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" a liberated Afghanistan is back to being the #1 exporter of heroin in the world "Terrorism
It is going to take more than military action to eradicate the terrorist threat. Terrorism is a multi-dimensional phenomena - it's cultural, economic, and philosophical. A prolonged military campaign only creates more martyrs for the cause, and makes our task that much more difficult. A complete revamping of our entire foreign policy is required, to present a new and more empathic face to the world. As it is, our foreign policy is being implemented by a bunch of people who are just as fundamentalist and single minded in their world outlook as the terrorists themselves.
Agenda Items
The terrorism acts of September 11 were, in the testimony of almost all experts, the result of many years of strategic planning by large and complex organizations. It is logical to assume that these missions were so successful because the team practiced on previous occasions. Major accidents on American soil of the previous five years should be re-investigated in this light. In particular, the Texas A & M Bonfire collapse, and the debacle at the Branch Dividian Compound. The criteria for selecting such events to be re-evaluated is simple: if they happened today, would most people suspect they were terrorist acts?
Israel is no longer our only staunch ally in the Middle East, and so they should no longer be able to dictate our policy there. The Israeli military behaves as badly as the terrorists they fight against. The media is biased in their coverage, in favour of Israel. The world needs to know the truth of the hostilities there, and the only way is to have continuous "reality TV" coverage. Park an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean and use satellite and aircraft surveillance to blanket the entire area with live coverage, and let the whole world watch and judge for itself. The people in Israel and Palestine deserve peace, and we should find a way to get it for them. Far from invading Iraq to depose the regime there, we should be invading Israel to enforce a Pax Romana on that obsessively aggressive and combative nation of pseudo Jews.
Iraq has suffered enough. The U.S. should leave ASAP, and the United Nations should form a task force to supervise the lifting of sanctions and a return of Iraq to the world community of nations. They made a mistake; they paid the price; now they have the right to be rehabilitated. They also deserve compensation for any oil that Kuwait has pumped out of the Iraqi side of the oil fields on their common border since the end of the Gulf War. That issue is what started the original Gulf War - Kuwait was siphoning oil out of Iraq's oil fields along their borders - and it has not yet been resolved; it probably never will be, with Iraq now being controlled by the U.S. and the multinational oil companies.
Ex patriots working in Saudi Arabia inform me that the kings and their immediate family take 90% of all the oil revenues for themselves. That is wrong. The mineral wealth of Saudi Arabia and the other Islamic kingdoms in the region should go to the people. That would go a long way to eliminating the conditions of extreme economic depravity that is the root cause of terrorism. The U.S. should assert maximum leverage to ensure a fair and equitable distribution of these oil revenues.
There remain many harrowing questions about the September 11 attacks. Most importantly, how the homing beacons and black boxes in most of the jets were disabled. The terrorists themselves had no such skills, or access. The President of an international pilot's union has told me that these devices cannot be disabled once the aircraft is in flight. This indicates that there was another group that facilitated the attacks; these people should be found. They are more dangerous than the Islamic fundamentalists; by far.
The other technical issue about 9/11 is that the Twin Towers collapsed in a perfect implosion. You may have seen the TV special a while back when a magician escaped a collapsing casino in Las Vegas. It took a team of experts a year to analyze the ten story building and place the explosives just right for the building to collapse without leaning any way. You can imagine how much harder it would be to do that with a 110 story building, especially since the substructure had been damanged a few years previous by a terrorist bombing in the basement. It's no exaggeration to say that there are only a half dozen universities in the world with those kind of capabilities, and computer power; to model an aircraft impact. (My situation at UT Austin narrows them down to just one - UT Austin.) Moreover, it's impossible for a pilot with only a few hours experience on multi engine aircraft to have targeted such an exact point on the towers. Remember the X Files episode (long before 9/11) when a jet was on autopilot, heading straight for the Twin Towers? I wonder if that was part of the FBI investigation ~ actually I know it was, because I wrote them all the stuff on this page at the time.
