Cheney's AEI speech today: "it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks. "

Josh Marshall comments on Dick Cheney's upcoming well-announced speech at the American Enterprise Institute today.

"This is someone who not only organized and seemingly directed a policy of state-sponsored torture. He did it in large part to get people to admit to crankish conspiracy theories he got taken in by by a crew of think-tank jockeys in DC whose theories most even half way sensible people treated as punch lines of jokes. So it's Torquemada or 1984 but only after getting rescripted by Mel Brooks.

This is an extremely gullible man who has just come off being the driving ideological force in an administration that most people can already see produced more fiascos and titanic, self-inflicted goofs than possibly any in our entire history. By any standard the guy is a monumental failure -- and not one whose mistakes stem in some Lyndon Johnson fashion from tragic overreach, but just a fool who damaged his country through his own gullibility, paranoia and bad judgment. Whatever else you can say about the Cheney story it ain't Shakespearean."

If you disagree with this analysis, then you haven't read Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency by Barton Gellman>

The great Republican defender of torture as American government policy is, in fact, scared to death that he will be blamed for using torture to get fake confessions to support is ridiculous belief that Sadam Hussein and al Qaeda were working together, when in fact they were deadly enemies. But in particular is is now quite clear that Ahmed Chalabi, probably working as an agent of Iranian Intelligence, ran an operation to get Cheney and other top Republicans to commit to attacking Iran's deadly enemy, Iraq. It worked.

Sinceso much of the media was extremely complicit in supporting Cheney's idiocy, it is no surprise that the media is now hyping the sick, cranky old man's idiotic statements with great publicity.

Moyer interviews Bacevich on the American security complex and its' failed Iraq war

Tonight at 9:00 pm Bill Moyers will air an interview with Col. Bacevich about the nature of the Imperial Presidency, the nature of the security state which has grown up since WW II, Congress' abdication of control and its new job as a perpetual job machine for Congress persons, and the way our security state has failed to stop 9/11 and failed to properly plan and organize the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Here is a short excerpt from that hour-long interview:



If this doesn't leave you thinking, then give it up. You have nothing to think with.


[H/T to Talking Points Memo.]

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Addendum 8/16/2008 1:11 pm CDT
Here is a link to the full transcript of the show "The Imperial Presidency" which aired last night.

Here is a video of the entire show shown last night.

This is Bacevich's newest book "The Limits of Power" which is scheduled for release next Tuesday, August 19, 2008.

This is Barnes & Noble's synopsis of the book:

The Limits of Power identifies a profound triple crisis facing America:

• the economy, in remarkable disarray, can no longer be fixed by relying on expansion abroad;
• the government, transformed by an imperial presidency, is a democracy in form only;
• U.S. involvement in endless wars, driven by a deep infatuation with military power, has been a catastrophe for the body politic.

These pressing problems threaten all of us, Republicans and Democrats. If the nation is to solve its predicament, it will need the revival of a distinctly American approach: the neglected tradition of realism.

Andrew J. Bacevich, uniquely respected across the political spectrum, offers a historical perspective on the illusions that have governed American policy since 1945. The realism he proposes includes respect for power and its limits; sensitivity to unintended consequences; aversion to claims of exceptionalism; skepticism of easy solutions, especially those involving force; and a conviction that the books will have to balance. Only a return to such principles, Bacevich argues, can provide common ground for fixing America’s urgent problems before the damage becomes irreparable.
[I have added the emphasis and the bullet points. Editor WTF-o]

One more element in the Republican plot to invade Iraq

So a top Army researcher into Anthrax has conveniently committed suicide, and only after his suicide is a story released that he was considered by the FBI to be the latest prime suspect in the Anthrax attacks which occurred right after 9/11. Ivin's "suicide" will certainly make it easier for the FBI to pin the attack on him, since unlike their last effort to blame Steven Hatfill, Ivins will not be alive to defend his reputation.

