Turns out, according to the Washington Post, the information on which the latest terrorist scare is based is two to three years old. It was sold to the American public initially as if it were a brand-new discovery. It seems that the Bush administration is unable to level with the American people about anything.
So once again, Dr. Howard Dean’s instincts are correct – there is definitely a smell of politics about the latest warning of an attack. Karl Rove, the puppet master, must get a big kick out of manipulating the American public and the corporate media – who, like the lap dogs they are, talk endlessly about whatever talking point Rove and his crew slip under their doors.
Hey, people seem to be paying too much attention to John Kerry, so let’s give them something else to think about. Let’s use the old stuff found in some terrorist’s computer to get folks all excited about an imminent attack.
What a game. This election is going to be test of American gullibility. You would have to be gullible to think a guy who hid out in the Texas National Guard (George Bush) and a draft dodger (Dick Cheney) are better able to command in a war than a person who actually fought in a war and earned the Silver Star. The Silver Star is no Cracker Jack prize.
And the notion that Bush has been successful in the war on terrorism is laughable. This guy presided over the two largest failures of intelligence in American history, and he did nothing except to insist that he had good intelligence. As for his claimed successes in preventing other terrorist acts, that’s the same old line of baloney the Central Intelligence Agency has been using for years. “Well, you know about our failures, but we’ve had all these successes, only they are all classified and we can’t tell you anything about them.” Yeah. Sure. And Paris Hilton is an intellectual.
Just as every Palestinian who is shot by the Israelis is a “militant,” even if he’s only 4 years old, every terrorist captured by a foreign country is an al-Qaida “leader.” Apparently, al-Qaida is all leaders and no followers, but just as apparently, we don’t seem able to find its real leaders. We have been looking for a 6-foot-6-inch guy in a country of short people for more than three years and have yet to glimpse him except on the television tapes he releases.
Of course, we’ll be hit again by terrorists, but that could be months or years away. They choose the time and place, and using Patrick Henry’s famous lamp of the past to light the future, it will likely be in a place and in a manner we don’t expect. The terrorists are not stupid. They know they can cost us millions of dollars just by adding a little chatter to the channels we monitor.
But you might as well get used to the occasional terrorist act. Our so-called war on terrorism is caused by our foreign policy, and Bush refuses to admit that, even though everybody from Osama bin Laden to the Middle East experts not on the Israeli payroll have been telling him that for three straight years.
We need to get our troops out of Islam’s holy places, and we need to fashion a policy that is fair and just in regard to the Palestinians. Until we do that, the war will go on indefinitely. And if the present administration is re-elected, it will probably get a lot worse, because those people are world-class blunderers. God only knows what other stupid tricks they will pull if they get to stay four more years.
The Bush administration is a collection of ideologues and empty suits. Even Bush’s alleged support for an intelligence director is misleading. Bush wants a guy with absolutely no power. That’s not what the commission recommends. Without the power to control the budgets and to direct the resources of the various intelligence agencies, a new “intelligence czar” would just be another public-relations gimmick. And public-relations gimmick is the sum total of the Bush administration.
