You have not disappointed me. I think your understanding of this really is pretty sophisticated and nuanced.

>>I know you write sci fi but please tell me you don't believe the Thierry craziness. I don't doubt Mossad is capable of doing pretty much anything they think needs to be done, but the WTC attack would not make sense on any level.
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>>Were I Mossad I would be thinking about exacerbating the Sunni Shia split or doing something really ugly to the Shia and have it lay at the door of the Alawites. An attack in France or Germany may make some strategic sense, but Mossad is pretty sensitive about blowback.
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>Life is still weirder than art.

As Hardy said, "While much is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened " ( finish Headhunter Jazz yet <s>? )

>I think Al Qaeda was created as a legal fiction first, for the needs of the trial for 1993 bombing on WTC, but just gained flesh, pretty much "Foucault's pendulum" style. And the role of Mossad may be just in making sure Al Qaeda succeeds and the Arabs and Muslims in general reap the wrath. IOW, it was let happen.

I don't think Al Qaeda is or was a fiction - except in the sense of it being an "organization" with "membership" and "the number 2 man" or whatever. The culture in which it exists doesn't really think that way. Very much like the western notion of a "nation" or "nationalism" which to a true Moslem is just not relevant.

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>Either that, or the decades of old boys appointing other old boys into various places, paying each others campaigns and generally taking care that loyalty overrides competency and that skimming overrides efficiency, have eventually produced such levels of dysfunctionality that 9/11 caught the system with its pants down... as down they usually are.
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>So we have a choice between criminal plot and criminal negligence.
>

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence <g>

There is a lot of truth in your observations here. The relations with Saudi Arabia are probably very key here. Think you'd enjoy Robert Baer's Sleeping with the Devil The game the Saudi's play - especially in paying protection money to those who hate them most and investing heavily in those whose interestes they most harm is very very weird and I think historically pretty unique.


>>The King David hotel (1946) was Irgun and they had their own pretty complex ( and traumatized ) way of seeing what their best interests were. In any case they made it very clear - both in the warning before the attack and afterward - that it was the act of the Jewish underground. No attempt was made to claim the arabs did it.
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>I seem to remember reading different accounts of it, but that was before the Internet, and left at home. Something published in early sixties in Belgrade, IIRC.
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>But then, who was the chief of Irguna at the time? Menachem Begin, who was later the 6th prime minister of Israel. Don't tell me he strictly forbade using the terrorist techniques of his youth.

You're quite right, of course, about Begin. But ruthless as he was, I think that by the time he became PM he was more focused on the targeted killing of enemies. ( perhaps a subtle distinction, but I think an important one )

I am amazed they never took out Arafat. ( they did get Haddad and could certainly have killed Arafat ) I do have a theory here that perhaps it was a way of denying the Palestinians leadership that may have actually furthered their cause. Arafat certainly didn't. Better your enemy be a crooked clown than an honest zealot.

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>>The attack on the USS Liberty during the 1967 war is still murky, but I don't recall there was any effort to blame the Arabs for it.
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>See my reply to Ed.
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>>I think the idea of Israel being behind 911 is an example of conspiracy theory that isn't even interesting because it conflicts so strongly with more logical explanations. The motives of those who would propose such a theory, however, would be much less difficult to decipher.
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>>I realize this is all great fun on the internet and there is a cottage industry to create 911 as a plot by Bush and Cheney to seize ultimate power and enslave Progressive Humanity. I'm as cynical as the next guy, but I also think really nefarious plots are a lot more subtle and are generally successful because they are not subject to debunking by any idiot with a webpage. <s>
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>We grew up with conspiracy theories back home, and during Miloshevich it became more than a cottage industry. Basically anything that happened was somehow a plot by Vatington (Vatican + Washington). But then it was discovered later that most of these theories were launched by none less but his own secret service. That's their job, to make the official version, no matter how insane, look good by creating far crazier alternatives.
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>That's what I'd do if that was my job - I'd pay a dozen guys to create websites, write books, push crazy theories, and then I'd wait for years to publish evidence to disprove them, always taking care to leave a hole or two so people could come up with their own. You only have to seed them, they'll water and fertilize on their own. Oh, yeah, and I'd take care that anyone who pokes a real hole in my official story gets branded as conspiracy theorists, his proof disparaged as junk science etc etc. The truth is dead, either way.

Now this is good stuff and I think shows an understanding of the layers of the onion. <s> It is certainly one view of the elephant.

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>So we can only follow the money, that doesn't lie. Who made a fortune on the whole story? Who made it big, and whose interests were served?

A good point, and the reason the most important investigation after 911 was done by forensic accountants. I think the thing that convinced them they were right about who did it was by checking stock trading and money movement in the week prior to the attack.

I would love to know how many car accidents and heart attacks were the result of those investigations.

I am surprised I apparently was wrong in my prediction that a big part of the "war on terror" was going to consist of our helping one half of the Saudi royal familiy kill the other half. C'est dommage.

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>>Now we will have Iran shouting "We're gonna get a bomb and boy would we like to drop it on Israel." just as Saddam wanted everyone to believe he had WMDs. It's rather like pointing a toy gun at a cop. Boy is he going to be embarrassed when he shoots you dead.
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>He was. But then, if your choice is no gun vs toy gun... and you're a dictator... you wield the toy gun for real, lest the plebeians recognize the emperor's clothes.

Well, that may work for keeping your own people in line, but it is still a pretty dangerous way to interact with your neighbors. I think one of the reasons we had to take the WMD thing seriously ( and err on the side of believing they were there ) was because the Israelis were starting to believe it. We are not the only nation that believes in pre-emptive threat neutralization. Iran is playing a very dangerous game. My guess would be that after Israel developed the bomb, the next thing they started working on was bunker busters. The really sad thing is there are a whole lot of Iranians who have more in common with secular Israelis than they do with their own "leaders".

As a side note, I always find it interesting that in cheering on aspirations for an Arab ( or Persian ) bomb the Palestians never seem to have looked closely at a map <s>

Arafat used to like to tell a story about how a frog allowed a scorpion to hop on his back for a ride across the river, certain he would not be stung because if he did the scorpion would drown. When half way across the scorpion stung the frog, the frong was shocked. "But why???"

The scorpion replies "It is my nature."

Perhaps a clown and a crook but you can't say the old villain didn't understand his own people.