Who knows, maybe Ivins even did it? Of course, now that he is conveniently dead, we will never know why or who else might have been involved.

Why did the U.S. invade Iraq again? We know now, clearly, that the WMD excuse was a sham, a piece of pure propaganda created to frighten Americans into supporting an invasion of Iraq. We know that George Bush used the bogus Italian Letter that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain Yellow cake Uranium, a precursor which could, with great effort, possibly be refined to use in an atomic bomb to justify the invasion. We know that the White House Iraq Group was set up specifically to coordinate all the lies and propaganda in order to justify the invasion of Iraq.

We know from Paul O'Neill that the invasion of Iraq was a key element of discussion in the White House Security meetings beginning days after the Bush administration was inaugurated in January 2001.

We know that 9/11 was planned and conducted by al Qaeda out of his hideout in Afghanistan, and that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had no tactical connection with Saddam Hussein or Iraq. Yet we also know that the Bush administration's first reaction after 9/11 was to use the attack to justify an invasion of Iraq. After 9/11 the Bush White House used every possible method to derail any effective investigation into what events led to the 9/11 attacks, including placing a high-ranking Republican White House staffer, Philip Zelikow, into the job of Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission where he could control what information was released.

What we forget is that after 9/11 the thing that really solidified the fear the American public had was the Anthrax attacks on American officials only a few days after the 9/11 tragedy. What caused those anthrax attacks? Look at this point Glenn Greenwald made yesterday:

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.There is a clear pattern of the Bush administration using every possible element of the U.S. government to bring about their long desired invasion of Iraq.
[Highlighting mine]

I find it highly suspicious that at first the FBI was releasing very inflammatory statements about Steven Hatfill as a "person of interest" only to have to withdraw them, apologize and pay him $5.8 million because he clearly was not the culprit. Then when the frame didn't work and a new FBI management took over the case, they focused in on Bruce E. Ivins, who very conveniently "committed suicide" before every being able to defend himself against the charges that he committed the crime.

Is Bruce Ivin's death and the public charges made - only after his death - to blame him for the Anthrax Attacks another part of the great Bush administration "shredding party" that is currently taking place to eliminate as much evidence of the criminal misdeeds conducted by Cheney and his group of thugs in Bush's name?

If so, expect to find some of the individuals who took the action covered by strange, mostly unexplained Presidential Pardons issued in Bush's last few days in office. There will be so many other similar pardons that isolating these will be difficult if not impossible.

I rarely indulge in conspiracy theories, but it has been obvious that the Bush administration, driven by Cheney, the Neocons, and others, wanted the Iraq invasion in the worst way from day one. The evidence that they did everything possible to push American into the invasion of Iraq is clear, and each day grows stronger. Since the initial invasion and its incompetent occupation the last six years have consisted primarily of secrecy and efforts to cover up and obfuscate the evidence of their culpability in propaganda, lies and misdirection the Bush Mayberry Machiavellis used to get their way.

In this environment, there seems to be nothing the Cheney thugs would not do first to get their way and after its failure, to stay out of prison and keep their wealth.

---

Go read all of Glenn Greenwald's article for a less speculative view of what has happened.

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Addendum 10:24 AM CDT

OK. This morning there has been a lot of talk about how Ivins has been mentally unstable since College. Consider the source of all this talk - it's the FBI or other elements of the Bush government. The breathless news reporters write those "reports" down and report them as true.

But if an Intelligence Analyst were to evaluate the history of reliability of the Bush administration, then they would immediately recognize that the Bush administration cannot be trusted to honestly present the time of day or the nature of the weather we can see both see right outside the window. Their history of preventing NASA scientists from reporting their findings on Global Warming provides only one example of reasons to distrust anything they say.

As for the FBI itself, it screwed up badly with Steven Hatfill as the $5.8 million settlement (our tax money, by the way) they gave him demonstrates. They are desperate to be able to show they have "solved" the Anthrax attacks. If they are discernibly more honest than George Bush, Dick Cheney or Alberto Gonzalez it would be hard to say why one should believe that.

