connecting*the*dots

(originally uploaded by JaciVico)

Harlem, New York

Artists: Mos Def - Immortal Technique - Eminem

=============

[Mos Def - talking]
Man, you hear this bullshit they be talkin’
Every day, man
It’s like these motherfuckers is just like professional liars
YouknowwhatI’msayin? It’s wild
Listen

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

[Verse 1 - Immortal Technique]
I pledge no allegiance, nigga fuck the president’s speeches
I’m baptized by America and covered in leeches
The dirty water that bleaches your soul and your facial features
Drownin’ you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers
And if you speak about the evil that the government does
The Patriot Act’ll track you to the type of your blood
They try to frame you, and say you was tryna sell drugs
And throw a federal indictment on niggaz to show you love
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in
All they talk about is terrorism on television
They tell you to listen, but they don’t really tell you they mission
They funded Al-Qaeda, and now they blame the Muslim religion
Even though Bin Laden, was a CIA tactician
They gave him billions of dollars, and they funded his purpose
Fahrenheit 9/11, that’s just scratchin’ the surface

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

[Verse 2 - Immortal Technique]
They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that’s bullshit, I’ll show you why it’s totally wrong
Cuz if another country invaded the hood tonight
It’d be warfare through Harlem, and Washington Heights
I wouldn’t be fightin’ for Bush or White America’s dream
I’d be fightin’ for my people’s survival and self-esteem
I wouldn’t fight for racist churches from the south, my nigga
I’d be fightin’ to keep the occupation out, my nigga
You ever clock someone who talk shit, or look at you wrong?
Imagine if they shot at you, and was rapin’ your moms
And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons
We sold him that shit, after Ronald Reagan’s election
Mercenary contractors fightin’ a new era
Corporate military bankin’ off the war on terror
They controllin’ the ghetto, with the failed attack
Tryna distract the fact that they engineerin’ the crack
So I’m strapped like Lee Malvo holdin’ a sniper rifle
These bullets’ll touch your kids, and I don’t mean like Michael
Your body be sent to the morgue, stripped down and recycled
I fire on house niggaz that support you and like you
Cuz innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily
This ain’t no alien conspiracy theory, this shit is real
Written on the dollar underneath the Masonic seal

(I don’t rap for dead presidents
I’d rather see the president dead
It’s never been said but I set precedents)–[Eminem]

[Hook - Mos Def]
Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga

Bin Laden didn’t blow up the projects
It was you, nigga
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]
Tell the truth, nigga
(Bush knocked down the towers)–[Jadakiss]

(Shady Records was 80 seconds away from the towers
Some cowards fucked with the wrong building, they meant to hit ours)– [Eminem]

(originally uploaded by Akcelik)

sponsored by…

Bostonians can sleep safely now that Jack Bauer is on the job.

YTMND rocks.

For more on the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Terrorist “hoax” go to BoingBoing.

(originally uploaded by ConjugalVisitor)

McClatchy Washington Bureau
Rumsfeld, Ashcroft received warning of al Qaida attack before 9/11
By Jonathan S. Landay, Warren P. Strobel and John Walcott

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.

One official who helped to prepare the briefing, which included a PowerPoint presentation, described it as a “10 on a scale of 1 to 10″ that “connected the dots” in earlier intelligence reports to present a stark warning that al-Qaida, which had already killed Americans in Yemen, Saudi Arabia and East Africa, was poised to strike again.

Former CIA Director George Tenet gave the independent Sept. 11, 2001, commission the same briefing on Jan. 28, 2004, but the commission made no mention of the warning in its 428-page final report. According to three former senior intelligence officials, Tenet testified to commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste and to Philip Zelikow, the panel’s executive director and the principal author of its report, who’s now Rice’s top adviser.

[…]

And people called Clinton’s interview with Chris Wallace “crazed?” Sounds much more like it was a factual explosion.

(originally uploaded by Scoobymoo)

Steve | 09.29.06 - 11:52 am

I’d have to say, I once thought terrorists were just religious nuts trying to get their 40 virgins. I thought 9/11 was a cowardly, yet simplistic attack.

Today, I realize how sophisticated crashing unarmed civilian airplanes into buildings really was. That single move has our country perilously close to destruction. Why hasn’t Al Queda attacked again? Because they don’t need to. We’ll do far more damage to ourselves than some cult of nuts with AK47s ever will.

We have played right into their hands. Knowing how badly we needed to go into Iraq, and being able to foresee (unlike us) the costly aftermath, they were able to bank on us depleting our treasury. Of course, this means more cuts to social programs and schools, ensuring we will be weak in the future. Then we really go the extra mile to appease them and take away our own rights to show them just how tough we are.

