Letters to the Editor
Bill Owen
Published Letters: 508 Editor's Choice: 6
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@Len, Too late, America has already had it's Walter Mitty
[Read the article: Obama, get ready for the "Clinton rules"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's too late Len, you've already had a President who made things up. His name was Ronald Reagan. Of course since then a lot of people have false memories of his time in office. Some people "remember" that he "beat the Russians", or they forget Iran/Contra.
Arms for Hostages.
"We did not--repeat, did not--trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we," Reagan proclaimed in November 1986. Four months later, on March 4, 1987, Reagan admitted in a televised national address, "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not."
Reagan, the senescent old murderer-in-chief, also claimed to have been there when the concentration camps were liberated.
In November 1983, Reagan told visiting Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he had served as a photographer in a U.S. Army unit assigned to film Nazi death camps. He repeated the story to Simon Wiesenthal the following February. Reagan never visited or filmed a concentration camp; he spent World War II in Hollywood, making training films with the First Motion Picture Unit of the Army Air Corps.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.mendacity-index.html
Your current dictator, buhs, once told Mahmoud Abbas that Jesus has told him to invade Iraq. Maybe that was not a fantasy, but Jesus, I hope it was.
You'd do well with a harmless character like Walter Mitty, at least his fantasies killed no one.
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There is no Al Qaeda
[Read the article: Ken Pollack: Al Qaeda is a great "catch-all" term]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is no 'Al Qaeda', and Bin Laden has been dead for years. If Binny was alive you would see him in nice clear videos but we don't, all we get are easily faked audio tapes.
Even if there was an "Al Qaeda" -- they are nothing to get excited about. Imagine -- an entire nation, armed to the teeth, terrified, of what, 20,000 people? How did America ever get the nerve to fight the Germans and the Japanese? Jesus, they had real armies, not a few guys with car bombs.
No, McSame and the rest use the term the way they used to use the word "communist", as a stick to beat anyone they wanted to kill, steal from, or invade.
And the "serious Middle East experts" are correct, the vast mass of Americans are uninterested, and/or incapable, of distinguishing between Hamas and Hezbollah, or Sunni and Shia, forget about Takfiris vis-à-vis Wahabists. Hell, in America almost everyone badly mispronounces the words Iraq, and Iran, whom they are about to bomb, bomb, bomb.
What is this al-Qaeda? Does such a group even exist?
Some terrorism experts doubt it. Adam Dolnik and Kimberly McCloud reckon it's time we 'defused the widespread image of al-Qaeda as a ubiquitous, super-organised terror network and call it as it is: a loose collection of groups and individuals that doesn't even refer to itself as al-Qaeda'. Dolnik and McCloud - who first started studying terrorism at the prestigious Monterey Institute of International Studies in California - claim it was Western officials who imposed the name 'al-Qaeda' on to disparate radical Islamic groups and who blew Osama bin Laden's power and reach 'out of proportion'. Both are concerned about the threat of terror, but argue that we should 'debunk the myth of al-Qaeda' (2).
There is a 'rooted public perception of what al-Qaeda is', says Dolnik, who is currently carrying out research on the Terrorism and Political Violence Programme at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies in Singapore; but, he says, such perceptions are far from accurate. Dolnik argues that where many imagine that al-Qaeda is 'a super organisation of thousands of super-trained and super-secret members who can be activated any minute', in fact it is better understood as something like a 'global ideology that has not only attracted many smaller regional groups, but has also facilitated the boom of new organisations that embrace this sort of radical and violent thinking'. Dolnik and others believe that, in many ways, the thing we refer to as 'al-Qaeda' is largely a creation of Western officials.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DFED.htm
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Actually Glenn, Kristol has sacrificed a great deal...
[Read the article: Bill Kristol, great man of sacrifice, on the duties of Passover]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He has sacrificed his credibility, his dignity, his honour, and his decency. (Assuming he ever had any of those qualities.)
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This is not the solution
[Read the article: Does a vagrant-fighting "bum bot" give robots a bad name?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Vlad the impaler once invited all the poor, the destitute and the starving to a vast banquet. Once they were inside he had the doors sealed shut, stuffed the interiour with straw and then burned them all alive.
Within a few years he had just as many poor people as he started with.
If only he had had a robot.
This bar owner is a bully and a criminal. His demented energies would be better directed at social change.
Where are they supposed to go anyway?
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Google Earth Dick
[Read the article: Give it up, Dick]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Pentagon hates Google Earth and with good reason. If you go have a look at the alleged reactor site, you will see that it really is in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing around for hundreds of kilometers. Yet, we are supposed to believe that the Syrians chose that spot to build a breeder reactor? Oh wait, maybe the Syrians don't know about spy satellites, just like Bin Laden did not know that the NSA could listen in on Sat Phones... Shhh!
It is somewhat believable that the Syrians would want nuclear weapons -- as it seems to be the only way to avoid getting attacked by America; but the idea that they would build it in the desert, and not underground -- is frankly unbelievable. This fairy tale is just another episode of the dick and george cartoon show.
Link to some sat photos: http://tinyurl.com/2j8htu