Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?

Using the McChrystal Moment to Raise a Forbidden Question

by Prof. David Ray Griffin
Global Research, June 25, 2010

There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.”1 This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.

Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!

There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?

Read more…

Mohamed Atta loved pork chops, and 49 other things you may not know

about the 9/11 Florida connection.

An Interview With Atta’s American Girlfriend Amanda`Nichols` Keller Part 1

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104×1433886

I just finished Daniel Hopsicker’s Welcome to Terrorland. He exposes the cover story of the Florida flight schools, and the ongoing cover-up. The whole thing stinks of Iran/Contra and CIA drugs. It’s the same, bloody game.

Though his style can be annoyingly breezy, I highly recommend the book. There’s original research you won’t find anywhere else but here and on his website: http://www.madcowprod.com /.

Here are some archived threads that touch on similar material:

“Jeb Bush seized flight school records at 2 AM on September 12″
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph…

“Heroin, Al Qaeda and the Florida Flight School”
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph…

And FYI, here are some notes I kept while reading the book:

1. In Venice Florida, Mohamed Atta lived for two months with an American stripper/lingerie model named Amanda Keller.

2. Atta loved to party. He was out with Keller nearly every night they were together. He was a heavy drinker, snorted coke, was a stylish dresser and wore expensive jewelry.

3. According to Keller, Atta loved pork chops.

4. Keller dumped him after he embarrassed her at a night club by dancing, poorly, atop a speaker (“doing that old ‘Roxbury head bob’ thing, you know”?)

5. Atta revenged himself later on Keller by returning to the apartment they’d shared and killing her cat and kittens, disemboweling and dismembering them in her apartment for her to find.

Rethinking Iran-Contra: A Much Darker Story?

The Iran-Contra/ October Surprise was the missing link in a larger American political narrative

by Robert Parry,
Global Research, July 1, 2010

The conventional view of the Iran-Contra scandal is that it covered the period 1985-86, when President Ronald Reagan became concerned about the fate of American hostages in Lebanon and agreed to secretly sell weapons to Iran’s Islamist government to gain its help in freeing the captives.

Supposedly, the scheme went awry when White House aide Oliver North and other participants got carried away, including North’s decision to divert profits from the arms sales to another one of Reagan’s priorities, the Nicaraguan contra rebels whose CIA assistance had been cut off by Congress.

The Iran-Contra scandal was exposed in fall of 1986 after the shooting down of a North supply plane over Nicaragua and revelations in Lebanon of Reagan’s arms sales to Iran. A White House staff shake-up, including North’s firing, and some wrist-slaps from Congress for Reagan’s alleged inattention to details resolved the scandal, at least that was how Official Washington saw it.

The few dissenters who wouldn’t accept that tidy conclusion – such as Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh – were mocked and marginalized by the news media, including the Washington Post (which ran an article concluding that Walsh’s consistency in pursuing the scandal was “so un-Washington” and that he would depart as “a perceived loser”).