SwiftVets.com

[fortdixlover]

As the article below mentions, the 9/11 terrorists hoped to kill far moe than the 3,000 they did.

'They hijacked airliners and tried to kill tens of thousands with one strike."

They knew that there were up to 75,000 people at the WTC during a business day and thought they could kill a large number of them. That only ~ 3,000 were killed is a miracle.

What if 50,000 had been killed? What would liberals have recommended then?

The Endless War of Islamists
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=13469

By Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu
FrontPageMagazine.com | May 25, 2004

Less than two weeks ago, we witnessed the brutal murder of Nick Berg - a medieval beheading videotaped and posted to the Internet for the world to see. Meanwhile in Gaz,a terrorists decapitated a Israeli Defense Force soldier and waved the head like a grisly trophy. The Islamic fascists have reached a new low. Or so it seems.

But they have murdered, even on film before - journalist Daniel Pearl and a brave Italian, Fabrizio Quattrocchi. (‘I’ll show you how an Italian dies!’. They deliberately target and assassinate women and children - in the most recent case a pregnant woman and her four toddlers were ambushed and killed with close-up shots in the head. With a final shot into her abdomen they made certain that the unborn baby she carried died, too.



We watch, listen to the screams and mumble some words. Then, we go about our business as if nothing happened, effectively ignoring the barbarity of the act, the threat implicit in it, and most of all, the message that the terrorists are sending: Beware, Infidel, your head will be cut from your body if we have the chance! Your children will be murdered, your women defiled, your culture destroyed.



Each time it seems as if the latest particularly heinous act by terrorists will be sufficient to focus American attention. But we somehow seem to rationalize or minimize the awfulness. The Blame America Firsters and the Moral Equivocators jump in and try to diminish the threat by offering up something the U.S. has done to offset the terrorist horror. So, when we have an admittedly disgusting but strategically irrelevant and highly localized episode like the prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib prison it becomes a vehicle for an explosion of mass hysteria and national self-recrimination.



How much has to happen, how many have to die, before we realize the challenge we face? How much brutality do we have to see before we confirm the morally bereft nature of the enemy who has vowed to destroy us? The September 11 attack was thought to be a wake up call. Have we forgotten the burning buildings, terrified people falling a hundred stories rather than burn to death?



These are not rhetorical questions. We have been slammed by attack after attack, by murder most foul, and by abuse of such a heinous nature that most Americans do not seem to be able or willing to come to terms with it. Now, once again with Nick Berg’s murder, we see the true, disgusting nature of the enemy.



But we cannot really see the faces of the enemy because they hide behind head scarves and ski masks. They are bold and brave in attacking the helpless. Bring a bound prisoner before them or civilians or, better yet, women and children, and they wave their Kalishnikov rifles menacingly and carry out unspeakable horrors, all done in the name of a god whose doctrine they have twisted into a satanic force.

They have chased us from countries before, these faceless hate-mongers. We fled Lebanon in 1983 when a suicide bomber killed more than 240 Marines. We pulled out of Somalia, reeling in shock and horror because we lost 18 Rangers and Delta Force operators despite the fact that they had won a great victory. Dragging American dead through the streets of Mogadishu was sufficiently shocking to American leaders to destroy our moral courage. It reinforced the al-Qaeda thugs’ conviction that if they make the war sufficiently grotesque to repulse American television viewers, they can turn defeat into victory.



We cannot permit this to happen. Each time we retreat, they come back at us with more force. Each time we respond with tokenism - missiles fired into desert camps, protestations before the UN - they raise the ante. They have assassinated our diplomats, kidnapped innocents, attacked military ships and installations, blown up embassies, murdered civilians, mutilated corpses and committed acts of brutality that the civilized world abhors. They hijacked airliners and tried to kill tens of thousands with one strike. They fill trucks with explosives and poison gas with the intention of inflicting mass murder.



Withdrawal or diminution of our efforts will not win them over to our side. Appeasement, discussion or mediation will not bring them to a peace table. They have no interest in such things. For the Islamic fundamentalist, the world is extraordinarily binary: victory over the infidel or martyrdom. Either is an acceptable, indeed desirable.



If we blanch in Iraq, back down before the horror of a helpless American citizen having his head severed and waved menacingly into a camera, then expect that the terror will ratchet up to new levels of severity. We know that the only thing that has prevented an attack with a dirty bomb, chemical, biological or possibly nuclear weapons is the fact that we have been relentlessly on the offense against the terrorists. If they are running, they cannot mount a strong attack.



We must keep the pressure up on them. Al-Qaeda’s ranks have been thinned by relentless attrition by U.S. and Coalition forces. The financial spigots have tightened (which is one reason the Saudis are now targeted), and available hiding places have shrunk. We have identified the leaders, especially Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the operational leader of al-Qaeda and self-confessed knife-wielder in the Berg murder in Iraq. That is the place to track him down, fight him and kill him along with as many of his minions as possible.



