No no, read the article again. AQ gets their Saudi money through shady charities. Separately, the Saudis gave big money to the Taliban.
Thanks, but those maps don’t do it for me- I don’t think they really describe the first year of military action in Afghanistan. Try to come back with something more comprehensive please.
And dude! Quit accusing me of not reading cites. I am surely not perfect, but take another look at my handle :rolleyes:
It is interesting that the author shared my opinion.
I think you’re right that there are Sudanese Al Qaeda supporters. And we ought to keep an eye on it.
But again, my interest in Sudanese AQ had to do with the group associated with OBL. I think the details of who, if any, followed him to Afghanistan answers questions about the nature of his AQ. Specifically: Is OBL the king of a gang which follows him around, or is he a super-spy terrorist who pulls up stakes and then attracts new followers in new lands with his rap and his bling?
Little bit from Column A and little bit from Column B. He tends not to move until staying put becomes hazardous and uses al Jazeera to incite supporters (c.f. the statement supposedly from Ayman al-Zawahri).
So you’re saying: some AQ more or less permanently follow OBL around, and he also has the (financial) power to attract new mercenaries?
Right, although I’d say his power is more fanatical than financial.
[QUOTE=Try2B Comprehensive]
Thanks, but those maps don’t do it for me- I don’t think they really describe the first year of military action in Afghanistan. Try to come back with something more comprehensive please.
[/QUOTE]
No thanks…do your own research.
:rolleyes: yourself. You are not even close to Comprehensive and it’s fairly clear that you don’t read the cites provided you. Personally I’m inclined to let you simply remain ignorant at this point. Ado.
-XT
At the risk of reviving this thread as a zombie, I was wondering if anyone had caught the 9/11: Science and Conspiracy on NatGeo tonight, and if so, if it changed any minds. Several of the key people in the 9/11 CT were on the show and they seemed militantly unconvinced by all that evidence stuff.
I thought the experiment with the loaded structural beam in the 700 gallons of jet fuel and the forensic examination of an actual demolition site were especially telling…as was the insistence of the CTer on what were nearly magical explanations (nano-thermite, sooper sekrit government ninjas, magic ponies and such). I did love when Griffin called testing the structural member in burning jet fuel a ‘strawman’…that was classic. I didn’t catch the name of the ‘architect’ truther, but his own hand wave of that test and insistence that it was irrelevant because there was overwhelming ‘evidence’ (none of which was ever actually produced) indicating explosive implosion of the buildings had me snorting Dr. Pepper for about half a minute or so. That guy owes me a new TV!
-XT
Was it Richard Gage? The guy is a disgrace.
Gage has all the integrity of wet toilet paper. There have been times when he has acknowledged that he was wrong, and still refused to back down from his claims. More or less like every truther, “yeah, it’s not true but I want to believe, damnit.”
Well, if this thread is to have another life as a zombie…
tell me again what c.f. stands for?
“compare with”
Thanks!
I could not turn that show off. The truthers in that show - much like our friends here - were certainly not going to be encumbered with the facts. They ask for evidence. It’s given. “What about this other thing?” Evidence given again. It just didn’t matter. That should could have gone on for a week, and they truthers still wouldn’t be convinced.
If you are true believer, no amount or evidence or facts are going to convince you otherwise. Here, or anywhere else.
I thought the show was well done, though a few of their arguments were weaker than they had to be…and they spent a lot of time bending over backwards to try and give equal time, even when the Truthers were just saying a lot of meaningless nothings and handwaving. Still, a must see for anyone interested in this subject.
-XT
To be honest, I had doubts about the 9/11 events from almost that very morning – I remember ‘confessing’ to my therapist that it all seemed too convenient for the US Administration at the time.
But it wasn’t until relatively recently, with the discovery of the work of David Ray Griffin, that I became aware that there is quite a sizable community of level-headed, intelligent professionals from the most rigorous disciplines, all questioning both the original ‘official’ story of the events of that Tuesday morning almost ten years ago, and the government’s bizarre and confusing response to that most terrible loss of human life.
Personally, I think the two most puzzling – and unaddressed – issues connected with the 9/11 attacks are as follows:
*The unexplained collapse, at nearly free-fall speed, of World Trade Center Building 7. Even the final ‘official’ version of the events ignore physics, and do not supply a satisfactory explanation for this unprecedented event in world history.
- The censored testimony of Norman Minetta, the US Secretary of Transportation, who gave an account of the events in the Presidential emergency bunker, on the morning of 9/11. In clear, unambiguous terms, Mr. Minetta described an ongoing exchange between an unnamed ‘young man’, and then Vice-President Cheney, about an incoming airplane, as it was ‘forty miles out’, ‘twenty miles out’, and so on. This testimony, which appears to imply some official knowledge of an aircraft heading… somewhere, just minutes before the Pentagon was attacked, was ‘accidentally’ omitted from the final Commission report, and no one has reported questioning the former Vice President about this mysterious exchange.
Of course, there’s much much more – the unexplained damage to the ground floors of both World Trade Center buildings, unrelated to the impact of the airplanes hundreds of stories above; the unusual heat, capable of melting steel, remaining onsite for months after the attacks; the haste with which the cleanup was executed, limiting scientific inquiry into the causes of the collapses; the unexplained presence of nanothermite in what dust evidence could be obtained by qualified scientists and engineers.
These are some of the things I’ve been thinking about. And you can say I said it.
Thanks.
Dude…this thread has been dead since 2009, and it’s freaking 25 pages long. Everything you said in your post was answered in the previous uncountable threads on this silly subject, not to mention in the previous 25 pages in THIS thread. If you just wanted to drop a drive by in a zombie thread that’s fine, but you don’t seriously expect to engage anyone in a thread this old, do you? 
-XT
Quick, without The Google, how tall were those buildings?
-Joe
Walter Zimmerman, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board. Have you read all 25 pages of this thread? I didn’t think so.
Please read that, then if you still have unanswered questions we’ll be happy to discuss them. But please read the whole thread first.
Even with our recent openness to tolerating zombies, I am afraid that this thread will not be left open. There are too many personal feuds that we do not need re-opened.
Walter Zimmerman, you are welcome to open a new thread on the topic, but I am closing this one.
Please note that, as others have said, we have been over this track on numerous occasions. The Conspiracy Theory “experts” have universally been demonstrated to either not really be experts or are pushing their own dishonest agenda and the purported “facts” employed by the CT crowd are generally false.
[ /Moderating]