[Winstonm]

Hunter S. Thompson AKA Nostradamus
Published 9-12-2001

Quote

....The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.


They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.....

[luke warm]

excellent timing winston, as usual

[Winstonm]

luke warm, on Sep 14 2010, 04:57 PM, said:

excellent timing winston, as usual

I'm don't understand your take - the prescience of this article as it was written the day after is amazing whenever it is read - that is not time-sensitive.

[jonottawa]

If we're running for Nostradamus, I'll throw my hat in the ring:

Letter to the Editor, The Daily Texan, October 9, 2001

Acting without thinking

It absolutely boggles my mind that America seems not only willing, but eager, to abandon virtually all of its most deeply held values in a futile attempt to avenge the tragic deaths of 6,000 or more people on Sept. 11. The unbelievably skewed mass media coverage -- led by Demagogue-in-Chief Dan Rather, whose statements on Letterman epitomized hate-mongering ignorance -- has all the objectivity of the Iraqi Ministry of Propaganda.

By ignoring international law, by targeting the legitimate government of a foreign state simply because it refuses to extradite a person who has been indicted -- but must be presumed innocent until proven guilty -- in the United States, by destabilizing the global economy and by climbing into bed with various unsavory regimes, many of whom, unlike the Taliban, have actively sponsored terrorist acts in the past, our government has shown a reckless disregard for the principles upon which America was founded.

Killing thousands of impoverished Afghan civilians won't bring our loved ones back. Inciting Muslim extremists -- who make up a very small, but significant, percentage of the world's 1 billion Muslims -- to further, and possibly far greater acts of terror won't bring our loved ones back. Declaring war against a country that fought the Soviet Union to a draw in the mid-'80s has got to be among the most boneheaded acts imaginable.

I pray that the few of us who have the courage to speak out against this atrocious, indefensible blunder, will be heard above the cacophony created by the spineless, unprincipled zealots who are doing their best to turn our great country into a banana republic by stifling rational debate, responding to terror with terror and ignoring the rule of law, while sending our economy into the toilet with their return to the voodoo economics of the '80s.

Jonathan Ferguson
First-year MPA student