You miss my point entirely. I make no claim the US knows where bin Laden is. There are folks out there with a lot of evidence that the FAA allowed flights out of the US for members of the bin Laden family, even while they were gorunding all US planes, but I am not one of those people, I don't know that it's significant that those family members allegedly went to Saudi Arabia, and I make no claims along those lines.
All I'm saying is the US demanded that the Taliban turn over bin Laden. the Taliban said "We don't have bin Laden." The US used this as a pretext to bomb and invade Afghantistan. Eight months later they officially declared that Al Qaeda and Afghanistan were probably behind the 9-11 attacks. Eight months later they still had not found the pretext for the attack, bin Laden.
The US also claimed that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction. Iraq said "We have no WMD." The US used this as a pretext to bomb and ivade Iraq, and in every other speech (or more, I didn't count) Bush would say "September 11th" when talking about the completely unrelated topic of Saddam Hussein. Two years later, they have still not found the very pretext for the attack, these WMD.
My statement "The US will find bin Laden when they want to" has to do with the fact that they knew damn well they'd never find him in Afghanistan, just as they knew they'd never find WMD in Iraq. I think we all know they need to look in Saudi Arabia, that Saudis were behind the attacks of September 11th (the majority of the terrorists are known to have flown in FROM Saudi Arabia, despite the current popular myth that there were Iraqis among them). The US isn't ready to get into such hot water as that. Iraq was a test case to see how far they could go in declaring war for no reason, and it's gone ok. The pretext even holds up, as a good number of US citizens still believe that Iraq was planning a big terrorist event in the US, sometime soon, with those WMD that we now know they were *capable* of building, even if they hadn't actually built them yet.
Anyway, as to who holds the rights to RED ZONE CUBA, I'll get back to you on that
Like you say, this is way off the topic of STAR WARS, and I may agree that the Emperor was just fine as a mysterious shadow figure in EMPIRE. And a a Sith-thingy of some kind. Sure sure. I just don't think he was used best in JEDI.
This post has been edited by civilian_number_two: 24 April 2004 - 04:13 AM