The only counter argument the reporters have reported is that Ivin's lawyer claims he was completely innocent. The fact that this supposedly "mentally unstable individual" had a top security clearance for the last 18 years makes the stories of his mental instable highly questionable.

Right now the most reliable data we have is that Dr. Ivins is dead, that he was a coworker of the previously wrongly indicated possible suspect, Steven Hatfill, at Fort Detrick working on Anthrax, and that there is a big propaganda effort currently going on to try to blame him for the Anthrax attack and get the FBI and the Bush administration off the hook for not getting results in the last seven years. We can't trust the sources for anything else at this time.

Oh, and we do know that the Bush administration admits that the U.S. Army itself was the source of the anthrax that killed or injured several people right after 9/11. Since this is not favorable information for the Bush administration to offer, the poor reliability record of the Bush administration is less of a reason to believe them. Glenn Greenwald has gone into this.

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Addendum II 11:30 am CDT
Laura Rozen at War and Piece offers links to several stories on Bruce Ivins.

The Bush obsession with Iraq

It is becoming more and more clear that the Bush administration started off in February 2001 with a plan to invade Iraq. That desire has become the central focus - in fact the obsession - of the Bush administration and of the national Republican Party. This is an effort to trace that obsession.
The Beginning

Bush administration before 9/11

The diversion into Afghanistan

The pivot back to Iraq

The failure in Iraq and the failure to justify the pivot to America

What's left in Iraq, America?

The Beginning

Where the idea of invading Iraq started is not clear, but here is a speculation. The Republicans had a real problem after 1989 when the USSR collapsed and Communism ceased to exist as a threat to America. Without a threat to America, how do Republicans get elected? How do defense contractors get new defense contracts? How do the Army, Navy and Air Force continue to justify spending more money on "defense" than all the nations in the rest of the world put together?

Saddam Hussein provided a partial answer in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait and threatened Saudi Arabia. He presented a threat to America's oil supplies and to George H. W. Bush's personal friends in Saudi Arabia, so very quickly Bush 41 organized an army sent it to Saudi Arabia, and used it to decisively defeat the Iraqi military in his 100 hour war. But he won too quickly, and it was over so that Bill Clinton could take advantage of Bush 41's lack of awareness of domestic American problems, together with Ross Perot's entry into the race, and get elected as President. This, of course, infuriated the conservatives. They understand that government is the responsibility of the elite, which incorporates Republicans and movement conservatives while automatically excluding Democrats.

The Project for the New American Century came up with a solution to the lack of an enemy for Republicans to rail against. Their 1998 Open letter to President Clinton on Iraq provided the framework for the Bush 43 administration's obsession with attacking Iraq. It immediately became the centerpiece of the Bush 43 administration as soon as he and Dick Cheney were sworn in.

Bush administration before 9/11

In my post Incompetent conservative Bush failed to prevent 9/11 I offer evidence that the Bush administration ignored the terrorist threat prior to 9/11. My speculation is that this was intentional. A terrorist attack on the American homeland could be used to justify an attack on Iraq, a nation whose military we had previously defeated easily and who was in much less capable military shape by 2001.

The diversion into Afghanistan

Osama bin Laden acted as they expected and attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Again it is speculation, but it seems likely the George W. Bush never expected Osama's attack to be so spectacularly successful. But it did provide the PR hook on which to hang an attack on Iraq. Many of us recall that Bush was immediately ready to attack Iraq, and had to be almost literally forced to attack Afghanistan, the actual source of the terrorists who committed 9/11. Sec. Def. Rumsfeld refused to send sufficient troops to Afghanistan to properly do the job, very probably because he wanted to use them in Iraq which was the central focus of the Bush administration. The escape of Osama bin Laden was one result of that penury.

