* Jeff Miller
* Allison Krause
* William Schroeder
* Sandy Scheuer

Also in our thoughts: Joe Lewis, John Cleary, Tom Grace, Alan Canfora, Dean Kahler, Doug Wrentmore, Jim Russell, Bob Stamps, Don MacKenzie.

Wondering About OBL

I've always wondered if Osama Bin Laden was really the force behind the 9/11 attacks. They came up with his name so quickly, and there never has been any real explanation as to how they came up with his name. He was a former CIA employee, GHW Bush having formerly run the CIA, and a member of the Bin Laden family, who celebrated holidays with Dubya, calling him "Uncle George." The security contract on the World Trade Center expired the day before the attacks, and the company that lost the contract was Neil Bush's.

That doesn't mean OBL wasn't the bad guy he was made out to be. It simply means that nobody ever bothered to present the evidence against him, and so the possibility exists that he was just a scapegoat.

And now, we'll never know. There's a British newspaper that claims that OBL was killed years ago, and this operation was intended to put paid to the legend of OBL. Or maybe the stories are right, and we gunned down an unarmed man.

A Skeptic, Not A Denier

The official version of events may well be correct, but the principle of Occam's Razor - that the simplest explanation is the best - doesn't favor it over the conspiracy theory, and it should.

Oh, well.

It wasn't the fact that the government was stupid on May 4. Governments always do stupid things; all large organizations do. And small organizations, too, although they are less obvious to the general public.

Unintended Consequences

They ended student deferments, and went to a lottery system. A number of students with low lottery numbers opted to join the National Guard. They'd barely had any training at all when they were ordered to campus. Some say that an officer ordered his men to fire; others say that his hand motions were misinterpreted. In any case, kids emerging from buildings, not demonstrators, but simply kids rushing from one class to another, were shot, with four of them dying and another nine wounded.

Handing live ammunition to a rabble of untrained soldiers and expecting them to behave appropriately is stupid. They should have had shields and billy clubs. You can kill someone with a billy, but you're less likely to do so. More important, you're only likely to kill someone you're actually trying to attack. The four that died were hit by accident. They were in the background when the troops shot at someone else and missed.

They Deserved It

What shocked me was that nobody had compassion for the families of these victims. They shouldn't have been there, was the most common response I heard. Yeah? College costs a bundle. It costs as much to sit in a classroom as to have a mechanic work on your car. You don't want to skip your classes.

But the average person thought that when the National Guard hit town to protect them, that students should have abandoned their studies, forfeiting a semester's tuition, losing a year of their life instead of expecting that the government troops were there to protect well-behaved students.

I Didn't Know

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming; we're finally on our own. This summer, I hear the drumming....

I didn't know any of the dead students. I didn't know any of the wounded students. I knew a couple of the students who had joined the Guard. Bought them a beer. When you're in a group that kills multiple innocent and responsible kids, it takes a lot of beer to wash off the blood. Last time I talked to one of them, he said there were still blood stains on his soul.

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
Allison Krause - CIA - conspiracy - Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young - Dubya - GHW Bush - Jeff Miller - National Guard - Occam's Razor - Osama Bin Laden - Sandy Scheuer - student protests - William Schroeder - World Trade Center