Originally posted by qtiger
Let us dissect the statement piece by piece
- Our intelligence agencies - Subject
- meet - Verb
- with rebel groups - Object
- who support our cause - Object modifier
- (free trade, not democracy) - Side note which modifies "our cause"
- all the time. - Parameters for verb.
Let us examine a similar sentence: Dick runs with his dog (who is white) on tuesdays. While tricky, after careful scrutiny you may notice that Dick runs with his dog who is white, and does not run with his dog because he is white. I believe this is where you became confused. You see, the side note is modifying the object of the sentence - which happens to be immediately previous to the side note - instead of magically changing the meaning of the entire sentence in ways I cannot comprehend.
This second sentence clearly states that the actions performed during the meeting cannot be clearly determined given the above data, in direct contradiction to the meaning you and Houdini revealed within my crazy statement, which had been heretofore concealed from even myself.
Hopefully this handy guide will help you properly read English in the future.
Thanks for the English lesson. I got all that the first time you wrote it. Your side note defined what "our cause" was, "free trade, and not democracy". So what I understood as what you were saying is that the meetings with Muhammed Atta could have been about anything, not just terrorist related activities. But it is ironic that Iraqs intelligence agencies met three times with a man that would eventually fly one of our planes into one of our buildings. And if you had read the article in the NY Post you would see that there are many other things that Iraq and Al Quaida were doing together, such as setting up training camps and sleeper sells to fight the Americans.
You do not need to be Houdini to figure out what the meetings with Atta were probably about.
Oh and I am sorry that you could not pick up on my sarcasm in that post. I thought it was laid on pretty thick. Next time I will place it inside some brackets suchs as <sarcasm> </sarcasm>