The Enemy

spc wrote:

stockingfull wrote:

spc wrote:What sickened me was the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. As he said it, a "modern day a lynching".

Actually, he said it was a "hi-tech lynching." But, ideology aside, he is the least-qualified appointment to the Supreme Court in modern history. Contrast, if you will, either Scalia or Roberts, with whom I agree on little in the way of Constitutional interpretation but at least they have the chops to be there.

Appointing him to succeed Thurgood Marshall was by far the most cynical thing Bush the Elder did as Prez.

Its funny how you say "he is the least-qualified appointment to the Supreme Court in modern history". Who the F are you.

Somebody who knows a little about the Supreme Court.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE4D81539F93BA1575BC0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

Devil5052 wrote:

coalkirk wrote:Slight correction...The FBI investigation of the flight school in Norman Oklahoma where the terrorists trained was in 1999, prior to GW Bush, on Clintons watch. But I don't blame Clinton, it was bungling at the FBI that lead to this going no where.

The following info points to this info coming on GW's watch.
Here is a link in re FBI Special Agent Rowley, the whistle blower in this case:

......"Ms Rowley questioned the response by FBI headquarters to the arrest of Moroccan-born Zacarias Moussaoui at a suburban Minneapolis motel on August 16 - three weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon.Moussaoui triggered the suspicions of a local flight instructor in suburban Minneapolis after paying $8000 ($14,370) in cash to take a flight-simulator course for a Boeing 747, despite having failed to fly even a single-engine Cessna solo after more than 50 hours of instruction'..........

Full link here: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/05/ ... 18693.html


This August date is very important & shows that it was the bungling of GW Bush's FBI in re the info that could have been surmised from Moussaoui should have uncovered the whole plot. It always amazes me how the Bush spin machine manages to re-write history to blame others for for his incompetency! Talk about Teflon Don!
(Think about it: How many intelligent Americans believe this stuff came in on Bill Clinton's watch & how many people still believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks?......When it comes to lying, the man is an artist!)

I'm not saying that nothing happened during GWB's watch that were clues that could have connected the dots but the flight school thing was discovered and investigated in 1999 prior to Bush. I don't blame Clinton for that. I don't see why you should blame Bush for not revamping the FBI in the 7 months he was in office prior to the attack. The intelligence failures had more to do with Clinton cutting the balls off of our ability to deal with anyone who wasn't a boy scout in foregin countries.

stockingfull wrote:Somebody who knows a little about the Supreme Court.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE4D81539F93BA1575BC0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

The democrats shouldn't have done what they did during those confirmation hearings. Case closed.
The ABA has become a controversial factor, & it is only one factor, in recommending judicial nominees. They did state "We are very pleased that the A.B.A.'s Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary has found Judge Thomas qualified to be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court,"

For God sakes they gave Robert Bork four negative votes.

coalkirk wrote:I'm not saying that nothing happened during GWB's watch that were clues that could have connected the dots but the flight school thing was discovered and investigated in 1999 prior to Bush. I don't blame Clinton for that. I don't see why you should blame Bush for not revamping the FBI in the 7 months he was in office prior to the attack. The intelligence failures had more to do with Clinton cutting the balls off of our ability to deal with anyone who wasn't a boy scout in foregin countries.

Morning Coalkirk. Damn cold here this AM (In he 30's) & I do miss the Harman's heat this early. I'm not saying that Bill Clinton did a good job of seeing the terrorist threat. What I am saying is that GW Bush always gets a free ride as to 9/11.His administration had plenty of warnings about it but did nothing. (Just listen to his security expert Richard Clarke, among others) Bush was more interested in getting people with the right religious/political background, regardless of their competence, into high Justice & FBI positions than he was in protecting this country. (just go back through the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings & see why most senior officials left the Justice Dept) Yet, if you ask 100 intelligent people, in this country, 90% of them will tell you that GW was totally blindsided by 9/11 & that it was Bill Clinton who missed all the clues. That Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks, & so on. Why is the public so quick to forgive GW, when the tradition is the commander always takes the blame for things that happen on his watch. (Kimmel & Short for Pearl Harbor, Carter for the Iran hostage rescue failure as examples) GW had almost a year in office & should have found out about the 9/11 plan, according to his security chief. At a minimum, to make it like he was a hapless victim with no responsibility is just true revisionist history "spun" by this admin.

