"... disingenuous for our government to exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through, to justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe, but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don't need to give up and our constitution says we should never give up."

It's funny that Williams brings up pearl harbor. We over-reacted to that too by forcefully imprisoning tens of thousands of US citizens because of their race alone. Something they've worked hard over the last 60 years to remove from public consciousness.

The idea that they give a fuck about you or your constitutional rights has been proven false repeatedly if they have an inkling of an opinion that you or someone 3 steps removed from you has done something they don't like, illegal or not.

This reminds me of how the president of the USA might have known about the Pearl Harbor attack. He let it happen to influence the public into supporting the war.

If he put our defenses on full alert, the outcome of the war might have been totally different.

By in large, Japan was. It was the aggressor, but not exactly without justifiable self defense as a cause.

The American military build up was absolutely intended to at the very least be prepared to attack Japan. The hardware destroyed in Pearl Harbor was very likely to be used against Japan.

Now, the Japanese policy of conquest throughout Asia and it's genocidal treatment of those areas it conquered is another matter. It is those horrific acts which, to me, shift Japan from aggressor to 'bad guy' if we must use such cheap descriptions.

By this logic Japan was justified in the bombing of Pearl Harbor, since the planes there were touted as able to burn Japanese cities to the ground.

You're right I did judge you a bit harshly I apologize, but I don't agree Israel is right here.

>> ^Kofi:

Was Pearl Harbour very selective and targeted?
Plus, 30,000 tonnes?!?!?!?! Think about it for a moment. Tonnes, pounds, whatever.


Pearl Harbor is an interesting case. It's on one hand a horrific war crime, and on the other well within the standards in which the US operates. Hawaii was a colony which we stole and placed military bases there to control the pacific. Bombers were being produced and put there with the expressed intention, literally this was put in the paper, to bomb the shit out of Japan.

It would be like China setting up on Cuba and sending planes there that they brag can bomb all US cities on the eastern sea board. We'd probably go insane and start nuking everything if that happened.

Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

>> ^Skeeve:


..With regards to American profiteering, it really isn't debatable; the US was publicly trading with both the Axis and the Allies until Pearl Harbor and then American businesses found more secretive ways of trading with Germany after. If one believes in nationalism above all else, then this is horrid, but if money is what someone worships, then this is the correct course of action. Either way, the justification of the war doesn't really come into it.


This is where the Bush family made their money and therefore dictated Americas future - and future disaster. You guys who want to overlook rapacious greed and murder in the here and now as merely unfortunate should bear in mind that by relinquishing your right to morally judge and control your gangsters in deference to big ideas about markets, then through the inevitability of exponential inheritance, you also relinquish your right to control your future.

This is EXACTLY the sort of shit the authors of the constitution had seen over and over in Europe and were desperate to avoid. Oh well.

I think that a "just" war is something that can only exist in a historical context. The Second World War was undoubtedly an economic/resource war (with myriad other "causes" piled on top) and the parties entered into it with that in mind. It is only after the dust settles that someone can claim it was justified - as it was in the case of the Second World War with the realization of the scale of Nazi atrocities.

I don't think that means a "just" war doesn't exist, just that nations don't enter into a war for the same reasons they are later justified with.

With regards to American profiteering, it really isn't debatable; the US was publicly trading with both the Axis and the Allies until Pearl Harbor and then American businesses found more secretive ways of trading with Germany after. If one believes in nationalism above all else, then this is horrid, but if money is what someone worships, then this is the correct course of action. Either way, the justification of the war doesn't really come into it.

>> ^ChaosEngine:

Anyone care to enlighten me as to why these supposed conspirators blew up the towers? I mean, it must have been a pretty extensive operation to plan, so I'm guessing they didn't just murder a few thousand of their own citizens for shits and giggles.
Hell, even maddox isn't retarded enough to actually believe this shit.


