You're blowing smoke, Teribus.

[Your comments on my post in italics, my responses to your comments in blue.]

Your response to my first paragraph:
You say, If the entire [emphasis mine] resources of a nation were put to that use. . . .   I said nothing about the entire resources of a nation. Nor did I say that they didn't spend a lot of money on this operation or that they did not have an extensive organization. What I said was that the planning and the financial backing necessary to carry off such an attack did not require the resources of an entire nation or an organization any more extensive than the hijackers themselves. Hollywood scripts have nothing to do with it. And what "evidence so far gathered by police forces throughout Europe and in America itself" are you referring to? No solid connection to any particular nation has ever been established, only assumed or alleged. I stand by that.

Second paragraph:
I think Powell was right in the first place. And as far as bin Laden's delight that the towers collapsed, this does not indicate his prior knowledge of what was to happen. The towers had been attacked before, if you recall, and it's no surprise that this group of terrorists still had it on the books. It is not proof, however, that this was bin Laden's operation. If he's the megalomaniac he's made out to be, I think he would have crowed about how well his operation had worked. But he didn't.

Third Paragraph:
I was not even thinking of Clinton's cruise missile attack. You have an interesting dissertation on the military operations in Afghanistan, but none of it refutes anything I said. And I am aware that Afghanistan was no Eden and had been a battleground for several nations and local factions for some time, but when the US aided them in the war with the Soviet Union, it made lots of promises about helping them rebuild the country, then when the Soviets left, we dropped them like a pregnant girl friend. There was one helluva lot of resentment about that in Afghanistan and all over the Arab world. "Look how the Americans keep their promises!" Now, again we promise to rebuild Afghanistan after we went after al Quaeda, and once again we're sneaking out on the deal because we have other fish to fry in Iraq. I could give you a list as long as your arm of the promises that Bush and his administration has made to folks, both foreign and domestic, that he has never followed through on, and this is merely one on that list. Your description of conditions in Afghanistan are laughable. . . .I don't think the Afghanis find this very laughable. I don't find it laughable either. Why? Do you?

Fourth paragraph:
If you chose to continue spreading this lie, all well and good, but it does not alter the fact that what you are saying is not true and will continue to be untrue no matter how many times you reiterate it, or how much those reading your posts, or listening to you, wish to believe it. Its a lie Don, be honest enough to admit it. Calling me a liar doesn't make me one, no matter how much you may wish to buttress up your argument. Anybody who hasn't been living in a cave for the last couple of years can attest to the Bush administration's drumbeat of associating 9/11 with Saddam Hussein. See my post—12 Sep 03 - 04:43 AM—in response to Bev and Jerry's comment. I'm not going to re-argue the matter of Saddam's alleged nuclear capability and his stockpile of WMDs. Their existence or lack thereof and their strange failure to appear has been argued extensively in other threads, not to mention by a couple of Congressional committees who keep wanting answers and not getting them, and, of course, there are the scorch marks that appear on Tony Blair's behind administered by many of his constituents who also want answers to their questions, not just repeated assertions.

And as far as my veracity is concerned, Teribus, watch your mouth. Or, in this case, your keyboard.

[Back to normal fonts.]

Teribus, disagreeing with someone is one thing. Calling him a liar, however, is beyond the pale.

You've gone through my post paragraph by paragraph and spent a great deal of time and effort lifting selected remarks of mine out of context, analyzing what you say I have said, occasionally misquoting me by a word or two here and there, and generally misconstruing, misinterpreting, and distorting what I have written. This does not make ME the liar. I stand by everything I wrote.

I could continue, refuting your line-by-line attempt to refute me (I note from your previous posts that this is your style—misinterpret, set up a straw man, then knock it down, in the meantime, trying to bury whoever you disagree with in an avalanche of essentially irrelevant information, with the hoped-for side-effect of convincing people that you're more knowledgeable than you really are). But I have a life to live, so apart from what I have written in this post so far, I'm not going to waste time continuing with this. I, for one, have a busy day ahead, which includes a letter to my Congressional Representative, and I have an e-mail to get off the to Letters to the Editor departments of a couple of newspapers (not to mention a song I'm learning). I can't waste any more time arguing with you. People can read for themselves what I posted, then read your interpretations, and decide for themselves where the veracity is to be found.

You object to my frequent references to the Project for the New American Century web site. Again, I invite people to read it for themselves and decide—for themselves—the relevance of my references. I can understand your dislike of this. Indeed, that's why I thought, on a couple of occasions, that they had pulled the site, because it so blatantly reveals their intentions, which are so obviously being carried out as we sit here writing to each other.

As far as the last sentence in my eighth paragraph is concerned, I am not the only one who is wondering about the strange lack of interest in early intelligence reports about a possible attack on 9/11. And why, when the airliners obviously departed from their flight plans, fighter planes were not scrambled to go and investigate as regulations demand and had been done in all such departures from flight plan—until this one. Don't you wonder about this? If not, why not? Or would you just rather not think about it from fear that it might lead you to wonder a bit also?

Don Firth