The pivot back to Iraq

Digby then points to the next stage of attacking Iraq:

The Iraq-Al Qaeda link was cultivated through hundreds of the 935 false statements the Bush Administration made in the run-up to war. Without it, there would be no pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq, no case made to the public that both wars represented the same fight against terrorism.
[Highlighting mine - Editor WTF-o]

That pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq had been an unplanned for problem. They had expected the terrorist attack on America, together with Saddam's clearly bad reputation, to be sufficient to justify an immediate attack on Iraq. They hadn't planned on Afghanistan as a central focus of the war. But planning has not been their long suite, as demonstrate by the lack of a plan for the occupation for Iraq and the lack of a plan to get Turkey to cooperate with the northern prong of the invasion of Iraq. [Keep in mind that diplomacy is not planned in the Pentagon, and it was the responsibility of the White House to get the Turks to cooperate with the invasion. That didn't happen either.]

Ultimately it is going to be the failure of the Bush administration to show any connection between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorists that damns the whole project. That's why the new report that Military finds no connection between Saddam and al Qaeda is still being fought by Bush apparatchiks like Doug Feith.

The failure in Iraq and the failure to justify the pivot to America

That failure to effectively lay the blame for 9/11 on Saddam is a disaster for the Republicans, second only to their military and political failure in the conduct of the occupation. There was no real reason (outside PNAC fantasies) to attack Iraq, so the conservatives had to develop a public relations ploy. It looks more and more likely that permitting 9/11 to happen was that public relations ploy. When the American public unexpectedly directed their anger at al Qaeda, the Taliban and Afghanistan instead of Iraq, it started going South on the Bush administration.

They have spent the time since then scrambling to justify the war and occupation of Iraq while covering up their complicity in causing 9/11 by such things as first resisting the 9/11 Commission and then, when that failed, by getting Condi Rice's deputy, Philip Zelikow, appointed executive director of the 9/11 Commission so that he could derail it.

What's left in Iraq, America?

As long as the Bush administration remains in power they can continue to conceal the true level of their total incompetence and failure. Their failures are legion, and run across the board of government. But it should be clear that attacking Iraq was the prime goal of the Bush administration on their first day in office, and Iraq will have totally absorbed their efforts until the last day Bush and Cheney remain in office. Nothing else has mattered to them for over seven years so far, and if they can get McCain elected President the focus on Iraq will continue for another four years.

That is why the Bush 43 Presidency is the greatest failed Presidency in American history. The entire American federal government has been totally focused on some strange unneeded and unachievable fantasy in Iraq since day one of the Bush Presidency in January 2001. There has been no success, just a series of greater or lesser failures, and there is not any prospect of real improvement either for America or for Iraq.

As soon as a Democrat takes office as President, the next step is going to be for both the congressional Republican Party and the media in general to take up the cry "Don't investigate all this. It is over. Why destroy lives and careers?" but such cries need to be ignored. They are just one step in the Republican effort to regain office and do to America again what they have done during the last decade.

This won't be over until investigators open the crypt of the Republican undead and put a stake though their heart, but one thing is clear. The Bush 43 administration has had the invasion of Iraq as its central focus from before George W. Bush took office. It will remain the central focus of the Presidency after he leaves, eight years later. The invasion and occupation started without honest reasons given to the American public or the world. Terrorism and revenge for 9/11 was presented as the reason, but obviously was merely an excuse for what had been decided well before 9/11. As of 2009 the occupation of Iraq will continue to drain resources without any purpose beyond trying to clean up the mess created by the invasion itself.

That's the legacy of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and the conservative movement.

Giuliani's lack of efforts to provide radios killed Firemen on 9/11

Let's not forget that the radios that the New York Fire Department was issued had failed in 1993. Rudy Giuliani was mayor during the period after that and was directly responsible for obtaining radios that worked. Here is the story from Think Progress.

the firefighters on 9/11 were forced to use old equipment that had malfunctioned eight years earlier, during the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center.