In his book, The Grand Chessboard, Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski (former national security advisor for President Carter, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a member of the Trilateral Commission along with Bush Sr. and Dick Cheney) writes of an imperialistic endeavor of controlling the world's vast natural resources (oil, natural gas, minerals, gold, etc.) and also human labor in Eurasia (specifically central Asia/Uzbekistan) that the U.S. must undertake to maintain global domination despite the American public's indecisiveness towards the external projection of American power (in which he reminds the reader that the American public supported U.S.'s engagement in World War II largely because of the shock effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor) and cautions that it will become more difficult to establish consensus on foreign policy issues with an ever increasingly multi-cultural society in America unless the public widely perceives a massive direct external threat. (killtown.911review.org)

>> ^xxovercastxx:

As I've said before...
>> ^xxovercastxx:
If the government wanted to destroy WTC and blame it on Muslims, why not just blatantly use explosives? It's not like the place hasn't been bombed before. Why bother with the hijacked planes and all the other shit? Blow the lower floors out and let the thing come crashing down. Dozens of terrorist orgs would have been thrilled to take credit for it.



You do realize it usually takes weeks of planning and setting up to rig a demolition, right? No way people are going to believe that foreign agents would be able to set up a demolition without being noticed. And using jihadi elements helps exploit the fear factor.
And, you're right, it has happened before. The FBI helped stage a bombing on the WTC in 1993 but it didn't terrorize the public enough for the power elite to implement everything they wanted to do. They needed a "new Pearl Harbor" to do that.

Anyone, including us, who kills civilians maliciously should be prosecuted by the international court as they have violated the social contract that we all live by.

Very rarely in history has a SINGLE individual been responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. When coupled with the fact that this individual espoused a racist, mysoginistic world view that was a danger to all mankind this is particularly heinous. In those instances where the violation of the social contract is so egregious, we as a society have a responsibility to enforce that contract and serve the penalty for the good of mankind.

Should Osama have been brought alive to justice? Perhaps. More to the point, he as a symbol of beliefs by going unpunished can longer be a point of origin for pain and misery felt by people around the world.

Am I happy he is dead? Damn straight.

>> ^Stormsinger:

>> ^Yogi:
A person that orders the mass killings of civilians is someone I would kill with my bare hands. In one very poignant way 9/11 was different than Pearl Harbor...

Like firebombing Tokyo or Dresden, perhaps?...

>> ^Yogi:

A person that orders the mass killings of civilians is someone I would kill with my bare hands. In one very poignant way 9/11 was different than Pearl Harbor. It was an organized attack on a civilian population, not an attack on an invading force that was waiting in a colony that they annexed. Yet would anyone sit there and say that Pearl Harbor was justified? No. So 9/11 is way way worse than that.


Like firebombing Tokyo or Dresden, perhaps? Would you pass the same sentence on the Allied leaders, or would you give them a pass for some reason? What about those who trained and used him as a weapon in their own little wars, setting this whole disaster in motion?

Mass killings of civilians -is- the history of war...like it or not, it does seem like he was only following a multi-millenial precedent in -that- respect. That said, I certainly won't miss him, and I do believe the world is a better place without him...but I do not agree that this is cause for celebration. This is just the latest act in a long running tragedy.

I agree it was revenge but I'm fine with it. I'm anti-death penalty and peaceful as hell but there are just some people that don't deserve to live on this planet. People like those who butcher children with machetes while they sit in their classrooms. A person that orders the mass killings of civilians is someone I would kill with my bare hands. In one very poignant way 9/11 was different than Pearl Harbor. It was an organized attack on a civilian population, not an attack on an invading force that was waiting in a colony that they annexed. Yet would anyone sit there and say that Pearl Harbor was justified? No. So 9/11 is way way worse than that.

Fucking americans and their "Pearl Harbor justifies the murder of ~200,000 people".

Pearl Harbor thrust the US into the war, though it had little to no bearing on the decision of whether or not to drop the bomb. Throughout the island-hopping Pacific campaign, it was noticed that the Japanese would never (or very rarely) surrender. Even if a soldier was the last man alive on an overrun island, he would fight. If he ran out of bullets, he would charge with a sword. In a few places, civilians threw themselves along with their children off of cliffs by the thousands because the Japanese government had told them that American troops would rape and torture them.

So the question was, what's going to be the human cost of a land invasion of Japan? They assumed they would have to fight not just entrenched enemy soldiers fighting for their homes, but the civilian population as well. It was also assumed this would mean the war would drag on for much longer.

Hindsight is 20/20 and we can look at this in comfy chairs from an academic setting. They didn't have such privilege.