America did not ask for this war regardless of what the hand-wringing antiwar crowd tries to say. These ideological forces have been simmering for centuries and have come to a boil in the past few decades. This is a war for the ages, not of the moment. It is a clash of cultures over time.



Why has it fallen upon us to bear the principal burden of the war? Because we are America. Despite a wide array of weaknesses and faults, we offer the best opportunity for the people of the world to live in freedom. Everything that America stands for: freedom of worship, speech, assembly; freedom for women and minorities; economic opportunity, open education and unfettered self-expression are despised and rejected by the Islamo-fascists.



We must stay the course no matter where it takes us and what it costs. And frankly - with my usual caveat about the immense tragedy of any lost soldier - the cost in money and lives has been minimal for a war of this nature. We claim to be a superpower and a shining beacon on a hill. The terrorists doubt that. They challenge our culture. They maim and mutilate, murder and explod,e trying to drag us down into the dark world they inhabit. We must continue the fight; and we must win. That is the lesson of the Nick Berg murder. Whoever Nick Berg was, to the terrorists he was one of us; to the terrorists Nick Berg was all of us.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lt. Col. Gordon Cucullu has been an Army Green Beret lieutenant colonel, as well as a writer, popular speaker, business executive and farmer. His most recent book is Separated at Birth, about North and South Korea.

[mikest]

[Scott]

Are you referring to the bombing of the "aspirin factory" in the Sudan?

Or the response to the attack on the USS Cole?

Liberals haven't had a single effective response to terrorism since 1992.

Why should anyone believe them now?

[fortdixlover]

[Richard]

The terrorists want to commit mass murder on a scale that will shock America into submission. 9/11 was not the first attempt. In 1993, the first WTC attack was an attempt to topple one tower into another. If that failed, Ramseh Yousef planned to murder the occupants of the WTC in a cloud of cyanide gas.

This from the World Trade Center bombing

The bomb
Yousef's complex 600 kilogram bomb was made of urea pellets, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, aluminum azide, magnesium azide, and bottled hydrogen. He added sodium cyanide to the mix as the vapors could go through the ventilation shafts and elevators of the towers. The van that Yousef used had four twenty-foot long fuses, all covered in surgical tubing. Yousef calculated that the fuse would trigger the bomb in twelve minutes after he would use a cheap cigarette lighter to light the fuse.

It was a miracle that only six people died in the first attack and only 3,000 died in the second attack.


Richard
_________________
The Public View

[hist/student]

unabashed comprehensive retraction

[sparky]

[hist/student]

unabashed comprehensive retraction

[mikest]

[sparky]

You should have read my post, Hist/student. Regarding the bombing of the "aspirin factory,"

But most lawmakers from both parties were quick to rally behind Clinton in a deluge of public statements and appearances yesterday, a marked contrast to the relatively sparse and chilly reception that greeted his Monday statement on the Lewinsky matter.

"I think the president did exactly the right thing," House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) said of the bombing attacks. "By doing this we're sending the signal there are no sanctuaries for terrorists."

Gingrich said he was told "very precise details" of the attack before it occurred, and praised Clinton's aides for being "sensitive to making sure we were not blindsided in this." Other congressional leaders, several of whom were on vacation or difficult to locate, said the White House had made an effort to notify them before the attacks.

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) called the attacks "appropriate and just," and House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) said "the American people stand united in the face of terrorism."

Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) praised Clinton for doing "the right thing at the right time to protect vital U.S. interests against terrorist attacks," and House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) said the United States "should respond forcefully when U.S. lives are at stake."

It was clear from several lawmakers' statements that support for Clinton was not just a knee-jerk reaction, but also a response made easier because of former GOP senator and current Defense Secretary William S. Cohen. "I have enough confidence in [Cohen] to believe that he would not be involved in anything orchestrated for domestic political purposes," Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah) said.

Gingrich dismissed any possibility that Clinton may have ordered the attacks to divert attention from the scandal. Instead, he said, there was an urgent need for a reprisal following the Aug. 7 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

"Anyone who watched the film of the bombings, anyone who saw the coffins come home knows better than to question this timing," Gingrich said. "It was done as early as possible to send a message to terrorists across the globe that killing Americans has a cost. It has no relationship with any other activity of any kind."

To underscore this view, Rich Galen, one of Gingrich's top advisers, sent an e-mail to conservative radio talk show hosts entitled "Wag the Dog," after a recent movie of the same name in which White House spin doctors concoct an international crisis to draw attention away from a president's sexual indiscretions.

"Speaker Newt Gingrich has made it clear to me" that the attacks were necessary and appropriate, Galen said. "This is a time to put our nation's interests ahead of our political concerns. I am asking you to help your listeners, your friends, and your associates to look at this situation with the sober eyes it deserves."

Gingrich made the same point himself during a conference call with House Republicans late yesterday, telling colleagues that while none of them has to mute criticism about the Lewinsky matter, "on this topic I think it's very useful and I think it sends a powerful signal to the world" that the GOP stand with Clinton.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/react082198.htm [url][/url]

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