Rumsfeld's Appearance

I'll give Mr. Rumsfeld credit for at least appearing in public before the 9/11 panel today. That's more than can be said for Bush or Condi.

But when he said today that killing Osama bin Laden before 9/11 certainly would not have prevented 9/11, I found myself both in agreement as well as asking this question: So why the hell was it so important to spend about a billion dollars a day bombing the hell out of Afghanistan immediately after 9/11?

I mean, the Taliban is back. Al Qaeda's still around. So's Osama and al Zawahiri. More than 200 people are dead in Spain in just the past two weeks.

It's legitimate at this point to ask: what exactly is the War on Terror doing besides making Halliburton, Bechtel, and many other friends of the Bush-Cheney team very, very, very rich and even more powerful?