Friday, October 19, 2007

Quote Miners for 9/11 Truth

One thing that continually amazes me about the truthers is that they continue to lie and misrepresent things, even when they don't really need to. I guess they are so fixated on their goal of defeating their supposed enemies, that the ends really matter, not the means. One example is this post on 911 Blogger regarding a speech Paul Wolfowitz made to a West Point class in June 2001, under the headline, "101 Days Before 9/11: Paul Wolfowitz Hints At Our Future And His"

"This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of a military disaster whose name has become synonymous with surprise - the attack on Pearl Harbor ... military history is full of surprises ... Surprise happens so often that it’s surprising that we’re still surprised by it ... At the beginning of the last century, the British economist Norman Angell published a runaway best seller ... his book, The Great Illusion. International finance, he argued, had become so interdependent and so interwoven with trade and industry that it had rendered war unprofitable ... 'Before you leave the Army … you will be engaged in another war.'"

Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz - West Point Commencement - June 2, 2001


The implication being that Wolfowitz had some sort of inside knowledge of the cadets being "engaged in another war".

If you look closely though, you will find two sets of quotation marks, in fact, these aren't Wolfowitz's words, he is quoting someone, from 1903:

A century ago, on a peaceful day in 1903, with great foresight, Secretary of War Elihu Root told Douglas MacArthur’s graduating class, "Before you leave the Army…you will be engaged in another war. It is bound to come, and will come. Prepare your country."

Now Wolfowitz does go on to say that "One day, you too you will be tested in combat", but this is hardly an ominous prediction, on the contrary it is something we would expect an assistant Secretary of Defense to say, especially given the numerous times that Army soldiers have found themselves in combat situations over the previous twenty years, Panama, Desert Storm and Somalia coming to mind immediately.