Show of Hands

BTW Bush sucks too

Well then there you have it.

Silly

Yeah, it's a line item in the budget.
:-/

You think 100 guys are fighting civil wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Algeria, Somalia, the Philippines and Egypt?

Try again.

How about you do some research.

I've been face to face with more than 100 of them. Lol

In 2010 Intel Officials estimated there were less than 500, that was before Osama was killed and they somewhat "disbanded". There is a difference between terrorists and Al Qaeda

There are other groups in the Middle East fighting our troops but I can assure you there are much less al Qaeda member than what the media has you believe.

According to a recent CNN article. There are over 3000 trained al Qaeda fighters in Iraq alone.

You do realize that Al Qaeda is an international confederation of militant Sunni jihadist fighters, right?

I'd love to know how they got that number. What'd they do, send out a survey asking if the respondent was an active member of a terrorist organization?

Rosebud
It's from the AP. Not sure where they got the number but I don't distrust it.

I don't think a secretive terrorist organization is something you can count the members of. They probably don't even know how many of them there are, how could anyone else accurately guess?

Rosebud
By tracking troop movement. Using military intelligence and recon missions. In the end it will be a guess but the military is pretty good at doing this and they have been doing it a long time.

Troop movements? Lol

What does an AQ member look like? Every other Arab guy in the whole world.

ScrewU
Nice profile pic, but obvious never in the military.

You do realize that all mainstream news corps have been caught lying on multiple occasions. And workers have been fired for trying to uncover the truth. They tell you what they want you to hear, nothing more.

They purposely mislead you to see things from their point of view, that's why you need to do your own research on all topics you see on tv because chances are what you're seeing is only half of the truth.

Bad.
Show me what you have on this subject.

Dude, 150 AQ operatives were broken out of an Iraqi prison a couple of months ago, and that AQ almost took over Mali.

Jun 27, 2010 CIA director Leon Panetta "there are at most 50-100 Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan" and your telling me they're more powerful now than they were when Osama was still alive?

Bad
3 years ago!?

That's the great thing about being a stateless army. You can just pack up and leave when someone with big guns comes to town. There international leadership is definitely in disarray, but they are still thriving in certain locales.

@swj read the last part of my last comment. What I'm saying is if they were stronger then why would they have so many more active members now?

He was referring to Iraq, not Afghanistan. Like I said, AQ is more like a confederation, so targeting international leadership and specific locations doesn't do as much damage as you would think. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's regime did a decent job...

Minimizing AQ's influence. The new regime is not nearly as effective.

They broke more than 2,000 guys out of prison alone last year.

Exactly. Threat to the Shii-dominated Iraqi govt, which is closely tied to Iran (and supporting the Syrian govt in its civil war).

And Bush's. We shouldn't have strived to take on world Islamic terrorists in the first place.

You do know that being the big guy in the office means you get blamed for stuff, right?

Whether or not it is justified? Yes I guess you have a point there. Comes with the job.

But it goes back to the days when we overthrew the democratic government of Iran and installed the shah.

Because you believed the media that Iraq was a fake war etc? Perhaps?

Hussein's regime was Shia. Al Qaeda is a Sunni organization. Those guys hate each other almost as much as they hate the Jews. We went there so we could eliminate the threat that was keeping our troops in Saudi Arabia. The US' occupation of Saudi...

Arabia is one of the things that pissed off Bin Laden in the first place.

Then let the Middle East eat itself in whatever bloodshed it chooses. I don't care.

I am glad to see that we are apprehending instead of droning more terrorist leaders in order to gain information about future attacks.

ال قاعدة

I'm scared to translate this... SOHNSA could be watching!

It's also a colloquialism for the toilet. Not too scary now, eh?

I google translated it and got the base, and clicked on the do you mean word and came up Qaeda

That's because Al Qaeda directly translates to the base.

Since we were correcting spelling I thought I'd do it completely right ;)