Emotion?

I'll go a few rounds..........but just for fun. I'm not here to change anyone's mind, or the world itself.........it's just fun to debate the points.

But I'm not looking for a raise, a job, a degree, or your approval........so you'll forgive me if I don't get too involved.

[QUOTEacting like asses.] [/QUOTE]


And AuntyM you are acting like>?

God bless you and every American with the intestinal fortitude to admit when they have made a mistake with their vote.

Why does it always come down to a lie or some big scheme to screw the people? Generally by the less informed? Even Bill Clinton said last week that Bush has never lied he has done exactly what he said he would do in the campaign.

Of all the people I talk with even the most conservative do not call Clinton a liar or do they feel he lied to the American people about anything except Lewinski. He just has different views and values on certain issues. Even Al Gore who I feel is the worst thing for this country as a presidential hopeful since Bob Dole. I think he parses his words but it easy to see what he is saying and I doubt he lies.

Whats up with all this accusation of lies and conspiracy ?

I try to avoid name-calling, but TK's ongoing disdain for anyone who disagrees with him leaves me not caring.

Gas bag = TK

From TK's post: "I have read at least several 1000 books and articles about the war on terror and the players since 911. . . . In my family we read at least 4 hours a day . . ."

Tk,

It's fairly obvious that you're a well informed, even if I think it's mis-informed about some things, individual. And maybe you're even a speed reader. But 9/11 was only 1,008 days ago. Please tell me again how many thousand books and articles you've read on the war on terror and the players involved in just over 1,000 days. Even at 4 hours or more per day.

Your statements about basic information are not credible. I doubt this will help you understand why your statements about even more complex topics are not credible to many of us, since you NEVER admit being wrong or making an error.

Furthermore, simply consuming a large quantity of reading material doesn't necessarily make you: right, better informed, or having a clearer understanding of the issue of the war on terror. The quality of your reading material is at least as important, if not more so, than the quantity. It comes down to reasoned analysis for independent thinkers. Generally I find that I disagree with your analysis and conclusions, or the analysis - if any - of the authors of your reading material, when you parrot that.

You think I don't have a clue. I do think I have a clue, and then some. You may be right. I may be right. Neither of us may be right. But in your simple world there is only one right and wrong. And you are always right. And everyone who disagrees with you is always wrong, or at least doesn't have a clue. I guess it helps keep your world simple that way. Which is apparently the only way you can understand it. If that's the case, I pity you.

For the record, I still generally disagree with you. And I'll revoke calling you a gas bag if you lend some credibility to your statement about reading "several thousand books and articles . . ." in the last 1,008 days.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

I'm sensing that he will now call you a name and try feebly to discredit your spot-on analysis with neo-conservative hyperbole.

Call it a hunch....

Salmo,

An article a day is 1000. If I just read one a day.

I am able to offer you a list of some of the books. We are online with KCLS and reserve the books and they send them to the local lib. They then call and tell us they have arrived.
Try it you will always have a stack of books.
I have also been given many by my assisatnt. She lived in SA from 12 to 18 and her dad is still a foreign contractor. She reccomends Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia -- by Jean Sasson as her favorite for the truth about life in the ME.

The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Press)
All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the
In the Land of Israel, by Amos Oz (Harcourt Brace)


Karen Armstrong’s Islam, A Short History (Modern Library)
The Koran Interpreted (Simon and Schuster
Taliban (Yale University Press)
Soldiers of God (Vintage)
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, by David Shipler (Penguin).
From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman (Anchor).
A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by Howard Sachar (Oxford University Press)
A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani (Warner Books)
House of Windows, by Adina Hoffman (Broadway Books)
Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer. (John Wiley & Sons)
The Iron Wall, by Avi Shalim (W. W. Norton & Co.)
The Middle East, by Bernard Lewis (Touchstone Books)
Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Charles Smith (Bedford/St. Martin's)
A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin (Owl Books)
Power Politics, by Arundhati Roy (South End Press)
Righteous Victims, by Benny Morris (Knopf)
A Short History of the Jewish People from Legendary Times to Modern Statehood, by Raymond P. Scheindlin (Hungry Minds).
Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn Arabi and New Poems, by Michael Sells (Ibis Editions)
Unholy Wars, by John Cooley (Stylus Publishing, )
Wild Thorns, by Sahar Khalifeh (Interlink Publishing Group)
The Yellow Wind, by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Salmo,

Here is another that you can question. I have listened to over 10,000 recordings in the area of Jazz, rock and classical music. I once listened to 1000 reel to reel tapes of Jazz recordings in college to get an A in a history of Jazz class. 1000 tapes in one semester End of sept to end of Jan do the math on that one.

WRONG AGAIN

By RICHARD MINITER

June 17, 2004 -- THE 9/11 Commission is in danger of going the way of the Warren Commission — a blue-chip panel investigating a national tragedy that foolishly ends up fueling controversy. And that's a shame. Yesterday, the commission announced there was "no credible evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality, there's a wealth of evidence.

And by disputing the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, the commissioners are answering a question no one asked them. They were supposed to investigate 9/11, not al Qaeda as a whole. In an election year, this makes them look partisan.

The timing of the final report smells fishy, too: 500,000 copies are due in book stores on July 26 — the very day the Democratic convention begins in Boston. Again, not a credibility-enhancing move.

The 9/11 panel seems recklessly naive when it takes the word of the intelligence community as gospel. A wise commissioner would remember that everyone has an institutional interest, a bias. (E.g., for many in the intelligence community, conceding that Iraq could have been one of bin Laden's backers would be admitting that they were wrong for the past decade and wrong to oppose the Iraq war.) And a neutral commissioner would conclude that the jury is still out on Iraq-al Qaeda, not stamp it "case closed."

Yesterday's report itself casts doubt on the intelligence sector's long-held beliefs. Buried in it is an admission that bin Laden sought a partnership with Iraq (among other nations), though it maintains the relationship was never consummated. (How could they know?) This explodes two cherished myths of America's intelligence analysts: that secular dictators and Islamic terrorists would never team up and that al Qaeda is a "loose, stateless network," not a "cut out" for evil regimes. If the CIA's analysts were wrong about that, couldn't they also be wrong about a Saddam-bin Laden link?

A wealth of evidence on the public record — from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers — attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam.


* Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Yasin both a home and a salary.

* Bin Laden met eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and with Saddam's external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 6, 2003.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid '90s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan — who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks — that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre."

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad, where militants trained to hijack planes with knives — on a full-size Boeing 707.

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

* The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Wounded, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When he recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" in Baghdad.

* CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document-forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. . . . This information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The 9/11 Commission's work is too important to squander on politics. The nation needs a full, frank assessment of the government-wide failures in the Clinton and Bush years that led to the terrorist attacks — and a sober judge, not a camera-mugging prosecutor. Let's hope the commissioners realize that before July 26.

Richard Miniter is the author of "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror."