There was a Conspiracy to mislead US citizens into war with Afghanistan and Iraq

[SpitfireIX]

CK, are you aware that during the 1930s the US had plans to fight a war with Britain, including plans to invade Canada? (War Plan Red^WP)

Your obvious premise that military plans are created only after a decision to initiate war has been taken is clearly false, and thus your entire argument is invalid. Are you willing to be intellectually honest and admit it?

 

[BStrong]

There was a Conspiracy to mislead...

No.

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

Can you people tell me how I am supposed to summarize the FACT that the Taliban tried to hand Bin Laden over both before and after 9/11 without posting several different sources that are of US officials and/or of declassified documents?

What else am I supposed to do when someone claims that no government official or declassified government documents have said that the Taliban tried to hand Bin Laden over after arresting him and even offered to pay for a US missile strike on his prisoner location but post links to each source?

@ANTPogo Laili Helms, niece of the former CIA director and former ambassador for the Taliban after her introduction by U.S. Senator Hank Brown, is NOT linked to or referenced in ANY of the links I just posted above so please go back read and learn.

ANTPogo said; “Actually, the recently-released information said that Obama rejected those pessimistic analyses of the Afghanistan situation and the success of the proposed surge, even ignoring his own vice-president, in order to give the US generals in Afghanistan the increased troop levels they asked for.”

So I post a New York Times story that says the opposite of ANTPogo and is in support of my second post which was a SUMMERY:
“President Obama’s thinking about what he once called “a war of necessity” began to radically change less than a year after he took up residency in the White House….Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy,…. Mr. Obama began to question why Americans were dying to prop up a leader, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, who was volatile, unreliable and willing to manipulate the ballot box. Faced with an economic crisis at home and a fiscal crisis that Mr. Obama knew would eventually require deep limits on Pentagon spending, he was also shocked, they said, by what the war’s cost would be if the generals’ counterinsurgency plan were left on autopilot — $1 trillion over 10 years. And the more he delved into what it would take to truly change Afghan society, the more he concluded that the task was so overwhelming that it would make little difference whether a large American and NATO force remained for 2 more years, 5 more years or 10 more years.” https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/u...pagewanted=all

Then I went on to explain, (with proof), that the US Generals lied to the American people, (not to Obama), to justify a surge that they already concluded, including Obama, would not succeed in defeating the Taliban but could at least help negotiate a better price with the Taliban for security of the TAPI pipe line.

Just because a plan created out of hubris before 9/11 regarding Afghanistan failed miserably along with their war does NOT mean that such a plan was not made.

If that’s the case then the US never made plans to invade AT ALL do to the FACT the war has been lost.

 

[Scott Sommers]

The problem is that if you don't post the way others want to read, you end up talking to yourself. That may seem fun and cool to you, but my guess is that you really want people reading your posts.

I have trouble understanding your difficulty with posting readable comments. I've read many of your posts from 2 years ago about the P2 and Operation Gladio, and while I think you completely misunderstand the situation, your posts are very clear and readable. I can only imagine that an earlier suggestion is correct and you've become used to chatting with your conspiracy friends. This will just get you ignored here. And who wants that? Even getting called names and other bad things is better than being ignored. Being ignored means no friends, and no wants that, after all.

 

[jimfish]

Can you people tell me how I am supposed to summarize the FACT that the Taliban tried to hand Bin Laden over both before and after 9/11 without posting several different sources that are of US officials and/or of declassified documents?

Perhaps doing so in your own words might help. A lot of the stuff you posted seems to have been copied and pasted verbatim from places like HotAir[dot]Com's comment section, Counterpunch[dot]Org, and Michael C. Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon", among numerous other websites.

In your reply to ANTPogo, you say "Obama knew he had to flex some muscle...with the Taliban in order to at least negotiate a better price to secure TAPI pipe line." Over on HotAir, a user called JustTheFacts said the exact same thing, and he said it back in May. If you are JustTheFacts, it's best not to simply copy and paste old arguments; especially not in reply to somebody. Discussion should be dynamic, not stale.

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

Four Questions

#1. Why do scholars and US government officials insist that the Talban is NOT Al Qaeda and why has US government officials repeatedly insisted that the Taliban is NOT our enemy? Even Biden has said the Taliban is not our enemy.

#2. The US officials and the Unocal officials, who attended the meetings about Afghanistan, insist no threat of military action against the Taliban was ever made before 9/11 nor was there ever any mention of pipe lines. In fact, Simons says the very fact that they are old, retired and out of the diplomatic loop makes them an unlikely choice for the transmission of a specific military threat like the one Naik describes. And with official channels already in use, Coldren argues, why would the White House bother using a bunch or retirees to announce an imminent military strike? They all insist the US had no intention to invade in the first place.

Yet there are over a dozen news reports between June 2001 and August 2001 that claimed the US is “supplying the Northern Alliance with military equipment, advisers, and helicopter technicians” because the “US will combat the Taliban with the help of two Central Asian countries, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan” and that “Washington would launch its operation from bases in Tajikistan, where American advisers were already in place.” That military action to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan is planned to “take place before the snows started falling in Afghanistan, by the middle of October at the latest.”

So who is misleading whom?

#3. If the US reason for invading Afghanistan before 9/11 was to get Bin laden. Why did the US keep refusing the Taliban’s offers to hand bin laden over and why was the objective to oust the Taliban after the Taliban had arrested bin laden, in a shoot out that killed some of his body guards, threatening to kick him out of Afghanistan while tensions were at the breaking point between the Taliban and Bin Laden as has been proven by dozens of sources all with government officials and declassified documents?

The Taliban was bending over backwards to satisfy the US they even criminalized poppy farming and did a MUCH better job of it then the US has EVER done in the entire decade they have been there yet the US wanted to overthrow the Taliban before 9/11 why?

“…the US will combat the Taliban….”

“The wider objective was to oust the Taliban.”

“…to topple the Taliban regime and install a transitional government…”

“…in a concerted front against Afghanistan’s Taliban regime.”

And etc, etc, etc.

#4. Does anyone actually believe that the longest war in the history of the world’s currently GREATEST EMPIRE was to go after one man with no regard for any Geo-political interest or fall out?

If so does that mean we could have said mission accomplished after we got him in DIFFERENT country?

 

[A'isha]

Can you people tell me how I am supposed to summarize the FACT that the Taliban tried to hand Bin Laden over both before and after 9/11 without posting several different sources that are of US officials and/or of declassified documents?

The Chicago Manual of Style

What else am I supposed to do when someone claims that no government official or declassified government documents have said that the Taliban tried to hand Bin Laden over after arresting him and even offered to pay for a US missile strike on his prisoner location but post links to each source?

You could start by actually examining and vetting your sources, and selecting the most primary and verifiable ones, instead of cutting-and-pasting massive amounts of linkspam from other websites.

@ANTPogo Laili Helms, niece of the former CIA director and former ambassador for the Taliban after her introduction by U.S. Senator Hank Brown, is NOT linked to or referenced in ANY of the links I just posted above so please go back read and learn.

What was she doing in your initial bombardment of linkspam in the first place? You do realize that quality of sources is more important than quantity, right? This is why hardly anyone in this thread is bothering to read what you wrote, much less attempting to engage with you.

Your problem is that you don't seem to actually have a coherent argument. You provide a scattershot of citations, without apparently checking on how or why those sources might be relevant to your argument, and without any regard for how a source you use to support one part of your argument might end up contradicting another part of your argument. You also have no logical chain linking the purported facts in your citations with the actual arguments you're using them to prove - for example, the fact that the US was apparently making contingency plans to attack a known terrorist hideout harboring one of the most wanted terrorists in the world before 9/11 is used in some sort of non-sequitur QED claim that this proves the US only invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 because of this pipeline, without any actual explanation as to why this is so.

You also haven't explained the disconnect between the fact that while the Taliban might not have been all that fond of bin Laden, they were certainly not interested in handing him straight over to the United States. There's no actual contradiction between "we don't want him hanging around here" and "we don't want the Americans to get their grubby mitts on him", you know.

Nor have you explained the disconnect between Obama supposedly realizing the occupation of Afghanistan being a lost cause, yet greenlighting the surge to purportedly get the Taliban to negotiate something about the pipeline, and the fact that this would be a completely pointless and irrelevant thing to do, since any "agreement" would be worthless the instant the US forces pulled out of Afghanistan and became unable to either enforce the Taliban's compliance vis a vis the pipeline or ignore the Taliban altogether and protect the pipeline themselves. This is even more mystifying since, according to your argument, Obama would actually know this in advance, since you say he knew the US would be abandoning attempts to establish stability in Afghanistan and leaving the country to the Taliban before the pipeline is even scheduled to be finished! So what actual benefit is the conspiracy to carry out the surge in contravention of Obama's own desires actually supposed to accomplish here?

 

[Scott Sommers]

#3. If the US reason for invading Afghanistan before 9/11 was to get Bin laden then why did the US keep refusing the Taliban’s offers to hand bin laden over and why was the objective to oust the Taliban after the Taliban had bin Laden’s body guards killed and arrested bin laden threatening to kick him out of Afghanistan while tensions were at the breaking point between the Taliban and Bin Laden as has been proven by dozens of sources all with government officials and declassified documents?

The Taliban was bending over backwards to satisfy the US they even criminalized poppy farming and did a MUCH better job of it then the US has EVER done in the entire decade they have been there yet the US wanted to overthrow the Taliban why?

It seems like you just changed the topic. But anyway, the posts are getting better. Still much too wordy and poorly sourced.

For example, I am an old man and was alive during 9/11. In fact, I was so old then, I have a very clear memory of events. I don't remember things going like this at all. You're going to have do more than just post an opinion - which this is right now. But don't do posting a wall of text, either. You might be confusing Bush's refusal to negotiate with the Taliban over Osama.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

Returning to the White House after a weekend at Camp David, the president said the bombing would not stop, unless the ruling Taliban "turn [bin Laden] over, turn his cohorts over, turn any hostages they hold over." He added, "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty". In Jalalabad, deputy prime minister Haji Abdul Kabir - the third most powerful figure in the ruling Taliban regime - told reporters that the Taliban would require evidence that Bin Laden was behind the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, but added: "we would be ready to hand him over to a third country"...The Taliban would be ready to discuss handing over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country if the US halted the bombing of Afghanistan, a senior Taliban official said today.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/international/21CND-PAK.html?pagewanted=all

The ruling Taliban of Afghanistan today further complicated the status of Osama bin Laden and rejected the ultimatum of the United States that he and his lieutenants be handed over to answer for their suspected role in last week's terrorist attacks in the United States.

Taliban maintains refusal to turn over bin Laden
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-worldtrade-taliban-chi,0,2638022.story

Defying new military warnings from the United States and Britain on Tuesday, Afghanistan's Taliban government again refused to turn over suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden and disregarded the American threat to its regime.

I'm in no sense well-informed about this event, but I was alive at the time. I get the feeling you're really confused about this and are just posting a bunch of crap your friends all agree on. But it's not true. The Taliban were not going to kick Osama out. That is...unless there's something super-secret that you and the Scoobie Doo team know about about that all the top newspapers in the world missed completely. And wouldn't that be ohh so cool...a bunch of kids know a lot more about this bin Laden affair than the top journalists in America.

Stranger things have happened.

Well...maybe not.

 

[A'isha]

It seems that the argument is since the Taliban said "We'll turn bin Laden over to you, if you do X", and the US refused to do X, that means the US really didn't want bin Laden that much after all.

Which ignores, as you say, the whole "this is not subject to negotiation, turn him over right now because he just killed thousands of our citizens in a horrific and destructive terrorist attack" factor involved in the US not doing X.

 

[kookbreaker]

More to the point, if you look at what the Taliban was trying to do, they were trying to send Bin Laden to a 3rd country where he could neatly disappear or get bogged down in legal proceedings. The US wasn't really keen on that, even before 9/11.

I wish I could find the link, but remember the Taliban's 'we can't find Bin Laden' bit? Probably to be followed by 'The dog ate Bin Laden!'.

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

The Chicago Manual of Style

You could start by actually examining and vetting your sources, and selecting the most primary and verifiable ones, instead of cutting-and-pasting massive amounts of linkspam from other websites.

What was she doing in your initial bombardment of linkspam in the first place? You do realize that quality of sources is more important than quantity, right? This is why hardly anyone in this thread is bothering to read what you wrote, much less attempting to engage with you.

Your problem is that you don't seem to actually have a coherent argument. You provide a scattershot of citations, without apparently checking on how or why those sources might be relevant to your argument, and without any regard for how a source you use to support one part of your argument might end up contradicting another part of your argument. You also have no logical chain linking the purported facts in your citations with the actual arguments you're using them to prove - for example, the fact that the US was apparently making contingency plans to attack a known terrorist hideout harboring one of the most wanted terrorists in the world before 9/11 is used in some sort of non-sequitur QED claim that this proves the US only invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 because of this pipeline, without any actual explanation as to why this is so.

You also haven't explained the disconnect between the fact that while the Taliban might not have been all that fond of bin Laden, they were certainly not interested in handing him straight over to the United States. There's no actual contradiction between "we don't want him hanging around here" and "we don't want the Americans to get their grubby mitts on him", you know.

Nor have you explained the disconnect between Obama supposedly realizing the occupation of Afghanistan being a lost cause, yet greenlighting the surge to purportedly get the Taliban to negotiate something about the pipeline, and the fact that this would be a completely pointless and irrelevant thing to do, since any "agreement" would be worthless the instant the US forces pulled out of Afghanistan and became unable to either enforce the Taliban's compliance vis a vis the pipeline or ignore the Taliban altogether and protect the pipeline themselves. This is even more mystifying since, according to your argument, Obama would actually know this in advance, since you say he knew the US would be abandoning attempts to establish stability in Afghanistan and leaving the country to the Taliban before the pipeline is even scheduled to be finished! So what actual benefit is the conspiracy to carry out the surge in contravention of Obama's own desires actually supposed to accomplish here?

I spent several hours carefully reading the articles/papers attached to those links to insure that every claim I posted before each link had in each article/paper at least two or more separate sources listed, proving said claim, which could also be verified by other articles/papers that also used two or more sources.

She was in ONLY one article and was ONLY one of the TWO sources in the ONE of a dozen articles/papers I linked to verifying the specific claim I made before the link. Because what she verified was also verified by another GOVERNMENT source in the same article and over a dozen other articles/papers with DIFFERENT sources also verified the same claim I felt that the article I linked to was satisfactory despite that one of the TWO sources in the ONE article of over a dozen articles/papers verifying my claim was Laili Helms, niece of the former CIA director and former ambassador for the Taliban after her introduction by U.S. Senator Hank Brown

In your opinion was the US planning on invading Afghanistan before 9/11 in order to oust the Taliban?

And if so what was the international justification for the invasion to overthrow the Taliban before 9/11?

The US officials and the Unocal officials, who attended the meetings about Afghanistan, insist no threat of military action against the Taliban was ever made before 9/11 nor was there ever any mention of pipe lines. In fact, Simons says the very fact that they are old, retired and out of the diplomatic loop makes them an unlikely choice for the transmission of a specific military threat like the one Naik describes. And with official channels already in use, Coldren argues, why would the White House bother using a bunch or retirees to announce an imminent military strike? They all insist the US had no intention to invade in the first place.

They also repeatedly claimed that they could not threaten military action regarding OBL at that time because the investigation was ongoing as to weather OBL had been involved in the USS Cole attack.

Or are they just trying to mislead the American people?

 

[A'isha]

Could you stop with the cut and paste, please? You're repeating "Laili Helms, niece of the former CIA director and former ambassador for the Taliban after her introduction by U.S. Senator Hank Brown" like it was some kind of ritual mantra, and that whole paragraph about "US officials and the Unocal officials" is word-for-word from your previous posts in this thread.

Besides, it's not our job to disprove your assertions. It's your job to prove them.

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

Could you stop with the cut and paste, please? You're repeating "Laili Helms, niece of the former CIA director and former ambassador for the Taliban after her introduction by U.S. Senator Hank Brown" like it was some kind of ritual mantra, and that whole paragraph about "US officials and the Unocal officials" is word-for-word from your previous posts in this thread.

Besides, it's not our job to disprove your assertions. It's your job to prove them.

I started this thread in order to provide the opportunity for others to evaluate the relevant factual information and post their thoughts and conclusions.

If I thoroughly defended the words that I already used I have a bad habit of reusing them in an admittedly childish gesture that they still remain undefeated. Please forgive me I will do my best to stop it.

Breach of rule 4 removed.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

More to the point, if you look at what the Taliban was trying to do, they were trying to send Bin Laden to a 3rd country where he could neatly disappear or get bogged down in legal proceedings. The US wasn't really keen on that, even before 9/11.

I wish I could find the link, but remember the Taliban's 'we can't find Bin Laden' bit? Probably to be followed by 'The dog ate Bin Laden!'.

That al Qada had anything to do with the USS cole attack was an "unproven assumption" in late November.

By December 21 the CIA had made a "preliminary judgment" that "al Qaeda appeared to have supported the attack," with no "definitive conclusion."

On January 25, Tenet briefed the President on the Cole investigation. The written briefing repeated for top officials of the new administration what the CIA had told the Clinton White House in November. This included the "preliminary judgment" that al Qaeda was responsible, with the caveat that no evidence had yet been found that Bin Ladin himself ordered the attack... in March 2001, the CIA's briefing slides for Rice were still describing the CIA's "preliminary judgment" that a "strong circumstantial case" could be made against al Qaeda but noting that the CIA continued to lack "conclusive information on external command and control" of the attack.

Edited by Locknar: 

SNIP'ed, breach of rule 4.

