I didn’t know that about Rumsfield, Diamand.  I suppose you are right in the sense he was incompetent.  Isn’t it odd that the US would put a pharicudical CEO in to manage the American military.  Both the American economic and political system is obsolete.

More British soldiers will die in Afghanistan, the defence secretary, Bob Ainsworth, warned today as it was announced that a seventh serviceman had been killed in the country in as many days.
“We must stay and finish the job” in Afghanistan.

He sounds just like Bush.
England has been running drugs since the opium wars. It
came as no surprise when Obama announced that nothing will be done to interfere with Afghanistan’s record poppy crop. After all, instead of just 13 colonies, England now controls a bankrupt U.S. After Obama builds a green zone sized “embassy” in Pakistan, don’t be surprised if he builds one in Afghanistan also. It’s all about drugs. No surprise that America
is the drug consuming capital of the world.

What I meant FT by ‘stupid’ is that Rumsfeld has said at various times that Flight 93 was ‘shot down’, as well as many other slips of the tongue: giving the game away because he just can’t keep his lip buttoned.

The 9/11 Commission simply left out two crucial pieces of evidence (protecting the Bush administration which was its job after all).

1. The omission of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta’s testimony given to the Commission that Vice-President Cheney and others in the underground shelter (Emergency Centre) were aware by 9.26 am that an aircraft was supposedly approaching the Pentagon and they did absolutely nothing.

2. The omission of Richard Clarke’s testimony which suggests he received the shoot down authorization from Bush (Flight 93) by 9.50 am on 9/11.

Rumsfeld, while talking to journalists, also referred to the ‘missile used to damage the building’ when talking about the Pentagon. It might be senility or a sub-conscious desire to boast but you won’t ever see any of his stream of consciousness moments in the mainstream media. They’re part of the team.

Thta doesn’t indicate stupidity on the part of Rumsfield, Diamand, it indicates advance knowledge.  Rumsfield is evil but he isn’t stupid’ his incopetance in Iraq is a result of him being ignorant and crazy, not planning for an occupation.  But stupid, no.

He and Cheney were collegues since they worked for Nixon thirty years before.  they appear to be at the center of this conspiracy.  I got the feeling somehow that Bush didn’t know much about it, although this is speculative.  But apparently Rumsfield did.

“Real Talk on Afghanistan”,the title makes it sound like it could be interesting ,but it turns out to be the same old Bland rhetoric.How could the US and the Coalition Forces even consider stabilizing
Afghanistan when the border with Pakistan is as porous as Swiss cheese and their main logistics wind through Pakistan.Barak Obama met with Medvedev in Moscow and received the good news that Russia
will allow aircraft to fly over Russia in order to supply the Troops on the ground ,but realistically is a Berlin style airlift the answer in turning the tide?

Yes, folktruther. They undoubtedly did use the same kind of ‘experts’ at the Pentagon -they certainly had a lot of them to choose from. Another snippet that I find really fascinating about all of this is Rumsfeld’s behaviour on the morning of 9/11.

Robert Andrews—the top civilian official in charge of special operations under Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld—a former Green Beret whose office was on the second floor of the south section of the Pentagon, adjacent to the west section’ was also interviewed by Honegger. Andrews made a sketch for the author of the path he took that morning at the Pentagon, and revealed that immediately after the second World Trade Center attack of 9:03 a.m., ‘Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld left his office on the Potomac side of the Pentagon and went (merely) across the hall on the same floor to his Executive Support Center (ESC), which is set up for teleconferencing. There, he joined the teleconference of top government officials run by Richard Clarke out of the White House Situation Room media room. Clarke, in his book, ‘Against All Enemies’, confirms that Rumsfeld was among the first officials on this teleconference shortly after the second WTC tower was hit’ What Clarke and Andrews say on this is completely at odds with the official story and the findings of the 9/11 Commission, both of which claim that no one could locate Secretary Rumsfeld until approximately 10:30 am when he walked into the National Military Command Center (NMCC).

Earlier than that Donnie was at another meeting:

He seems to have developed the gift of prophecy during a breakfast meeting with key military personnel held on the morning of 9/11:
‘During the course of the meeting Rumsfeld predict(ed) that some kind of “shocking” world event (would) occur in the near future’ ( 9/11 Timeline,  see Before 8:46 am September 11, 2001).
Soon after, Rumsfeld was handed a note saying that one of the Towers had been hit. In spite of this another person at the meeting, Thomas White, claims that they all just went on ‘…with the day’s business’. There was no panic. No one rushed to the door or the phone. Rumsfeld did not turn pale or look surprised. Having just announced that some ‘shocking’ world event was about to occur, obviously he had no reason to be surprised. Even more obviously there is stupid and then there’s Rumsfeld - a whole new brand of stupid.

