Another Date That Will Live in Infamy

Let history show that on September 9, 2009, this country and everything it stands for was brutally and verbally attacked by radical terrorists whose visceral hate for Americans knows no bounds, and who have infiltrated every level of government. Although the hand of peace has been repeatedly offered to these people, they have now proven they have no sense of human decency and cannot be reasoned with. In order to prevent future attacks on our soil, we must not rest until they are rooted out and brought to justice, wherever we find them.

I'm Not Sure They Thought This Through Beforehand

While there is still some hysterical hyperventilation on the right over the "First Terrorist Attack Since 9/11", they seem to have dialed it back some as of this morning. Which is so unlike them.

And I can't help but wonder if maybe it was because the guy used a gun.

If a few angry losers want to kill people, they're not going to get it done with whacked-out plots to blow up Sears Tower or the Brooklyn Bridge. They can get it done using guns. Thanks to the extraordinarily lax gun laws in most states in this country, they can kill a whole lot of people with guns.

(In the case of George Tiller, of course, they didn't have to kill a lot of people; one was enough to make their point.)

Pointing that out--as they do, inadvertently, when they call the murder of Private William Long "terrorism"--does not serve the interests of the gun fetishists.

QOTD: Do Ask Do Tell Edition

Richard Clark in this morning's Washington Post:

[T]he decisions that Bush officials made in the [post-9/11] months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election.... [emphasis added]

The rest is history.

[Edited title.]

Follow the Motive

Besides What Steve Said about Said Ali al-Shihri, the former Guantanamo detainee who is now an al Qaeda leader, I want to highlight a portion of the story that isn't getting the emphasis it should.

My first reaction on hearing about it was, 'who leaked this'? The timing struck me as a little too convenient, coming on the heels of Obama's executive order on Guantanamo. The answer is in the story:

His status was announced in an Internet statement by the militant group and was confirmed by an American counterterrorism official. [emphasis added]

There it is: it comes from al Qaeda. They may or may not have posted it after Obama's executive order (none of the stories is any more specific than 'this week'), but at the very least it coincides with the arrival of a new President who has consistently said he plans to close Guantanamo.

'Coincides.' Right.

So it seems to me the big story here is not that one former Guantanamo detainee joined al Qaeda (whether because the administration blew it in the first place, or because he was radicalized by the Guantanamo experience, or maybe both); the big story is that al Qaeda is trying to sabotage efforts to close Guantanamo.

What does that tell you?

As Robert Gibbs said, Thursday's executive orders "made America safer, made America stronger." Guantanamo has made us less safe, not more; if you don't believe me, just ask al Qaeda.

Things Look Different From the Top

I know we're kind of a laid back blog site but this story is really an important one. I found it over at War and Piece, Laura Rozen's journalistic site, but I would have encountered it eventually because I know people who work for BAE and I was just talking to a Channel Four newscaster (hello Jon! If you are bored in Iraq and surfing the web!) about them. In a Nutshell, this is the story of how politics and political decisions really get made up at the top. When a bribery and military industrial complex scandal got too close to the House of Saud, they literally blackmailed the Prime Minister of England into dropping the case using the threat of major terrorism against an English city.

People have written a lot of silly stuff about what they would have done if they'd been, for example, HRC in the run up to the AUMF and what they think Obama will or won't do when he gets into power (g-d willing.) I've tried to point out something that democrats and the man on the street just don't seem to get--power and danger look differently to you when you are at the top of the power pyramid and not at the bottom. I have no doubt that on Obama's first day in office he will be shown, by some cabal of *&^% wise men that includes the corpses of Kissinger, Negroponte, and a host of the other undead militarists, jingoists, baby rapers, nun torturers, clapped out whores of the carlysle group and pimped up blackwell mercenaries a series of paper threats that will be a combination of true and untrue, very serious and utterly spurious. And Obama is going to have to sort them out and take the chance that he is wrong on some big thing even if he is right on a host of little things. None of us know what he will do. And for darn sure none of us know what we would do if we aren't strong enough to keep the cockroaches from the oval office in the first place.
aimai

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid. Or Not.

John Tierney continues his crusade to minimize global warming with a column titled In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm :

I’d like to wish you a happy New Year, but I’m afraid I have a different sort of prediction.

You’re in for very bad weather. In 2008, your television will bring you image after frightening image of natural havoc linked to global warming. You will be told that such bizarre weather must be a sign of dangerous climate change — and that these images are a mere preview of what’s in store unless we act quickly to cool the planet....