The Bush administration, by their own admission was not concerned with OBL and were not expecting an attack. So why were they making preparations to invade Afghanistan before 9/11 just to apprehend one man, that did not order the USS Cole attack nor masterminded the attack, whom they had no interest in?

What would have been the legal Justification given to the international community to justify an invasion of Afghanistan before 9/11 and more importantly why was the Bush administration making preparations to invade when they admittedly didn’t care about Bin Laden?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

It seems like you just changed the topic. But anyway, the posts are getting better. Still much too wordy and poorly sourced.

For example, I am an old man and was alive during 9/11. In fact, I was so old then, I have a very clear memory of events. I don't remember things going like this at all. You're going to have do more than just post an opinion - which this is right now. But don't do posting a wall of text, either. You might be confusing Bush's refusal to negotiate with the Taliban over Osama.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/oct/14/afghanistan.terrorism5

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/21/international/21CND-PAK.html?pagewanted=all

Taliban maintains refusal to turn over bin Laden
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-worldtrade-taliban-chi,0,2638022.story

I'm in no sense well-informed about this event, but I was alive at the time. I get the feeling you're really confused about this and are just posting a bunch of crap your friends all agree on. But it's not true. The Taliban were not going to kick Osama out. That is...unless there's something super-secret that you and the Scoobie Doo team know about about that all the top newspapers in the world missed completely. And wouldn't that be ohh so cool...a bunch of kids know a lot more about this bin Laden affair than the top journalists in America.

Stranger things have happened.

Well...maybe not.

I’m just going to post a few articles that verify the Taliban were desperately trying to get rid of Bin Laden.

Breach of rule 4 removed. Do not copy and paste large amounts of material from elsewhere.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles

If you’re interested I have many, MANY, more links that verify that the Taliban wanted Bin Laden gone.

 

[tsig]

The Copy-Pasta is strong in this one.

Praise the FSM.

 

[Travis]

Question: what was the whole "mislead" word in your title about?

So far you've only proven that Afghanistan just happened to be in a geographic location where some thought it might prove useful for a pipeline to go through it. You've also proven that the Taliban maybe didn't like him. But that is irrelevant. They were, after all, executing women in stadiums for daring to read books so what they thought of Osama is sort of hard to take as any bit of truth.

Unless you have some smoking gun evidence that the Bush administration was not interested in getting Osama and was primarily interested in a pipeline that still hasn't begun to be built this all seems a waste of time.

 

[kookbreaker]

All of these walls of screed hardly even come close to "overwhelmingly proven fact".

 

[theprestige]

Just addressing two points of many, more or less at random:

Leah Farrell, senior counter-terrorism intelligence analyst with the Australian Federal Police from 2002 to 2008, wrote in her blog that the relationship “is not a marriage, it’s friends with benefits”. Farrell has also said that jihadi accounts of the late 1990s have shown bin Laden was not that close to Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar before the 9/11 attacks.

"... wrote on her blog..."

Yep.

That's an actual citation you are actually using to support your argument.

Wrote on her blog.

The paper, based on both Taliban and jihadist documents and from interviews with Taliban and former Taliban officials, points to basic differences of ideology and interest between the Taliban and al Qaeda throughout the history of their relations. The relationship is a “marriage of convenience” imposed by the foreign military presence, not an expression of an ideological alliance.

There are basic differences of ideology and interest between the US and the UK. And yet somehow world events have conspired to make them the closest of allies. Perhaps it's a Franco-Prussian plot to run an oil pipeline through the English Channel?

 

[ConspiracyKiller]

Question: what was the whole "mislead" word in your title about?

So far you've only proven that Afghanistan just happened to be in a geographic location where some thought it might prove useful for a pipeline to go through it. You've also proven that the Taliban maybe didn't like him. But that is irrelevant. They were, after all, executing women in stadiums for daring to read books so what they thought of Osama is sort of hard to take as any bit of truth.

Unless you have some smoking gun evidence that the Bush administration was not interested in getting Osama and was primarily interested in a pipeline that still hasn't begun to be built this all seems a waste of time.

Because the 9/11 plans were made in Germany and because no Afghans were involved in the attack even if Bush would have managed to kill every single Taliban in an invasion of Afghanistan before 9/11 or excepted any one of the many Taliban offers to hand bin Laden over or even kill bin Laden, the 9/11 attacks would have STILL happened.

But so many Americans have been misled that many believe that if the Taliban would have been exterminated before 9/11 the attack would never have happened and so now they want the Taliban annihilated because of the 9/11 attack that the Taliban had nothing to do with.

Breach of rule 4 removed.

Replying to this modbox in thread will be off topic  Posted By: Cuddles