Ex patriots working in Saudi Arabia inform me that the kings and their immediate family take 90% of all the oil revenues for themselves. That is wrong. The mineral wealth of Saudi Arabia and the other Islamic kingdoms in the region should go to the people.
That would go a long way to eliminating the conditions of extreme economic depravity that is the root cause of terrorism. The U.S. should assert maximum leverage to ensure a fair and equitable distribution of these oil revenues. Of course, then we might have to use fuel more equitably in America, and conserve energy ~ which is a bad thing. Conspicuous consumption of energy is the new standard of success in America – bigger cars, faster highways, less efficient buildings; burn burn burn.
There remain many harrowing questions about the September 11 attacks. Most importantly, how the homing beacons and black boxes in most of the jets were disabled. The terrorists themselves had no such skills, or access. The President of an international pilot’s union has told me that these devices cannot be disabled once the aircraft is in flight. This indicates that there was another group that facilitated the attacks; these people should be found. They are more dangerous than the Islamic fundamentalists; by far. Who knows, maybe a fundamentalist Israeli organization facilitated the terror attacks. It has a bizarre logic: look what’s happened, Saddam Hussein is gone, America is in an all out war on terrorism. God works in strange ways.
The other technical issue about 9/11 is that the Twin Towers collapsed in a perfect implosion. You may have seen the TV special a while back when a magician escaped a collapsing casino in Las Vegas. It took a team of experts a year to analyze the ten story building and place the explosives just right for the building to collapse without leaning any way. You can imagine how much harder it would be to do that with a 110 story building, especially since the substructure had been damaged a few years previous by a terrorist bombing in the basement. It’s no exaggeration to say that there are only a half dozen universities in the world with those kind of capabilities, and computer power; to model an aircraft impact. (My situation at UT Austin narrows them down to just one.) Moreover, it’s impossible for a pilot with only a few hours experience on multi engine aircraft to have targeted such an exact point on the towers. Remember the X Files episode (long before 9/11) when a jet was on autopilot, heading straight for the Twin Towers? I wonder if that was part of the FBI investigation ~ actually I know it was, because I wrote them all the stuff on this page at the time. I’ve also posed it in all the relevant news groups.
The Administration is saying their war on terrorism will last many years; perhaps decades. At the rate they are going it’s more likely it will last hundreds, or thousands, of years. It’ll go down in history as the “Thousand Years War.” It seems the Administration is carefully crafting it into a modern Crusade – protecting the Holy Land against the heathen. In so doing, they are exerting total control over not only the war effort but religion as well. Whatever happened to the strong Constitutional prerogative of separation of Church and State? As far as that goes, how long can the war go on without Congress having to declare a formal Act of War? Isn’t it time Congress showed the President some support and voted us into a formal War against Terrorism? While they’re at it, they could attach a constitutional amendment declaring War on Drugs and War on Poverty.