Morning Devil,
I think I'd fire up that Harman if it's in the 30's. We're supposed to get down in the 30's at night early next week and I'm planning to fire the hand fired stove just to keep the edge off.

Well I guess it;'s just that Clinton had 8 years, with mounting evidence and actual attacks. Bush only had 7 months in office prior to the big attack. I don't blame either of them. The system was screwed up. The CIA and the FBI wouldn't talk to each other. The culture in the FBI wasn't conducive to information making it up the chain. Infiltrating Bin Ladens organization was and is all but impossible. In hind sight, it's easy to see the big ppicture but prior to 9/11 if someone had said terrorsts were going to hi-jack planes and fly them into buildings, no one would have listened. It was unprecedented and unthinkable. now we should be expecting anything and everything. For instance, there's now "chatter" about a new attack here in intelligence circles. Oh boy. can't wait. Better stock up on provisions.

coalkirk wrote:Morning Devil,
I think I'd fire up that Harman if it's in the 30's. We're supposed to get down in the 30's at night early next week and I'm planning to fire the hand fired stove just to keep the edge off.

Well I guess it;'s just that Clinton had 8 years, with mounting evidence and actual attacks. Bush only had 7 months in office prior to the big attack. I don't blame either of them. The system was screwed up. The CIA and the FBI wouldn't talk to each other. The culture in the FBI wasn't conducive to information making it up the chain. Infiltrating Bin Ladens organization was and is all but impossible. In hind sight, it's easy to see the big ppicture but prior to 9/11 if someone had said terrorsts were going to hi-jack planes and fly them into buildings, no one would have listened. It was unprecedented and unthinkable. now we should be expecting anything and everything. For instance, there's now "chatter" about a new attack here in intelligence circles. Oh boy. can't wait. Better stock up on provisions.

They are forecasting a cool snap here for early next week & I'm trying to decide if I want to start up the Harman again or just run the evil gas furnace a few minutes a day, & wear sweatshirts! (I got the new wall thimble yesterday but wont hook that up until the fall. (It's just sheet metal & I'm afraid the humidity will start rust)
I agree with you about Clinton having more time to discover the 9/11 plot than GW, but that doesn't absolve GW from sharing responsibility & Clinton is gone....... but GW is still sitting at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The 9/11 plot was coming to a head with much more open activity on GW's watch than on Clinton's, so he bears the ultimate responsibility, in my view. In any case, GW always is referred to as an innocent "victim" in this case, which is simply not the case.
As far as this comment: ...."The system was screwed up. The CIA and the FBI wouldn't talk to each other."....I agree but don't believe things will ever really change. Having worked for the Justice Dept for many years, there is an almost insurmountable rivalry between federal laws enforcement agencies that no law or Executive Order will ever be able to really penetrate. Careers, paths to advancement, etc are very powerful drawbacks to true inter-agency cooperation. (Things look great on government flow charts & visual aids displayed at Congressional hearings........ but they don't ever reflect the real truth)

Little story:
Back in 1974 when I was going through DEA's Basic Agent Training course (BA4) there were 3 CIA Agents 2 classes behind me in BA-6, being trained as DEA Agents so they could use that as cover in overseas assignments. (This info has been publicly available for years, btw...so I am not giving up any still classified info here) To make a long story short, they (CIA Agents) were hated by our instructors as they wouldn't do any of the PT or participate in any field training! They all had "chips on their shoulder" & were rushed through training as fast as possible.....In many ways, trying to get all federal agents to "work well together" would be like any President writing an Executive Order requiring cats & dogs to share food happily, & expecting it to really happen.

Not wanting to dampen the jovial banter here....

Just thought I'd remind everyone that this very night, 22 years ago, Chernobyl nuclear reactor #4 suffered a catastrophic meltdown due to operator induced malfunction... The cloud of radioactive material spewed over most of Eastern Europe and left thousands dead or suffering longterm illnesses like cancer. The area remains virtually a wasteland.

Let us all hope and pray that terrorists never decide to fly planes, or launch rockets, into any of the some 450 nuclear reactors in existence today around the world. 3 or 4 strategically crashed planes could set off a nuclear armageddon that would leave the Western hemisphere a twilight zone...

