Bradford DeLong:
> UBL: "...we calculated in advance the number of casualties from the
> enemy, who would be killed based on the position of the tower. We
> calculated that the floors that would be hit would be three or four
> floors. I was the most optimistic of them all... due to my experience
> in this field, I was thinking that the fire from the gas in the plane
> would melt the iron structure of the building and collapse the area
> where the plane hit and all the floors above it only. This is all
> that we had hoped for. ... We had notification since the previous
> Thursday that the event would take place that day. We had finished
> our work that day and had the radio on. It was 5:30 p.m. our time. I
> was sitting with Dr. Ahmad Abu-al-((Khair)). Immediately, we heard
> the news that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We turned the
> radio station to the news from Washington. The news continued and no
> mention of the attack until the end. At the end of the newscast, they
> reported that a plane just hit the World Trade Center.... After a
> little while, they announced that another plane had hit the World
> Trade Center. The brothers who heard the news were overjoyed by it."
>
> Do you also think that Khrushchev's 1956 Party Congress speech was a Nazi
> plot?
I haven't studied Khrushchev's 1956 Party Congress speech. It seems improbable that it would be a _Nazi_ plot, however. The favorite "paranoid" theory of the era was that is was a _Communist_ plot to deceive the West -- a reasonable enough guess at the time, given that Stalin was supposed to have turned everyone in the USSR, including Khrushchev, into a mindless puppet.
As for the text above, I have no idea whether it is veracious. Time will tell -- maybe. My direct experience with the government and the boss media is that they lie constantly but not consistently. Thus it is possible that there actually is an Osama bin Laden who plotted and funded terrorist acts and spoke about them as above; or the whole thing could be some kind of game, in tune with the Arabian-Nights character of the present war or whatever it is. However, if this bin Laden fellow is the devilish mastermind that he is portrayed to be, one would think he would have taken care to lay out a good escape route for himself, indeed, to have left Afghanistan before the first bomb fell on it, unless he was planning a heroic fighting martyrdom for himself a la Ali Hussein. So also his supposed buddies.
Had the Administration wanted to get just these people, one would think it would have played a far more delicate and sophisticated game than rechurning the Afghan rubble with large bombs dropped from high altitudes. So I conclude they have been up to something else.
-- Gordon