That’s interesting, Diamand.  the 9/11 truthers were pretty much agreed that it couldn’t habe been a plane, but this is the first evidence I’ve heard of that explosives were planted inside.  but then its reasonable since they were also planted in the towers, so they could have used the same people.

No ardee it wasn’t Marshall and his friends unless he works for the Pentagon or the CIA or was involved in the neo con cabal that planned it. The touch I love is that they did it on the Pentagon’s birthday, 11th September. The same date they got their minions to carry out the coup in Chile in 1973. Not only are they completely nuts, they are egomaniacs as well.

As to what happened at the Pentagon I tend to take the word of someone who was actually in the Pentagon on 9/11: someone who worked there.

April Gallop, an Army employee with a Top Secret clearance, was at her desk in the Army administrative offices in the west section of the Pentagon on 9/11, the area of the building hardest hit and with the most casualties, when what she said sounded and felt “like a bomb” went off.
“Being in the Army with the training I had, I know what a bomb sounds and acts like, especially the aftermath, and it sounded and acted like a bomb’, Gallop told Barbara Honegger in an under-oath videotaped interview.

Barbara Honegger, M.S. is Senior Military Affairs Journalist with the Naval Postgraduate School (1995-present). Honegger served as Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President and White House Policy Analyst (1981-83); was the pioneering Irangate author and whistleblower on the October Surprise (October Surprise, Tudor, 1989) and in the Iran-Contra exposé documentary film Cover-Up; and was called as a researcher-witness at both the October 23, 2004 and August 27, 2005 Los Angeles Citizens 9/11 Grand Jury hearings held at Patriotic Hall in Los Angeles, Calif.

“There was no plane or plane parts inside the building, and no smell of jet fuel” Gallop told her. There was, however a strong smell of cordite, in other words of explosives. In two hours of under-oath videotaped testimony, Gallop states that the explosion went off at the precise instant she hit the ‘power on’ button on her computer in the Army administrative area, to which she had just returned that morning after maternity leave.  The explosion stopped her wrist watch just after 9:30 a.m. but Cheney originally claimed a ‘plane’ hit the Pentagon at 9.47 a.m. April Gallop keeps her stopped wrist watch in a safety deposit box. The area worst hit was the auditing department where auditors were searching for the 2.3 trillion dollars that Rumsfeld had announced on CNN on 10/9/01 was missing from the Pentagon. Guess what? They never found it. Of course these missing trillions were a matter of immense importance to Osama bin Laden. Obviously he got really angry with those auditors. If it wasn’t all so tragic it would be funny. Effluent? Maybe. Conspiracy? Definitely.

diamond, July 8 at 4:39 pm #

Careful Diamond, you should know that it was Marshall and his friends…..

By diamond, July 8 at 4:39 pm #

So diamond - at the risk of unleashing a torrent of conspiracy effluent… who DID do 9/11?

Yes, I agree with his blimpship. The situation is serious. America and their coalition of the craven invaded a country that didn’t do 9/11. A country which had already been destroyed by a proxy war fought for America against the Red Army by the Muhujeddin, including their right hand Saudi, Osama bin Laden, who ran the CIA outpost known as MAK. They invaded a country that lacked the resources and the sophistication to do 9/11 even if they wanted to, high on hysteria and propaganda. Then, not content with this, America installed as their puppet Karzai, a former American oil company employee and a man who has a brother who is a drug lord in Afghanistan. The smirked over their glorious victory over a third world country that was in ruins, then they ran off with their tails on fire to invade Iraq - a country which also didn’t do 9/11- and created a godawful mess which continues to this day. Yes, they had the fun of hanging Saddam Hussein, a former employee of theirs who had fought another proxy war for them against Iran, but the rest of it was endless shit and folks dying all over the place. It was like well, Vietnam,for want of a better word. The Pentagon should buy a sign (God knows they’ve got enough taxpayer money to do it) that reads NO ONE HAS EVER WON AN INSURGENCY and hang it up on the side of the Pentagon they blew up so they could blame it on ‘terrorists’. Because you see, a rich, uneducated moron or a moron with five stars is still a moron.

I do nto see the resemblance myself but his words resemble the typical crap one hears about these wars.
Regardless of what these folks say these sorts of wars are lost before they are fought.

This is real talk?  Possibly real mainstream talk.  Real talk is that the war is lost for the West and noone wants to withdraw because this would acknowldege it and the the withdrawers blamed.

You’re right, Mary Ann, he does look like Hitler, especially if Hitler wore glasses.

“Let us be under no illusion. The situation in Afghanistan is serious, and not yet decided. The way forward is hard and dangerous. More lives will be lost and our resolve will be tested.”

In other words, the situation is hopeless but not serious. 

P.S. This man amazingly resembles Hitler.