Sofia wrote:nimh wrote--
MJ wrote: it is a "well-established fact" that there was no link; Sofia wrote back, prove it.
...when the fact is MJ had asserted it was a well-established fact that al-Quaida did not fly the planes...
Whoa ...
<looks it up>
<mutters something along the lines of, "that cant be ..">
<looks up all the posts in question again>
<swallows hard>
Well.
It seems like i owe some people some apologies here.
Foremost you, Sofia.
<shakes head>.
I must have been even more confused last week than i already thought. I apparently succeeded in momentarily afflicting myself with a very specific mental block. To be more precise, it seems that, reading your and MJ's posts, and writing my own responses, I've consistently blinked out one word and mentally replaced it with another - which turned all my remarks into gibberish.
That is, it seems i've been playing a whole lot of articulate, passionate debate about something that - never was said in the first place.
See ... to explain ... i must have misread (to just pick a random understatement).
mamajuana wrote:In the first place, it has been already well established that Al Queda didn't fly the planes into the WTC - it was the Saudis.
and you wrote:MJ-- Your statement that it has been well-established that al-Quaida didn't fly the planes into the WTC... Link please? Mohammad Atta has been linked to al-Quaida. Don't think he's the only one.
And then i picked up on that latter quote - took it, and ran with it a long way, to lecture you all about how mama was WELL right to insist that it was "well-established" that there was no link between the WTC attacks and ......... Saddam's Iraq.
Which is - obviously -
not what she'd said - and not what you'd questioned (here).
So
all of my subsequent posts were fighting out a kind of 'ghost war'; - arguing and proving that one would be
well justified in concluding that it's been well-established, thus far, that Saddam wasn't involved - and that it was thus pretty irresponsible for a public official in Cheney's position to keep suggesting there was a link when he didnt have any new evidence to bring - et cetera et cetera.
All points that I do (still) mean, most passionately - but that concern something
you hadnt been talking about, in the first place.
Dunno what it was. Perhaps I
really didnt expect anyone (that I usually agree with) to say
Al-Qaeda was not connnected to 9/11. While I was fully focused on the ongoing discussion about
Iraq not being connected to 9/11. So I just saw what I expected to see: MJ saying that Saddam wasnt involved, you asking for proof that he wasnt. The coincidence about Atta being the man who fulfills a key role in the Iraq-link discussion, too, must have facilitated my mental "find and replace" job on Al-Qaeda/Iraq, as well.
Still, its baffling, and more than a little embarassing <nods>.
I mean, some of my posts were just sheer gobbledygook!
Gobbledygook because I would copy-paste the statements the two of you made about the Al-Qaeda link, and then argue them as if they were about the Saddam-link.
In
this post, for example, I wrote (note emphasis), "Concerning the Atta /
Iraq link - Cheney mentioned it in his speech, I believe. Below are two of the comments that provoked in the media. I've never heard of any of the other hijackers being linked to
Al-Qaeda, link would be appreciated." - and then proceeded with two quotes that showed how the
Iraq link to the hijackers should be considered as having been put to rest. Replace "Al-Qaeda" in this paragraph, and the post makes perfect sense - about the Iraq link, that is - which, again, though, hadnt actually been what you'd been talking about.
I repeated the same ****-up in
this post -
four times.
No less than four times in that post I wrote "Al-Qaeda" when I meant "Iraq" - as in,
"- No other hijacker apart from Atta has been linked by anyone to Al-Qaeda" and
"Atta has been linked to Al-Qaeda by government claims that come down to him having met an Al-Qaeda operative in Prague [but] concerning this claim, we know the following [..]" and
"I think that MJ could make a pretty feasible case with the above information that the negation of every link thus far made between Al-Qaeda and 9/11 has been pretty "well established".".
If, in those sentences, you replace the dark red "Al-Qaeda"'s by "Iraq(i)", the post makes perfect sense again. Except, again, of course, that it makes perfect sense as a post that lectures you about the lacking evidence about suggested Saddam-911 claims - when neither you nor MJ had been talking about that in the first place. And as it stands now, its just gobbledygook.
<shakes head>
And I just went on and on, too ... digging myself into an ever deeper hole. In
this post, for example. Again - do a find/replace and replace every "Al-Qaeda" by "Iraq/Saddam" and the post makes sense again, though about the wrong topic. And in
this post at least I get it all correct - though
still on the topic you hadnt been talking about.
Actually, I find all of this really troubling - especially cause I kept on doing it, post after post after post. As if some connection in my head's machine just wasnt working. That is ... really troubling <nods>.
(And nobody went - "nimh! what the f* are you talking about! you're not making sense!" ... ??).
Anyway, back to you - and the rest of y'all posters whom I confused ... A mistake like this would have been embarassing enough in any situation, but in this case I might have added aggravation at a very sad moment.
I'm sorry.
