Saturday, September 6, 2003
Sometimes I really worry that Europe has gone absolutely, totally over the freaking edge. I mean batshit bonkers nuts. The latest sign is this article in The Guardian (via Atlantic Blog) written by a former British MP and environment minister. Sure, we have people like Kucinich and McKinney, but Europe just seems to have a much higher barking moonbat quotient, and I don't mind telling you - it worries me.
This is all about, you guessed it, how the US was actually behind the 9/11 attacks as a pretext for global domination. I'm sorry to say I have no intention of fisking this, or frankly even reading it point-by-point. If you believe in this crap, you probably believe that teenage acne is the product of a plot by Clearasil distributors, or Neil Armstrong made his famous landing from inside a Hollywood movie studio (the pictures were just too perfect). It's like a belief in the supernatural, in ghosts, goblins and goonies. There's just no use in trying to talk sense into those who think they see them - their irrational desire to believe trumps all. Now, many people have their little eccentric ideas, but when it starts to become a mass-movement of people who seem to be experiencing a slightly different reality from the rest of us...
Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Michael Meacher: This war on terrorism is bogus
Nor is the US response after 9/11 any better. No serious attempt has ever been made to catch Bin Laden. In late September and early October 2001, leaders of Pakistan's two Islamist parties negotiated Bin Laden's extradition to Pakistan to stand trial for 9/11. However, a US official said, significantly, that "casting our objectives too narrowly" risked "a premature collapse of the international effort if by some lucky chance Mr Bin Laden was captured". The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, General Myers, went so far as to say that "the goal has never been to get Bin Laden" (AP, April 5 2002). The whistleblowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (December 19 2002) that FBI headquarters wanted no arrests. And in November 2001 the US airforce complained it had had al-Qaida and Taliban leaders in its sights as many as 10 times over the previous six weeks, but had been unable to attack because they did not receive permission quickly enough (Time Magazine, May 13 2002). None of this assembled evidence, all of which comes from sources already in the public domain, is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism...
I guess what bothers me is not that a major paper would print this, or an actual government official would write it, but that it's not unlikely significant numbers of people are reading it, nodding their heads and thinking, "Why yes, it does all make sense now..." The pod people are coming.
Update: Tom Paine at Silent Running comments. and catches Meacher in a lie.
Update: Winds of Change comments as well.
