looking for muslims that might be a little radical.

As many Texans that work in Saudi and around the Middle East I expect that Texans are more feared than our illegitimate president is.
 
Iron River said:
No cousin Bill; I was talking about NY City, DC and Chicago.

I stay vigilant but I can’t find an arrogant muslim any where I go and I look for them. The ones I see around Austin don’t seem to want to make eye contact with me and I’m not that mean looking. I’m not bowing and apologizing for being a great republic either and I am looking for muslims that might be a little radical.

As many Texans that work in Saudi and around the Middle East I expect that Texans are more feared than our illegitimate president is.
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My wife taught a few muslims....one poor boy was as dumb as they come, and his daddy had trouble accepting it. It had to be the teacher's fault, because most of them were women. In 8th grade, they have more than a few teachers, and only one was male. That was the only teacher that the dad would talk to, the women, including a female principal, just sat there and watched this clown in case he got too hinky. My son used to work for a female jewish principal, and when a muslim dad came in trying to tell her she knows nothing about the middle east, she got right back in his face. She got loud and proud, and a bit potty mouth with him. you could hear it outside her office and down the hall. Another muslim family wasn't smart enough to tell their kids to play it cool at school right after 9/11. A dad had to be called in and have it explained to him that his kids were in for a beating if they didn't stop repeating what dad and an uncle were saying. The other kids didn't much care for muslims saying the people in the Towers "deserved to die".
 
We don’t have any muslims, - that I know of - in our little town south of Austin. But we do have some liberal teachers. On 9/11 I called the school to make sure my daughter was watching history being made but i was told that it was up to the individual teachers.

It turned out that my daughter was watching TV but I didn’t know if she was or not so I went to get her. When my daughter realized what was happening she put her books in her back pack and the teacher asked her where she saw going so she told the teacher that I would be there to get her in a few minutes but the teacher didn’t believe her until I got there.

I can’t remember sitting down that whole day. We all just stood and watched the towers burn until they fell. It was later that we learned that Bush had been flying the second plane so that he could get into the building to light the fuse to bring the towers down.
 
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Iron River said:
The most effective use of a nuclear bomb would be to demonstrate it in the desert of Iran and then claim that there are three more bombs already in NY City, DC and Chicago. Thousands if not millions of people would die in the panic to get out of those cities.

Our economy would crash and we would be without a government for weeks as our congressional critters hid under rocks.
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I hope you said it in jest, or even cynically. I'd hate to think you were really so cold and so cruel.

ricksfolly
 
Catawba said:
Yeah, its funny how a country will resist an armed invasion and occupation with whatever weapons they have available to them. Go figure, huh?
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Except for so many other examples where it doesn't happen like Germany, Japan, Panama...

Catawba said:
I realize we still have 35,000 troops there
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Are we "bogged down" in iraq or not? At what troop level are we no longer "bogged down"? Let me guess: whichever number suits your argument.
 
scourge99 said:
Except for so many other examples where it doesn't happen like Germany, Japan, Panama...
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I don't remember Germany, Japan, or Panama demanding that all of our troops leave their country either. We don't take a hint very well, do we?


Are we "bogged down" in iraq or not? At what troop level are we no longer "bogged down"? Let me guess: whichever number suits your argument.
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We are still forced to prop up the government there with our military as we have been for the last 8 years at great expense to the taxpayers, present and future, so hell yes we are still bogged down there.
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Catawba said:
No, that is not news to me, but neither Bush Sr. or Clinton was willing to mislead the public in order to take the country to war with a long occupation to accomplish it.
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What is the difference between a fool and a liar?
 
Whatever the hell people may think about the wars, al Qaeda is a legitimate threat to the US and other western countries. I don't see why some people are trying to portray this information as NBD.
 
Tucker Case said:
Whatever the hell people may think about the wars, al Qaeda is a legitimate threat to the US and other western countries. I don't see why some people are trying to portray this information as NBD.
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True, but we have many threats we face.
 
Catawba said:
True, but we have many threats we face.
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Personally, I think we should take any al Qaeda threat at least as seriously as any other threat if not more. They, above all othe rgroups, have shown the will and ability to do major damage here in the US.
 
Tucker Case said:
Personally, I think we should take any al Qaeda threat at least as seriously as any other threat if not more. They, above all othe rgroups, have shown the will and ability to do major damage here in the US.
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It certainly seems we've sacrificed more in terms of money and lives due to our fears of al Qaeda than we have to more serious threats of climate change and peak oil.
 
Tucker Case said:
Whatever the hell people may think about the wars, al Qaeda is a legitimate threat to the US and other western countries. I don't see why some people are trying to portray this information as NBD.
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It certainly is a legitimate threat to the US and other western countries. It's a very big deal, which is why we have security tighter than ticks on a dog's ass. As I've said before in this thread, I've no doubt they will hit us again, dispite the fact that most of their attempts have been thankfully thwarted. We can't cower in fear on a daily basis. We have much more chance of being individually affected by crime in the streets and natural disasters than we do of individually being affected by a terrorist attack. 9/11 was a national tragedy. I hope nothing of that magnitude ever succeeds again. We have to be vigilent, pragmatic and aware, but we cannot as a nation be in a constant state of terror.

My main anger is that we had the opportunity to destroy the entire core of Al Qaeda while it was still small and bunched together in Afghanistan, and because of poor military decisions made, only a fraction of our military was sent to deal with it in Afghanistan. Because of those blunders, Al Qaeda as a group escaped into Pakistan and look at the domino affect that has had in the region. The Taliban have recruited, replenished, and reassaulted Afghanistan. Al Qaeda has a foothold in Pakistand which grows larger by the day. And none of it had to happen if Rumsfeld and Bush had sent enough troops in to do the job correctly the first time, when they had the undivided support of the American people to do so.

I'll admit I resent hell out of that, and the subsequent invasion of Iraq. I'll also admit that said resentment still colors my views on the topic. :(
 
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Catawba said:
It certainly seems we've sacrificed more in terms of money and lives due to our fears of al Qaeda than we have to more serious threats of climate change and peak oil.
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I would say we sacrificed more in terms of money and lives over oil than we have over al Qaeda, but that's more of my opinion on why we went to war in Iraq than anything else.
 
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