Again... I'm just going to throw this one out there...
This guy is crazy, and it's definately not quoted off of an government website:
I fail to see your point, how does that have any bearing on the chemtrail nuts who threaten violence.
In any case I think Bill Cohen's assessment of the possibilities of the terrorists developing EM wave weapons in 1997 proved to be just a bit optimistic. 15 years on and we have no more evidence now then we did then of there existence or development. Also if you read the sentence in context he was talking about them being "engaged" in trying to develop such weapons back as 1997 not actually using them, yet from that time to today there has not been one shred of evidence to support that such weapons were ever successfully developed.
I don't think Secretary Cohen is/was crazy, I think he was a sharp politician who was playing to the crowd, which happened to be the
"Conference on Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and U.S. Strategy at the Georgia Center, Mahler Auditorium, University of Georgia, Athens, Ga. The event is part of the Sam Nunn Policy Forum being hosted by the University of Georgia. Secretary Cohen is joined by Sen. Sam Nunn and Sen. Richard G. Lugar."
He's a politician, it was a political event, and he was doing what good obedient political appointees do best, trying to win support for the policies of the President who appointed him. And now I'm pushing the boundary of rule 14 so I'll shut up about Bill Cohen.
Bottom line; just because someone holds a White House cabinet position does not mean there opinions are infallible. Just because something is written on a .gov website doesn't mean it's true. Isn't it the chemtrail nuts themselves who constantly proclaim that the government is lying and intentionally misleading us?
Do I believe the government hides stuff from the public? Of course they do, just look at half the documents people get from FOIA with half the page blacked out. But here we have people taking a perfectly natural and well documented and understood phenomenon like contrails, and trying to twist and obfuscate it enough to fit some conspiracy theory.
That is 180° from the scientific method, they are trying to change the facts, ( ignoring 70 years of science on the topic) to fit their hypothesis, instead of changing their hypothesis to fit the facts.
I believe in Occam's Razor.
Occam's razor, also known as Ockham's razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness), is a principle that generally recommends that, from among competing hypotheses, selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions usually provides the correct one, and that the simplest explanation will be the most plausible until evidence is presented to prove it false.