If It's An Election Year, Then It MUST Be Time For More Terror Alerts

Gee, where have we heard THIS before?

Is it any surprise we're hearing all this talk now of big, bad terror attacks planned soon - right now for Europe (Spain, etc.), but I'm sure we'll see this extended to us - when we have a presidential election come November? After all, they need to build up the case for supported "all war, all the time" guaranteed us by whatever GOP candidate rides into the Oval Office on the numbers from rigged electronic voting machines.

Perhaps you can spend your "huge" tax rebate check buying bullets for the Pentagon(again).

Maureen Dowd: "Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined To Strike In U.S."

Maureen lays it on the line, most ably (find the rest here at Pottersville):

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.

And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.

And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.

And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.

Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.

Last year, W. called his “personal friend” Gen. Pervez Musharraf “a strong defender of freedom.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be Al Qaeda’s freedom. The White House is pinning the blame on Pervez.

While the administration lavishes billions on Pakistan, including $750 million in a risible attempt to win “hearts and minds” in tribal areas where Al Qaeda leaders are hiding and training, President Musharraf has helped create a quiet mountain retreat, a veritable terrorism spa, for Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri to refresh themselves and get back in shape.

The administration’s most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now “be more likely to consider” attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to “put operatives here” — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and “acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks.”

(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)

After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama’s name, calling him “just a person who’s now been marginalized,” and adding “I just don’t spend that much time on him.”

This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America’s most determined enemy.

W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.

Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.

[...]W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”

Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.

If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

The rest is here.

Chertoff Gets Gas; America Foots "Security" Bill

So we went from Tom Ridge as secretary of Homeland Security spending billions to come up with a color-coded (and it was miscoded, actually) terror alert system that was held together with duct tape and chutzpah to Michael (Legion of Satan) Chertoff now putting us on alert because he has a "gut feeling" we're in for fresh terrorist attacks.

Yes, his gut feeling is that:

a) Bush wants to keep terrorizing the rest of the world and doesn't want to be told NO;
b) Bush wants to invade Iran now;
c) even rigged Republican-owned voting machines might not win the Repugs the 2008 presidential vote

Republican Leaders: Pray For Another Terrorist Attack On U.S. So We Can Win

I noticed some people - including at least a few Republicans I spoke with - were quite taken aback when the head of the Arkansas state GOP said the other day that (to paraphrase):

What we need in America is another September 11th, another horrific terrorist attack
on our home soil, because that is what the GOP needs to win all the seats it wants
in the 2008 presidential election.

Excuse me? Really? We need another 9-11-01?

Unbelievably, this Arkansas ass is hardly the first rightwinger to state something like this. There are an endless number of examples, almost all of which come from the far red right.

For example, Newt Gingrich (who remains an undeclared contender for the GOP race for President) said last summer that America needed to do whatever it could to help Israel turn the war they were waging on Lebanon (one often called a proxy war fought by Israel for America to put the fear of God into other Arab/Muslim heavy countries like Iran and Syria.

Specifically, Gingrich said (and I am not engaging in hyperbole) that it was in the very BEST interests of the GOP to help Israel morph the Lebanon situation into World War III SINCE Americans would flock to embrace Bush's war-as-the-answer-to-everything doctine as they did after 9-11. He said this publicly and repeatedly. Virtually none of the press called him on that, or demanded to know why taxpayer money and U.S. soldiers' lives were completely and utterly expendable so long as Republicans not only retained power, but they also got MORE power.

Sheik Mohammed And The Beheading of Journalist Daniel Pearl: How Do You Trust The Confessions Of The Tortured

Today, the Bushies purposely let slip that Sheikh Mohammed, whom we've had in custody for more than a few years and whom we apparently torture on a near daily basis (Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld both noted he was an excellent candidate for "waterboarding" torture to find the truth, has claimed he was responsible for the kidnapping and videotaped execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl. They also claim he's admitted to being one of the masterminds behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Reports AP:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's capture four years ago didn't shut down al-Qaida or bring the Americans to Osama bin Laden. But if his mega-confession is to be believed, his arrest was a crushing blow to bin Laden's plans for even more deadly attacks in the wake of 9/11.

But after more than four years in custody, and exposed to torture-torture-torture, how can we be sure what he really did or didn't do? That's one of the huge problems with torture; the information you get is notoriously unreliable. I don't buy that these admissions are true when they were elicited so very long after his capture.

Actually, I can say that there have been at least four or five separate statements/alerts offered up by Sheikh Mohammed in the past that turned out to be completely false, including some of the silliest possible attack on America scenarios. Yet now, the Bushies insist we believe him. Right.

Protein Psycho: What Happens When (If) America Suffers a Successful WMD Attack

The ever-sharp Cernig of Cernig's Newshog points us to Protein Wisdom's thoughts on what we'll see should a terrorist group (other than the Bushies, America's biggest terror organization?) succeed in launching a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attack on our homeland (9-11 was NOT that; a major WMD attack would be huge orders of magnitude worse - and you know how scary our own country, in its hate and vengeance mindset, was after 9-11):

Protein Wisdom's "Bravo Romeo Delta" on what happens if (he writes "when") a terrorist group ever succeeds in a WMD attack on the US (graphics - the infamous pic of a naked, crying Vietnamese girl running down a road placed next to a pic of people fleeing the fall of the Twin Towers):

When we respond to the Big Terrorist Attack with a vengeance it’s not going to be the more familiar kind of rage that occasionally marks human affairs, because it will pop this boil and it’s going to be messy and foul. Our response will, at least viscerally, be a lot more like one of those very strange temper-tantrums that children occasionally have in which they exhibit hysteric, almost superhuman strength; the kind of apocalyptic anger where it takes four adults to wrestle down an uncontrollable, teary-eyed fury, a runny-nosed rage which has taken the form of a very hurt, very angry 8 year old kid. But make no mistake – it won’t be a childish response and won’t be amenable to ice cream or spanking.

...The rest of the world will gasp in horror at the terrorist attack, and shed its tears, and then give us the nod to retaliate. And we will. Again. And again. And again. And the rest of the world will start to look on in amazement and slowly, slowly turn away in abject shock and profound horror. We will make Curtis Lemay’s application of airpower against civilian targets look like Wesley Clark coordinating with NATO allies in the Kosovo Air War.

Our appetite for blood will be nigh well unquenchable. That’s what will kill us. We will drink and drink until we’re full and it won’t slake our thirst. And we’ll drink more until our organs burst and split and we start to hemorrhage internally. Then we’ll start throwing it all up – every last drop we drank. But because we’re bleeding internally now, we’ll continue to vomit up black blood until we die.

I agree with Cernig: you really should read the whole thing here at Protein Wisdom.