What you posted earlier was this:
"So, having given much thought to Al Qaeda, do you agree that it functions essentially, whatever its ideological fantasies, as a gang of agents provocateurs in the service of those who set it up and financed it in the first place?"
When pressed for what you meant, you posted:
"Remember Pearl Harbor."
Now, what you post below, if far clearer and much more reasonable. Sometimes when people ask you to explain what you mean, it is not a secret attack, but an actual issue of confusion to be clarified.
:-)
I think that we disagree over the use of the term "agents provocateurs."
-Chip
-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Shane Mage Sent: Sunday, May 19, 2002 8:03 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: second-wave attacks
Chip Berlet wrote:
Shane, you must admit that few historians actually believe that Pearl Harbor is the equivalent of the Reichstag Fire. This is, however, a popular theory among the hard right Patriot and militia movements....
I'm surprised that any historian would believe such a thing, unless it was a historian(sic) acting as a Nazi apologist. It was the Nazis who burned the Reichstag, but it was the Japanese who bombed Pearl Harbor. What Roosevelt and Bush have in common, as a matter now of public knowledge, is that both, faced with clear indications of a likely attack, took no action that might prevent that attack--nonfeasance in office. But, to Roosevelt's "credit," his [in]action had an arguably justified political purpose--forcing US entry into the war at the moment when Hitler's army stood within sight of the Kremlin--and he also made sure that the only essential part of the Pacific Fleet, the aircraft carrriers, were at sea instead of at their moorings. Bush's nonfeasance comported no damage limitations, his motivations had no color of public interest, and, unlike the Republicans in wartime, the Democrats in peacetime adopted a version of union sacrée that ruled out any public congessional investigation.
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64