Osama bin Laden was surprised by the towers’ collapse

[Jeroen]

According to an article on Jihad in The New Yorker.

For the new theorists of jihad, Al Qaeda is just the beginning.
by LAWRENCE WRIGHT
Issue of 2006-09-11

Even as members of Al Qaeda watched in exultation while the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon burned on September 11, 2001, they realized that the pendulum of catastrophe was swinging in their direction. Osama bin Laden later boasted that he was the only one in the group’s upper hierarchy who had anticipated the magnitude of the wound that Al Qaeda inflicted on America, but he also admitted that he was surprised by the towers’ collapse.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060911fa_fact3

[DoYouEverWonder]

1. Everyone's a Monday morning quarterback

Even if Usama supplied the drones, he didn't have too much else to do with the actual planning of the operation. That planning had to be an inside job.

[sabbat hunter]

2. why did it HAVE to be

an inside job. The current regime is filled with incompetents. you really think they could have planned out, carried out such a mission? you are giving the current regime a lot of credit then.

[DoYouEverWonder]

3. That's how competent they are

They have convinced the country that they are too incompetent. It's all an act. They know exactly what they are doing. They planned this attack for almost a decade if not more. In order to fly four planes with out interference and to bring 3 buildings down in the way they were brought down had to involve people on the inside. They knew too much about the buildings and the military response or rather the lack of military response to not have been an inside job.

[John Q. Citizen]

4. I think the current regime deserves a lot of credit for robbing the

treasury, stealing 3 elections, dragging us into multiple endless wars, subjugating the media, stacking the courts, stealing our rights, and scaring the crap out of Americans.

Or did they just get lucky, in your opinion?

[Sinti]

7. Halliburton's stock did rise 3000 percent - who else could do that?

They've gotten everything they wanted so far. The next step can easily be fund in the outline, and there are now Navy ships on the way to Iran. We have all read the PNAC papers right? Failure and incompetence are not words I would use in the context of the stated goals of PNAC. In fact, far from it.

[Make7]

9. 3000 percent? I'd love to see the source for that tidbit. ( n/t )

[Kingshakabobo]

11. Prepare for the chirping crickets. More disinformation from CTers.

Who needs facts when you have your gut?

[John Q. Citizen]

14. Indeed! Who? The who

you refer to is you. Chirp

chirp chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp.....



How do you like my hiku, your royal highness sir?

[Kingshakabobo]

18. Don't quit your day job. nt

[Sinti]

23. Sir, I do not deal in disinformation, and I take offense at the suggestion

that I do. There is no cause to engage in this kind of disrespectful, snidely derisive commentary with others here, who we should consider allies, even if we do differ on the subject of 9/11.

I do not tell stories out of my gut, or my ass, or my hat - unless I state clearly, that I just have a "gut feeling".

Additionally, I happily admit when I'm wrong, something many of you fail at miserably.

My statement there, which is a true one, though unclear in the way I phrased it, simply further proves the point that I and others are trying to make. They only fail when they're failing us... they succeed in spades when it comes to lining their own pockets. You can choose to deny this, that's your right, but snark is no substitute for substance. Prove to me they're suffering in any way from their failures, please.

[reorg]

12. what he probably meant

is this story:

Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

Raw Story, October 2005
Title: “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Rose 3,281 Percent Last Year, Senator Finds”
Author: John Byrne
Senator Frank Lautenberg’s website
Title: “Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Options Soar to $9.2 Million”

Vice President Dick Cheney’s stock options in Halliburton rose from $241,498 in 2004 to over $8 million in 2005, an increase of more than 3,000 percent, as Halliburton continues to rake in billions of dollars from no-bid/no-audit government contracts.

An analysis released by Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) reveals that as Halliburton’s fortunes rise, so do the Vice President’s. Halliburton has already taken more than $10 billion from the Bush-Cheney administration for work in Iraq. They were also awarded many of the unaccountable post-Katrina government contracts, as off-shore subsidiaries of Halliburton quietly worked around U.S. sanctions to conduct very questionable business with Iran (See Story #2). “It is unseemly,” notes Lautenberg, “for the Vice President to continue to benefit from this company at the same time his administration funnels billions of dollars to it.” ...

http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm#24
http://www.leovia.com/?q=node/2595

---

You could have found that source in two minutes.

