response to Mike Eisenstadt's critique

[Joseph H. Rowe]

>
>I wouldnt take what Joe Rowe forwarded very seriously. The
>Figaro is not itself a very serious newspaper and the notion
>that Osama would check in to the American Hospital in Dubai
>for a procedure last summer beggars belief. At least my belief.

>Mike Eisenstadt

	Mike, I'm not sure what your criteria for a "serious:" newspaper
are. Le Figaro is one of the top establishment dailies in France, and
whether or not you agree with its politics (which I generally don't), it is
at least as "serious" a paper as any big American daily owned by a giant
media corporation. It has a highly professional staff of international
correspondents and reporters. Major writers have occasionally written
articles for it, including Jean Paulhan, Andr=E9 Malraux, and others.
	Le Figaro can be criticized for many things, but it is absolutely
not a scandal-sheet or sensationalist tabloid, as you seem to insinuate.
And if you suppose for one moment that the TOTAL BLACKOUT of this story  in
the mainstream American press is due to the wise discrimination of
American editors, who agree with you that Le Figaro is "not serious" (and
their rags supposedly are!), then either you are incredibly naive --- which
I know not to be the case --- or else you are  rationalizing your own
reluctance to admit that you, too, mon cher ami, are capable of  being
misled and fooled by the American media. I say this because you curiously
had nothing at all to say about the essay's _other_  important evidence
that the CIA had ample, serious warnings about an impending suicide
airliner attack, and did nothing about it. This evidence is thoroughly
documented, and there is even more of it at the  websites mentioned. This
would support the thesis that the CIA was uninterested in going after bin
Laden until the time was "right" ----  whether or not Le Figaro's source
turns out to be reliable.
	I personally don't believe in an active conspiracy, but the
evidence seems to indicate a passive one: "OK, if those damn democrats
won't give us a proper military budget, we'll let them find out what
terrorism is really all about!" Nevertheless, such a passive conspiracy
would be almost as heinous and criminal as an active one, at least in my
system of ethics. If such a conspiracy of deliberate negligence does exist,
as the evidence suggests, then it has certainly achieved its objective, in
spades: a blank check from terrified taxpayers to the military-industrial
complex,  a devaluing of dissent and civil rights, and a very promising
replacement for the Cold War.
	I recommend that you (or any other reader of this) visit the
website http://www.copvcia.com and inform yourself, before engaing in more
polemics about a whole area of current events of which you are bound to be
ignorant, if you depend only on the likes of the New York Times, the
Washington Post, CBS, NBC, NPR, PBS, etc, etc..... to find out about
current events.


Joseph

Joseph Rowe
chez Arcosud
1, rue Constance, code porte 0118
75018 Paris, France

tel. (331) 42 55 18 92