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Comment by arprocter | Hacker News Reader

I interpreted what you quoted as a sly nod towards the Saudis, but maybe GP can clarify

Yeah that's what I was referring to.

The whole Al Qaida thing is murky with CIA engineering and scapegoating. Maybe I sound like a conspiracy theorist, I don't know. They were a pretty convenient foil for us to invade a whole bunch of countries that we had no business invading.

Dude, I think it is great you have left the army. I offer you another anecdata :

I have an American friend here in Groningen ( NL ) who has been living here for about 30 years now.

In the eighties he was stationed in Germany. Due to the thawing relationship between the US and the USSR a meet and greet between Russian and American soldiers was organised. He discovered they were ordinary guys, not monsters. They talked intelligence : both groups had knowledge about weapon systems of their enemies.

It opened his eyes, he left the army and stayed in our beautiful city.

The cold war too, was just 'a story line'.

This is a false equivalence. Yes, the individual soldiers shared commonality. But your implication that the Cold War was just a story line doesn't align with the facts. Read Solzhenitsyn. Look into Hungary 1956, Prague in 1968. To dismiss the Cold War as just a "story line" is the shallowest of arguments that flies in the face of history.

It's hard to develop a coherent picture when operations are shrouded in secrecy and, in some cases, covered by multiple outright deceptions. Sometimes all you're left with is speculation, and I don't begrudge anyone who tries to makes sense of it. The trend towards leaking in the information age is turning many conspiracy theories into facts.

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