[Make7]

15. I found a source for that in less than 2 minutes - before I even replied.

However, the claim that I responded to was that Halliburton's stock rose 3000 percent. The story that you posted is not making that claim.

She has made a similar claim before:

   "Halliburton stock price rose 3000 percent in 2005."

I thought maybe she got the information from a source that was misrepresenting the actual story - I was just curious why she believed it was true.

- Make7

[reorg]

17. oops

I thought sinti was a he, so she is female? I apologize for this mistake.

[Sinti]

22. Yep, I'm a girl... don't tell anybody. n/t

[Sinti]

21. Perhaps I was unclear "Cheney's" Halliburton stock options rose 3,281%

I don't know why I didn't put his name in there, as if I didn't want to be pointing a finger at the devil. This would be #24 of the top censored stories of 2006, in the 15 runners up section from the Tuscon Weekly.

http://www.tucsonweekly.com/gbase/Currents/Content?oid=oid:86396

They got the story from Project Censored.

http://www.projectcensored.org/censored_2007/index.htm#24

Project Censored got the story from Raw story.

http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Cheneys_stock_options_rose_3281_last_1011.html

You can do the math yourself if you like.


Edited to add:

Defense stocks generally rose over 300 percent between 2000 and 2003

Defense: Maxim Group noted on February 27, 2003, that defense stocks have moved up more than 300 percent from their January 2000 lows. Raytheon (NYSE: RTN) and Lockheed Martin (NYSE: LMT) continue to look attractive in this sector.

Their friends are well taken care of, the rest of us can kiss a$$.

[Make7]

24. "Perhaps I was unclear" is a bit of an understatement. ( n/t )

[Sinti]

25. Mea culpa, man. What can I say. I will be much more careful in future :)

The common stock tanked, then tripled in price at one point, and it's back down to roughly double the 2002 price now. There's a lot of money to be made at the top on this rise and fall stuff, as well. Cheney ain't the only one who's really happy with their performance. Technically, the company should be bankrupt.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0712-02.htm

http://www.texasmonthly.com/mag/issues/2002-10-01/feature3.php

http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/stock_troop2.html

[reorg]

16. exactly

"... Although the reports from Baghdad this summer might seem to suggest that all is not well with Operation Iraqi Freedom — the city a blood-smeared ruin, the American Army hiding in holes — the impression is misleading. Understand the war on terror as free-market capitalist enterprise rather than as some sort of public or government service, and in the nightly newscasts we see before us victory, not defeat.

As is usual and to be expected, the witless liberal media get the story wrong, mistaking innovative business practice for waste and fraud, grotesquely characterizing superior sales technique as a crime against humanity. The biased commentary misconstrues both the purpose and the high quality of the work in progress. Measure the achievement by the standards that define a commercial success — maximizing the cost to the consumers of the product, minimizing the risk to the investors — and we discover in the White House and the Pentagon, also in the Congress and the Department of Homeland Security, not the crowd of incompetent fools depicted in the pages of the New York Times but a company of visionary entrepreneurs, worthy of comparison with the men who built the country's rail-roads and liberated the Western prairie from the undemocratic buffalo. Heed the message served with every Republican banquet speech — that the private interest precedes the public interest, that money is good for rich people, bad for poor people — and who can say that the war in Iraq has proved to be anything other than the transformation of a godforsaken desert into a defense contractor's Garden of Eden?

The winning numbers posted in the profit margins light the paths to glory. During the five years since the striking down of the World Trade Center towers, the United States Congress has appropriated well over $300 billion for the Bush Administration's never-ending war against all the world's evildoers. Now flowing eastward out of Washington at the rate of $1.5 billion a week, much of the money takes the form of no-bid contracts, cost - plus and often immune from audit — at least $12.3 billion to Halliburton; $5.3 billion for Parsons Corporation; $3.7 billion for Fluor Corporation; $3.1 billion for Washington Group International; $2.8 billion for Bechtel Corporation.