The Administration is saying their war on terrorism will last many years; perhaps decades. At the rate they are going it's more likely it will last hundreds, or thousands, of years. It'll go down in history as the "Thousand Years War." It seems the Administration is carefully crafting it into a modern Crusade - protecting the Holy Land against the heathen. In so doing, they are exerting total control over not only the war effort but religion as well. Whatever happened to the strong Constitutional prerogative of separation of Church and State? As far as that goes, how long can the war go on without Congress having to declare a formal Act of War? Isn't it time Congress showed the President some support and voted us into a formal War against Terrorism?
Our policy with regards to Russia should be re-evaluated. They have become a nation of poor people, just to have commercial links with the West. That is wrong. The standard should be that a nation provide a steadily increasing standard of living for its people, that its citizens are healthy and content and well educated. How they manage to accomplish this is flexible, so long as the level of freedom and the level of personal responsibility of the citizens is always increasing. Ditto for Cuba. Far from being embargoed, Cuba should be made a model for the dictatorial norm of South American nations.
All they really need for the Department of Homeland Security to do is to buy a first class search engine from Google (they have all sizes available), and link it to the data bases of the important federal agencies. Let each of the agencies keep their own files, and do their own investigations as they always have. The key to stopping the terrorists is sifting independent sources of information from separate agencies. It's making the problem worse by eliminating the independence of all the information sources; i.e. disassembling the existing agencies and reassembling them in the Department of Homeland Security.
With a good Google Search Engine linked between the sundry intelligence services, last September they could have done a search on "terrorist aircraft pilot schools al Queda bin Laden" and would have immediately gotten a prioritized list of all the important documents revealed in the media in the subsequent investigations, clearly pointing out the imminent danger of an aircraft borne terrorist attack.
The media are now saying President Bush doesn't have enough power to conduct the war on terrorism as it should be. How much more power does he need? Consider the following list of Executive Orders that Bush signed into law on September 14, 2001 (most had been used by former presidents, from JFK onward, for a short while). Each Executive Order (number) "allows the government to:"
(10990) .. take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports
(10995) .. seize and control the communication media
(10997) .. take over all electrical, power, gas, petroleum, fuels, and minerals
(10998) .. take over all food resources and farms
(11000) .. mobilize civilians into work brigades under government supervision
(11001) .. take over all health, education, and welfare functions
(11002) .. designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons
(11003) .. take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft
(11004) .. allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned, and establish new locations for populations.
(11005) .. allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways, and public storage facilities
(11310) .. grants control to operate penal and correctional institutions
(11921) .. gives the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency control over the mechanism of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit, and the flow of money in U.S. financial instructions.
Accepting the fact that none of these Executive Orders have been revoked (it just takes signing another Executive Order), I now ask you what the government hopes to accomplish with the new Department of Homeland Security? The President already has dictatorial power. Now he seeks - with the aid of Congress - to create what can only be called a Gestapo, with the authority to spy upon every American. I'd trust the President with that kind of power - but clearly he's not the one using it.
They haven't brought a single terrorist to trial; they haven't proven anything against any of them; they haven't even proven that any acts of terror have been done on U.S. soil since September 11, 2001. In fact, they have not even proven that said events were conducted by Islamic extremists. (The FBI, among other things, is currently investigating former U.S. military germ warfare experts - our own people - in the Anthrax terror.) Nor will we ever know because the Department of Justice has classified the entire 911 investigation. As far as that goes, the government hasn't even established beyond the benefit of a doubt that all the above Executive Orders were even required. That alone is grounds for Impeachment - but, guess what, the U.S. Congress will never do it because they are part it.
This whole fiasco about Washington acting on superficial information about WMD's in the U.S. invasion of Iraq is easily explained by the fact that all the higher ups in Washington are lawyers, who are trained to ignore their conscience. So there were no inhibitions whatsoever about acting as they did, so adept are lawyers at stifling the most basic inklings of doubt from within their soul. Everybody was easily swayed by Authority. The same thing is happening again, as the White House pressures everybody to publish rosy predictions on job growth - 3.2 million new jobs in 2004 was the latest prediction. The next day the number of people filing for unemployment went up. Can we believe anything Washington says now?
© 2003 by bill clark
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