Dick Cheney just called Chuck Hagel and demanded he formulate plans to launch invasions of Venezuela and Quebec within 6 weeks.
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NBC backing off the story now.
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NBC was obviously wrong. AFP is reporting that the 18year old turned himself 50 km north of Reims. Reims is where the French police are collecting evidence, not shooting the 2 terrorists.
French police launch nationwide manhunt as Reims raids prove fruitless
A platoon of elite French special forces had searched a building where the suspects in the Charlie Hebdo shootings were thought to be hiding but are now thought to be elsewhere
Maybe then <a href=Bin Laden Family Evacuated - CBS News">heâd have been flown out with the rest of his family. Bush had a lot of reasons for Bin Laden not to be seen again.
One of bin Ladenâs brothers frantically called the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington looking for protection, Prince Bandar bin Sultan told The New York Times. The brother was sent to a room in the Watergate Hotel and was told not to open the door.
Most of bin Ladenâs relatives were attending high school and college. The young members of the bin Laden family were driven or flown under FBI supervision to a secret place in Texas and then to Washington, The Times reported Sunday.
Bin Laden was enormously embarrassing to Bush. Hereâs an old investigation that used my research:
Bath denies that money went from bin Mahfouz and bin Laden through him into Arbusto Energy, the first oil company started by George W. Bush⌠It was a purely personal investment.â Bin Laden and bin Mahfouz, he insists, had nothing to do with either the elder Bush or his son. âThey never met Bush â ever,â Bath says. âAnd there was no reason to. At that point, Bush was a young guy just out of Yale, a struggling young entrepreneur trying to get a drilling fund.â
âŚLater in the â80s, bin Mahfouzâs associates came to the rescue of Harken Energy, a struggling Dallas oil company of which George W. Bush was a director. And both the bin Mahfouz family and the bin Ladens participated in the Carlyle Group, the giant Washington private equity firm in which Bush Sr. and Baker were major figures. Over the next generation, more than $1.4 billion in investments and contracts went from the Saudis to these companies that were so close to the Bushes.
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Got the wrong guy hereâregistered Democrat who didnât vote for Bush either time around. That said, itâs ridiculous to suggest that there is something comparable to the response by French police after this and the US after 9/11.
And think about the logic of what youâre sayingâletâs assume Bush did have "a lot of reasons for Bin Laden not to be seen again (an assertion, of course, which you donât demonstrate at allâin fact, if bin Laden had some dirt on Bush, wouldnât it have made sense to use it) So wouldnât it have made sense that if Bin Laden were in the US at the time, he would have been killed, as opposed to flowing out of the country, where he could continue to be an embarrassment? Wouldnât a living bin Laden who could tell tales be worse? So why would Bush have flown him out had the opportunity arisen?
To suggest that somehow the French authorities were somehow more effective here than the US after 9/11 is just silly, for any number of reasons. Thereâs enough to legitimately criticize about US actions in the war on terror without making ludicrous comparisons.
Bush didnât handle that day well at all. It was quite the fiasco.
Not the pointâBush did a lousy job. Bush was a lousy president. But the two events in question were completely different.
- A simple criminal action involving 3 men who conducted a mass shooting and remained in the vicinity
- A mass terror attack long planned and coordinated by an international terrorist organization securely based in a foreign country, in which the perpetrators of the attack were killed, and the planners of the attack were protected abroad.
Itâs a bit like arguing that one doctor is âmore effectiveâ than another because he successfully treated a sprained ankle, while the other one had trouble coping with massive head trauma and a sucking chest wound. Itâs an absurd comparison, so why make it?
So to say something like this:
They didnât have to invade two countries or torture anyone and they still nabbed the bastards.
is completely absurd, because âthe bastardsâ who committed the crime are still around to be nabbed, as opposed to being in a flaming pile in lower manhattan or in Afghanistan.
Again, you wonât find me with a kind word to say about the Bush administration, which is why I am careful with the words I say and donât make absurd and invalid comparisons.
Or do you think that we could have ânabbed the bastardsâ responsible for 9/11 simply by following leads in NYC on 9/11?
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We had pretty good leads, to mostly dead men. There was the one in minneapolis we missed.
We really bungled it right away in looking for ways to use the attack to go after Iraq. Afghanistan was shorted right from the start.
On the day after 9/11, he adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: âIraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.â This, despite the fact, Mr. Tenet writes, that âthe intelligence then and nowâ showed âno evidence of Iraqi complicityâ in the 9/11 attacks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/books/28kaku.html?em=1177992000=c04b29ffd3e14e1b=5087
Youâre not getting thisâI agree with what youâre saying, but obviously we couldnât have ânabbed the bastardsâ for 9/11 simply by following leads, because they were dead or in Afghanistan.
And one of the points that I was commenting on was:
They didnât have to invade two countries or torture anyone and they still nabbed the bastards.
Well, we actually did have to invade Afghanistan to nab the bastards, and we actually had to also invade Pakistan to nab more of the bastards, which I believe counts as two countries. In France, by contrast, obviously, they didnât have to invade two countries to nab these guys, because they are still in France.
So again, no dispute with you about how screwed up and incompetent Bush and Co. wereâbut those points can be made without making an absurd statement suggesting that we somehow could have nabbed the perpetrators of 9/11 like the French nabbed these guys.
It was sarcasm, I guess you missed that?
Lighten up Francis.
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Isnât sarcasm customarily humorous?
But seriously folks, sarcasm is a rhetorical tool. Simply saying something is âsarcasmâ doesnât mean that you have a free pass to say any silly thing you want. You were using sarcasm to make a larger point, and the point was invalid.
But for a Stripes reference, I will forgive all trespasses.
Now the NYT says the youngest suspect, Hamyd Mourad, walked into a police station 145 miles northeast of Paris and surrendered. The other two, the Kouachi brothers, are still at large. Typical murky reporting in the wake of something like this. The surrender of the one does not augur well for the continuing freedom of the remaining two, Iâd think.
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Well heck, me and 6 other people thought it was, and after reading a little of your history here it seems you like to argue for the sake of argument. Iâm not interested in that, thanks.
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Yes, I am so disputatious that I canât go more than half a year without having to comment on something. I was serious about the Stripes thing, though. A flawed film, to be sure, but sufficiently important in my formative years to make me wax full of love and kindness for those who share an appreciation for it.
Good reminder of why, when there is a breaking International news story, it is best to turn off the U. S. networks and turn on the BBC.
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HuffPo is saying the 18 year old, Hamyd Mourad, 18, surrendered to police early Thursday.
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Very true chansgster but everyone is referring to GW and dick the prick im sure.
Imagine where we would be if john Mccain and Sarah Palin were in office.
Our 5 year olds would be training for war right now. Unless of coarse they
had a silver spoon hanging out of their mouth.
Yeah, whatâs the deal? The news is reporting that they are still looking for the two brothers. So they clearly are not in custody. And the 18 year old isnât dead from the latest reports. He turned himself in. The network nightly news even got it wrong. Not sure how these reports are being confirmed.
Heâs saying that there were leads which were not investigated, let alone followed. That because of the financial connections, Bush let his buddiesâ kids go rather than holding them as material witnesses to see if they knew anything about Osama and his whereabouts.
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