Roque Nuevo, that’s a good hearty laugh you have there. Which is a good thing, because the “your sarcasm bounces of me and sticks to you” attempt was rather lame.
The fascists states of past were not religious ones. While obviously religion was present, it was subverted and controlled by fascism, not the other way around.
What we are facing is theocratical Muslim states that may or may not have some trappings of a representative government, not authoritarian states that have some trappings of Islam.
And we can’t compare theocratical Christian states to theorcratical Muslim ones? Why not? Oh, right, I forgot. Christianity is automatically good and always has been and all ways will be.
However, I did thumb through the article you mentioned, and it appears that Algeria as described has elements of Nazism/fascism, however it appears that the most important entity in Algeria is Allah, not the State itself or a particular ethnic group. So what we get is theocratical tolitarianism, or perhaps fundamentalist tolitarianism.
As a practical matter, there probably isn’t much difference. A bullet to the back of the head is a bullet to the back of the head, after all.
Tom W.
“Wading through the approximately 9 million words you’ve written so far, I learn that you think the failures of the U.S. intelligence community were deliberate.
There were no intelligence failures, really. President’s Daily Briefing, August 6, 2001, for example. The FBI and the CIA concluded in Febuary 2001 that Al Qaeda was behind the USS Cole bombing. What’s-his-name, some guy from the Pentagon, flying down to Crawford to personally deliver a warning about Al Qaeda. The Minneapolis Field Office of the FBI finding and arresting Moussaoui, but an FBI lawyer named Marion “Spike” Bowman bungled the request for a search warrant for his rooms, and they weren’t searched until after 9/11.
There was spin and manipulation of good intelligence, repression of bad intelligence, and in at least one case a deliberate move to destroy a bearer of unwanted facts. Joe Wilson, specifically.
Remember that George Tenet was given Medal of Freedom when he retired. Why? He failed to disrupt the 9/11 attacks, although this may be due to a lack of guidence from the White House. However, he also failed on the question of the types, quantities, and locations of Iraqi WMDs.
If Bush gave him a MoF, then Bush is rewarding him for his performance. Which means that being “wrong” about 9/11 and/or Iraqi WMDs made Bush pleased. And why would falsely having an excuse to invade Iraq make Bush happy?
Marion “Spike” Bowman got a medal and a bonus, too, for “exceptional performance”, even though he gave the Mpls Field Office bad legal advice and didn’t pursue the warrant for Moussaoui’s room, which contained evidence of links to an Al-Qaeda financier and an Al-Qaeda boss that ran hijacking operations.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=marion_(_spike_)_bowman
The whole thing stinks to high heaven. Failures getting medals shoved up their butts. I mean, okay, they screwed up, and assuming it was accidental you just quietly put them out to pasture. But then giving them medals and bonuses and public congratulations???