The contracts specify the repair and reconstruction of Iraq's depleted infrastructure — roads, power plants, hospitals, oil fields, pipelines, schools, mosques, and sewer systems — but because so many of the project sites have been deemed unsafe for visitors, the invoices translate into art objects, intricately and lovingly decorated with surcharges for undelivered concrete and nonexistent electricity. So also the goods and services with which private security companies supplement the American military effort in Iraq. The Pentagon furnishes 130,000 troops, many of them National Guard Reservists, poorly paid, inadequately equipped, and held against their will for extended tours of duty; the private companies field an additional 50,000 personnel, some of them earning upward of $150,000 a year for driving trucks, cleaning latrines, flying helicopters, pitching tents. Unhampered by U.S. Army regulations or by Iraqi law, the military guest workers are most conspicuously employed as bodyguards for the cadres of American middle management requiring, in the words of one of the advertising brochures, "discreet travel companions" or a "heavily armored high profile convoy escort." For a discreet companion armed with an assault rifle and a record of prior service under the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Blackwater USA charges $600 a day, plus a 36 percent markup for expenses — travel, weapons, insurance, hotel room, ammunition.

For the friends of the free market operating in Iraq it doesn't matter who gets killed or why; every day is payday, and if from time to time events take a turn for the worse — another twenty or thirty Arabs annihilated in a mosque, a BBC cameraman lost on the road to the airport — back home in America with the flags and the executive - compensation packages, the stock prices for our reliably patriotic corporations rise with the smoke from the car bombs exploding in Ramadi and Fallujah — Lockheed Martin up from $52 to $75 between July 2003 and July 2006; over the span of the same three years, Boeing up. from $33 to $77; ExxonMobil up from $36 to $65; Chevron up from $36 to $66; Halliburton up from $22 to $74; Fluor up from $34 to $87. (...)"

NOTEBOOK, Lionharts, by Lewis H. Lapham, HARPER'S MAGAZINE / SEPTEMBER 2006

[Ezlivin]

5. C.S. Lewis wrote in the "Screwtape Letters" about satan

And when he was asked why people didn't believe in him, he said it was simple. Make them believe in a devil with a red skin-tight suit, a pointed tail and a pitchfork. In short, a ridiculous image. Once people view the devil or satan as that, they simply ignore the possibility of his existence.

Same goes here. By repeatedly saying that this administration is too "stupid" or too "incompetent" to carry out a particular task, you portray them as clowns we can ignore.

That is a very dangerous position.

[LARED]

13. The department of temptation

has a whole section devoted to rationalization.

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

6. yes; they could have and did..

more importantly, they have successfully taken a free country w/ intelligent citizens and turned it into a fascist state full of drooling morons in less than a century. how else can you explain the fact that so many people believe it's possible for fire to melt steel or steel framed buildings to collapse with nearly no resistance. trying to figure out how they could have done it is irrelevant when the physical evidence is telling us everything we need to know.

[Nozebro]

8. I'd say incompetence DOES apply in the case of someone who knows

even a little bit more about 9/11 than the average person, yet persists in saying the Official 9/11 Conspiracy Theory is truthful.

[Jeroen]

10. Power, nowadays, is decentralised

Power, nowadays, is decentralised. True power and control has shifted from institutions, like the Presidency or Congress, to hybrid, complex networks. The current administration now merely functions as an interface between these networks and the public. I am not saying that governments are completely powerless, but I am afraid that it could happen in the future.

Perhaps that is not a bad thing after all. This also means that some of the power is distributed to the people, who are in a way, connected to this network. 9/11 was a significant event, but I think that the worldwide, public investigation into 9/11 is even more significant. True democracy could be on the rise, but perhaps not as we know it.

My guess is that 9/11 was proxy operation carried out from within the network. I believe that Al Qaeda took the initiative and that information about the attack soon reached certain people across the Atlantic. Somehow it was decided that this was a golden opportunity to set the agenda for the next decades. Operations inside the U.S. were carefully coordinated with the attack by Atta and his crew. So, the OCT, MIHOP and LIHOP are, in a way, all valid.

[mirandapriestly]

19. I never believe this stuff, how do they know? eom

[Nozebro]

20. The NYer, like the NYT, learned a long time ago that there are far more

upscale RWingers than there are "limousine liberals" in their target demographic groups -- and the author of the article is a member of the Council On Foreign Relations -- not exactly known for being an organization devoted to the economic well-being of those of us who aren't in a position to exploit the miseries of the poor, huddled masses in wretched countries around the Big Balloon.