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Coal Jockey wrote:Let us all hope and pray that terrorists never decide to fly planes, or launch rockets, into any of the some 450 nuclear reactors in existence today around the world. 3 or 4 strategically crashed planes could set off a nuclear armageddon that would leave the Western hemisphere a twilight zone...

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

Greg would certainly know more about this but I'm pretty sure the chances of them hi-jacking a commercial airline are pretty nil at this point which is going to take very large planes that can fly very fast out of the equation. These would be the ones capable of doing the most damage. If you flew a small engine plane into the sides of one these building it's going to bounce off like a ball. This article cites a study that states that if the first plane that hit the WTC that was flying at much lower speed than the second one hit a nuclear power plant it would withstand the impact: http://www.tmia.com/security/airplane.html As the article says they don't mentioned the second plane and the entity that produced the article is a "friend" of the NRC.

Of course there is the unknown, I'd imagine even a small plane laden with explosives would pose a threat. There's also the worse case scenario factor or pure luck. Truthfully though I don't think any new attack is going to be carried out through airplanes, at least not directly as weapon. They have already stopped numerous attempts, stands to reason any terrorist organizations will be looking elsewhere to much easier targets where success is more likely. There is just so many of them...

I always think of Pearl Harbour and kamikaze's when I think of the 9-11 crashes. Somehow, I think it is human tendency to pretend we are immune - that all world peoples share our views of right and wrong, what it just and unjust in war - and we find comfort in this pretending. I live an hour away from two nuclear plants, Darlington and Pickering, and am downwind... cheery thoughts knowing that they are less than a ten minute flight from Canada's busiest airport in Toronto... right on the Lake. In one swoop a terrorist could wipe our Canada's most densely populated, richest farmland, and poison one of the world's significant freshwater lakes which supplies water to the "Golden Horseshoe" region and beyond. I doubt that there is any sort of permanent surveillance system in place and/or any plan or weaponry in place to offer any sort of counter attack on these two plants that have around ten reactors. They don't even need to hit a reactor, just take out a control building and watch the fireworks...

Coal Jockey wrote: just take out a control building and watch the fireworks...

Doubtful, any reactor is going to have redundant sytems. I'm no expert but I'd venture to guess they'd have to hit the reactor directly and hope they get the reactor or knock out enough stuff that it can't be controlled anymore. There was one thing I was reading that does sound a little alarming though, the reactors are hardened of course but many of these places store spent fuel rods in unhardened structures.

There was an "incident" last fall in Spain when they were refueling the Asco 1 reactor where radiation was released, and the matter was hushed up. It makes one question the storage and handling of spent fuel. One rupture of the integrity of a single pool - ie: a plane crash or missile strike - and there is enough radiation in one pool to decimate millions if located close to urban settings.

Nuclear is a mistake, like many things promoted and propogated during the mid twentieth century...

"...and the name of that star is called Wormwood..."

I don't think its mistake, quite the opposite. The U.S. is currently building a facility at Yucca mountain to house all the waste. Funny thing is they are going to be fighting the enviromenatalist's all the way and when they start to try and ship that stuff wherever it's going things are really going to blow-up. Fact is it's perfectly safe, I saw a show on the canister's they engineered. They were dropping them from like ten stories, hitting them with trains etc. Chances of anything happening are minscule. You'd have to have the thing hit by a train going 100 mph, fall off a 1000 ft. cliff into pit of gasoline on fire.

Electricity should be generated by coal and nukes. Save the more portable fuels for more portable things.

Take the wasted war money and work the security and emissions problems out while developing the inherently cleaner sources for land-based power like wind, solar, geo-thermal, ocean-thermal, etc. Share the technology world-wide.

USA should of been building nuke plants for years. we haven't built one in some 20 years. France gets most of it's power from nukes , something like 60%. matter of fact thier making a perment cap on the reactor at the place in Russia that had the accident. the cap Russia put on is leaking bad. then France is going to build some new plants there. seams France has thier *censored* together when it comes to nukes. one of my boys is going to school to be a nuclear enginer. he starts a summer program at the Perry plant , to get hands on experience.

I've heard that the USA will be building some new nukes. I think before this year is out you will see some building permits granted. There's been some agreement that once you get a new permit you will be quaranteed a smooth build. Interuptions from protest will not be allowed. ALL prostest will be before permit.