by Pazmaker » Tue Sep 12, 2006 10:34 pm
Great link dugoboy!<br><br>I particularly liked:<br><br><br>"I have in the book a quote from a leading official in charge of helping the community of scientists to become involved in the War on Terror, and to change their research, and to apply for grants. I asked this person in front of an audience in 2004 to place the War on Terror on a continuum of seriousness. "If the Manhattan Project were a 10 on a scale of 1 to 10, in which the government knew the Nazis were trying to get a bomb and we wanted to give the scientific community all the resources it needed to solve that problem. That's a 10 -- a super-serious, absolutely real problem and treated seriously by the government as such. On on the other side of the continuum is a 1, where the problem said to exist doesn't exist at all, though it's politically super-convenient to say so -- in other words, 'wag the dog.' In that case there is a war said to be going on when there really is no war." So I asked, on this continuum, where is the War on Terror?" This is a person responsible for helping get people involved in it. "On a scale of 1 to 10, is it near the Manhattan Project or Wag the Dog?" He said, "I can't answer that in public." I asked him in private and he said, "Somewhere between 1 and 1.5." So, it's not as if inside the government what I'm saying is not known, it is just that no one in the bureaucracy can say that publicly. Fighting the War on Terror is now the criterion by which every department has to get more funds, by saying it's important for the War on Terror. And we saw with Katrina, and we saw with the Iraq war, how the top echelons can cook evidence and twist organizations and bureaucracies so that even professionals who have their hearts and their heads in the right places cannot push the country in the right direction."<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