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade”....The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear.

Naturally, this gets its share of links from the wingnuts. Blue Crab Boulevard castigates "global warming hysterics"; hysterics about Iran and IslamoLiberal Terra are perfectly okay. Newsbusters slams the Lieberal Em-Ess-Em for global warming "alarmism"...and for failing to be alarmist about Iran and terrists under our beds within our borders. A. J. Strata is dismayed at "another year of 'The Sky Is Falling'"...even as he warns of imminent sky-type descent from Iran and U.S.-based terrists.

Where Terra is concerned, we have nothing to fear but not enough fear itself. Catastrophic climate change--not so much.

Just to be clear, I'm not slamming Tierney for that. He's a hack, and aggressively stupid about some things (like global warming), but to his credit he has tried to put terrorism in perspective (and from today's article: "we overestimate the odds of dying in a terrorist attack or a plane crash because we’ve seen such dramatic deaths so often on television").

It's the reflexive wingnuts I'm talking about--the ones who judge truth or falsehood solely on the basis of party/ideological/tribal affiliation. Little things like the relative likelihood and magnitude of impact don't matter; what matters is that Al Gore warns of one peril (so it's just hysteria), and George Bush harps on the other (so it's the Ultimate X-Treem Clash Of Civilization-Type Armageddoniffic Danger! Danger! Danger!).

What a bunch of useless tools.

How I Learned to Start Worrying...

With the Prezdint invoking images of nuclear holocaust and B-52s with nuclear warheads flying overhead, this might be the week to dig up Dr. Strangelove (full title: Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) and watch it, especially if you've never seen it, and maybe even if you have.

The dark humor of this film was at least partly derived from the possibility that the plot's bizarre scenario could actually play out in reality. For anyone who hasn't seen it, a B-52 with a nuclear warhead is sent on its mission, when the zany (but plausible) sequence of events brings the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. to the brink, and can't be called back. The context back then was that Mutually Assured Destruction (M.A.D., doncha love it?) was the policy of the time. Except for the fictitious "Doomsday Machine", everything referenced in the film, from the B-52s to the "red phone" and the drunken, bellicose Soviet Premier, was part of our Cold War reality.

I was not just a Cold War kid by virtue of age; we lived in Dayton, Ohio, when nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was a major operations and R&D center for the Strategic Air Command. It seemed like there were always military aircraft overhead, and the occasional sonic boom, far from being an annoyance, was an exciting reminder that we were only fifteen years into the supersonic age. Although the evidence suggests that some of those planes overhead had nuclear weapons aboard, if anything, it was supposed to make us feel safer; the normalization of insane concepts like MAD was a primary feature of Cold War living, just like the acceptance today that the risk of a terrorist attack far outweighs any other concern.

From the AP:

According to the officials, the weapons are designed with multiple safety features that ensure the warheads don't accidentally detonate. Arming the weapons requires a number of stringent protocols and authentication codes that must be followed for detonation.

From the cockpit of the rogue B-52, you see the frozen Arctic landscape screaming by at 500 mph, only 50 feet below (to avoid Soviet radar), as the crew goes through the checklist of decoding their orders, going through it again when they realize it's an order to drop The Big One on a Russian city.

Major T.J. "King" Kong, pilot/mission commander (played by Slim Pickens): "Well, I've been to one world fair, a picnic, and a rodeo, and that's the stupidest thing I ever heard come over a set of earphones. You sure you got today's codes?"

From the AP:

"Nothing like this has ever been reported before and we have been assured for decades that it was impossible," said [Ed] Markey, D-Mass., co-chair of the House task force on nonproliferation.

From the film:

President Merkin Muffley: "General Turgidson! When you instituted the human reliability tests, you *assured* me there was *no* possibility of such a thing *ever* occurring!"

General "Buck" Turgidson: "Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir."

Meanwhile, back in the cockpit...

Slim Pickens as Major "King" Kong again: "Well, boys, I reckon this is it - nuclear combat toe to toe with the Roosskies."

Of course, by the time the situation in Moscow and D.C. is defused, the equipment on which they would have received their callback order has been rendered inoperable by anti-aircraft missiles...

Nowadays there would be some interesting parallels between the characters in our own American tragicomedy of the last few years and the film's characters -- several of whom were played by Peter Sellers, including Dr. Strangelove (who will remind many of Donald Rumsfeld) and the president (who, because he is the voice of reason in the film, should not remind anyone of someone, if you know what I mean).