We now have secret prisons and full government control of our personal lives with no court oversight. The mere mention of terrorism and you can disappear forever with no trial. Hell, who needs evidence when you have torture. With torture, it’s only a matter of time before you get whatever confession you like.

Welcome to Cold War USSR. Goverment control, fear, economy being drained to support the military, secret prisons, the works. Being the ones to set the demise of the Soviet Union in motion, you’d think we’d see this coming. I guess not. I am now convinced Al Queda did.

The top scientific minds and universities in the world are here in the US. The most advanced country in the world being beaten down by a bunch of pink unicorn zealots. How embarrassing. They aimed to make us destroy our own country out of fear. They have been more effective than I had ever imagined.

The only element of Steve’s comment that I don’t particularily agree with is his position on social programs and schools. If it wasn’t Iraq, we would’ve figured out another way to send the majority of our taxes into the military industrial complex. You know, gotta keep making the widgets.

Well, maybe not quite at this clip.

But that’s where we stand, all because 19 men — neither boogymen nor fascists, but men — armed with box cutters, simply outfoxed our minimum wage airport security defenses 5 years ago and murdered 3,000 people in the most spectacular fashion possible.

We respond not by going after the chief conspirator of the mass homicide, instead we initiate “Shock and Awe” in a pre-planned pissing contest, create a killing field in Iraq and alter the most important elements of our DNA as Americans in the guise to protect us from people who would destroy all that we stand for as Americans.

The irony sickens me.

(originally uploaded by anotherview)

Times Herald-Record
We came, we saw, we made enemies
By Nicole Belle

[…]

Short version: Iraq wasn’t a terrorist threat when we attacked it; it is now because we did attack and botched the job so badly that terrorists are dying to go there and learn how to kill Americans anywhere. So the world is safe from Saddam (who was never a threat) but more vulnerable to terrorism, which (back to the beginning) was on the ropes in the early days in Afghanistan.

* * *

This NIC report, revealed this week in stories in The New York Times and Washington Post, is devastating to the Bush administration argument for continuing the fight in Iraq. John Negroponte, Bush’s national intelligence director and the boss of all 16 intelligence agencies, cautions not to form conclusions based solely on these news reports. There’s more to the assessment, he says, and many more judgments than the one linking the war to more terrorism. He says to do that would be a distortion.

Fine. Then release the 30-page National Intelligence Estimate for all Americans to read. Have congressional committees black out the really classified data, if necessary. But let us know what our intelligence agencies say firsthand, not what Bush decides to tell us they said. We’ve been here before, and there are now 2,600-plus reasons to doubt what the president says.

[…]

Someone, anyone, come up with a scenario for me where invading Iraq wouldn’t have created a similar state of affairs.

Take your time…

Now, it probably would’ve helped if we had taken this operation seriously and created a reconstruction plan before trucking into Iraq, but as Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently stated in the pre-war planning stages, “the American public will not back us if they think we are going over there for a long war.”

The result of such rhetoric, you ask?

Rumsfeld intimidated his planners out of creating any plans for reconstruction following the capture of Saddam — you know, these last 3 years come December.

Now we have jihadists and near enemy soldiers training and killing in the sandbox of our creation, using Iraqi citizens as pawns, targets and propaganda to rile up even more anti-American fury across the middle-east and the world.

But I digress…

Here are my three top reasons for why Iraq has become a hotbed of terrorist activity:

1. The Project For The New American Century
   If PNAC is the neoconservative playbook, this administration is an all-pro team for its execution. If I stumbled across this direct and coded language for the invasion of Iraq (and anywhere else for that matter) just ten days into the Iraq invasion, I’m betting that this document has been used by a few terrorists to up their enrollment prior to 9/11. And as soon as the invasion of Iraq was a sure bet, I’m guessing it became a major recruitment tool. The only reason I can come up with as to why (potential) leaders of this nation would publicize a document such as PNAC, is that they wanted the reality we now find ourselves knee-deep within and they needed their own recruitment stake-in-the-ground.
2. Poverty, Chaos And Fear: A Perfect Storm For Revenge
   If a child is killed in Iraq nowadays, we’re ultimately held responsible by his/her family. If a child’s father is killed, that child will most likely grow up with a propensity towards revenge. If a child’s uncle’s wedding is wiped out with a car bomb… well, you get the picture.
3. Let’s Talk About Sects, Baby
   Compare how much you know about, say, the Shia/Sunni relationship today with what you knew in 2003. You probably didn’t even know the names of any Islamic sects back then, right? And now I hope you realize that there is more internal conflict within Islam itself than with the West in general. Now realize that our government absolutely understood the issues between these sects — from their religous differences to their standing within the entire middle-east region to how they would respond to the overthrow of Saddam. I’m not cynical; if you believe we went in there without a clue, you’re only kidding yourself.

What are yours?