Len,

"truth is always the first casualty of war" is a quote of someone I can't remember but always take as fundamentally correct.

Who can say if this is even true? Who can say if only certain aspects of the story are true"?
And even if it is all true, where are the real genuine government officials in all of this??? A bunch of blue-sky thinkers getting their jollies off is different than government officials discussing possible policy alternatives.

Your interpretations are along the lines of my continuing conviction that JFK was killed in a conspiracy and not by a loner. I say this only to show that I too am a skeptic of many things that governments say.

But even I, in this case, would need to see/read/hear far far more than this single article to come to alternative conclusions like yours.

And of course I don't wnat to believe it (but I didn't want to believe a JFK conspiracy either), so that makes me look for even more.

I'll sum up with the observation that IF this was any kind of preemptive self-defense action, then it was surely the most ill-conceived notion of that type in the history of man-kind! Bar none.

Jim Nelson

>Do the latest reports in the UK press put the events in the US in a different light ?
>
>http://www.guardian.co.uk/wtccrash/story/0,1300,556279,00.html
>
>If the report is true, could it be viewed that the attacks were not terrorism, per se, but an act of self-defence ? In the event that the Afghan government (or any other, for that matter) had issued threats of unprovoked military action against the US, would it have been acceptable for the US to take action to weaken that government - including attacks against that countries military & financial centres ?
>
>Is it reasonable for the Afghan government, having heard the threats to its country & seen the build-up of troops in the neighbouring region (ostensibly on a training exercise), to believe that it was under significant threat & justified in taking pre-emptive action ?
>
>Does the report change the role of the US from that of victim, to that of aggressor ? Could a plausible scenario be that the US security, military and/or government were prepared to provoke a terrorist attack in response to threats on the Taliban & Afghanistan, in order to get public backing for military action to get Bin Laden ? Could that explain the "failure" of the security services - they wanted to allow a terrorist attack, unfortunately it was bigger than expected ?
>
>I realise I am being provocative here, but in light of the report in one of our national newspapers that US officials were paving the way for military action in Afghanistan in July, it does give rise to many questions that need answering.