And to piggyback on Tom's post from earlier today, the plot pits the NARL's against the RL's in a way that should send chills of recognition up any thinking American's spine.

Rent Dr. Strangelove and see it before you wake up one of these mornings to find we're living it. The propaganda runup to war with Iran starts this week.

Man Up, Grow A Pair And Stop Sniveling

The first two articles on this morning's reading list reinforced just how little of the American spirit is left in its citizens. From the war that must not be mentioned, to trying to justify basing a world view based on fear, is to continue down a well trodden path. One that the world has traveled before but the lessons have been forgotten.

The WaPo has an article about the conservative Democrat, Dan Boren (D-OK) and the patriotic silence that his district suffers from. Even though fifteen of his constituents lives have been lost in the debacle that is Iraq, nobody wants to speak out because they don't want to be unpatriotic. The Republicans noise machine certainly did its job well. When people who have suffered the most, understand the least and are willing to continue suffering emotionally and spiritually, that isn't patriotism. It's brainwashing. While a person doesn't have the right to yell fire in a crowded theater, one does have the right to point out that the nation has lost its way, the compass is broken, the flashlight's batteries are dying and the guide has other goals besides the survival of the troops.

Then from the Guardian comes a story where the author (Andrew Anthony) offers up the specious assumption that many on the liberal left side of the political equation, got to be that way because we felt that America was always the culprit on the world stage. Excuse me? I'm a liberal because I care about people, not things and I certainly don't wallow in angst and self-pity trying to reassess my perspective because I'm scared. Which is what he is doing. One moment in time, albeit the most tragic and revenge inducing, should not be responsible for turning a grown man into a whiny, hormonal (he uses mid-life crisis as an excuse), defensive, mewling ball of quivering baby bleats.

He assumes quite a bit in his hit piece, not the least of which is how fast someone can put together a reasoned argument under pressure. He must have spent a long time on this article because he uses lots of big words to make his arguments sound logical but all they do is reveal a man who waited until his forties to see the world as it really is, not just as a foil for him to have a good time. Once he saw that reality includes the terror that millions have lived with on a daily basis, he wants us to believe that he has grown up and that the other side has the right view and that everything he believed before that point was wrong and we should listen to him because now he has wisdom on his side. What a crock.

In Chinese medicine terms he lost a lot of Kidney qi due to fear on September 11 and no longer has enough water to rise up and cool the Heart which can lead to cloudy or irrational thinking. In regards to Hugo, OK, the grief (Lung) has smothered their voice, leaving them unable to speak up and fearful of authority. If we had had a different leader on 9/11, one who was capable of seeing the larger picture, this country could have continued forward into the future instead of retreating into the darkness of the past.

Terror is the world's problem, not just white people being killed by brown skinned people. Germany had the Baader-Meinhof, the US had Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, Japan had the Aum Shinrikyo and now we all have a problem. One that needs to be addressed on an individual and global scale. Why can't governments all over the world coordinate their efforts and decide on a moment in time and use that moment to arrest suspected terrorists all over the world? Let the court system sort it out instead and at the very least the terrorist networks will have been disrupted and it might be possible for the Bauers, Bonds, Bournes and Plames of this world to infiltrate suspected groups. Law abiding citizens rights are being eliminated in a futile attempt to control terrorism, so it would have to a one-time only deal, leaders shouldn't have that much power on a daily basis, that leads to the bad examples (Stalin, Hitler, Pinochet) we've seen previously.

Instead what we have is the death and destruction of our military, forced to keep fighting the wrong target and ensuring that there will be an endless supply of people willing to die for what they believe in. And take others with them. At this point there are very few innocents left, because our silence has allowed the atrocities to continue.

Crossposted at Big Brass Blog and Debsweb.

Future Headlines - WoT Expands to Second Life

WAR ON TERRORISM EXPANDS TO SECOND LIFE

"WE MUST FIGHT THEM IN THERE, SO WE DON'T HAVE TO FIGHT THEM OUT HERE," BUSH SAYS

'SURGE' INTO SECOND LIFE ANNOUNCED

CHICKENHAWKS RUSH TO SIGN UP, SAY "BETTER IN THERE THAN IN IRAQ"

Updated 2007/08/02, 9:20 am:

SOCIETY OF JESUS TO SAVE SECOND LIFE'S SINNERS