But it wasn’t “impossible” to get new radios to these firefighters, as Giuliani tried to claim. After the 1993 incident, Giuliani gave Motorola a $14-million no-bid contract. Despite this exorbitant sum, the radios were faulty and had to be taken out of service in March 2001, after a “distress call from a firefighter trapped in a burning house” went unheard. A New York City Council report on the fire department’s radio procurement process concluded:

Thus, despite its acknowledgment two years earlier that several manufacturers were developing technology that might meet FDNY’s CAI specifications, and in apparent disregard of its pledge to evaluate new technologies and products, the FDNY appears to have elected to accept a radio representing an entirely new communications technology from Motorola rather than conduct a competitive review of products and prices.

Brave New Films has put together a video on Giuliani’s record on the 9/11 radios HERE.

I posted on this earlier, and someone commented that the decisions were those of the Fire Department, not Rudy.

Sorry. Rudy was Mayor. He was responsible for everything his people did or failed to do. That is leadership 101. Rudy is running for President as a proven leader, and a leader can't take credit for his subordinates successes and then blame them for the failures.

Those roughly two hundred firemen who died in the North Tower because their radios failed were the direct responsibility of Rudolph Giuliani, and he can't duck the responsibility for their deaths. They died because he failed.

Why didn't the CIA give the tapes to the 9/11 Commission when asked? Coverup!

Marty Lederman at Balkinization discusses jut how badly the CIA and the Bush administration did NOT want the 9/11 Commission to get the torture tapes.

If the CIA had destroyed its interrogation tapes during the pendency of the 9/11 Commission investigation, that almost surely would have constituted felony violations of 18 U.S.C. 1512(c)(1). So they retained the tapes during that investigation. However, as the New York Times reports ..., the CIA very carefully avoided informing the 9/11 Commission of the existence of the interrogation tapes -- which would have been extremely valuable information for the Commission to use. "A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes" . . . but the Commission never said the magic words!: The Commission repeatedly sought "documents," "reports" and "information" related to the interrogations from the CIA -- but "staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos."

At one meeting, Lee Hamilton told George Tenet that "the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents 'even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.'" How infelicitous of Representative Hamilton -- you see, a videotape isn't a "document"!

I urge you to read the entire report from Phil Zelikow,, and ask yourself whether the concerted effort by countless government officials, up to and including Alberto Gonzales, Donald Rumsfeld and Steve Cambone, to assiduously avoid mentioning the videotapes to the 9/11 Commission -- in countless meetings and in response to numerous requests -- when obviously those videos would have been the motherlode of the evidence that the Commission was seeking, can possibly be justified. Zelikow wonders whether this didn't violate 18 U.S.C. 1001(a)(1) (prohibiting the knowing and willful concealment of "material facts" in an investigation by any "trick, scheme, or device"). Even if it did not, is there any scenario in which such stonewalling would not have constituted utter contempt for the Commission -- bad faith at a very high and sustained level?

Here's the really amazing bit, however: "Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active," said a CIA spokesperson. In other words, they knew the tapes were relevant -- indeed, the most relevant evidence possible -- and that they would be required to produce them if only the Commission and its lawyers somewhere down the line used the word "tapes," or "recordings," or "evidence." But they failed to mention the tapes.

This is clearly criminal behavior by members of the Bush administration. There should be a rapid, broad investigation and criminal charges brough quickly.

You want to know that the conservatives will say to defend this criminal behavior? They will claim that bringing charges in court against the criminals who conducted this criminal behavior is criminalizing politics.

Then they will complain that illegal immigrants should be arrested and because they violate the law by their very presence in America, or a tourist who overstayed her visa by three weeks back in 1995 should be arrested in the New York Airport, carried out in chains, held overnight, then deported - again in chains - the next day back to Iceland.

So violations of really important laws should not be criminalized by bringing charges in court if the culprits are conservatives, but a tourist who overstayed her visa by three weeks 12 years ago gets treated like a terrorist.

How in God's name to Republicans live with themselves and sleep at night?

Saudis say US could have prevented 9/11

Ex-Saudi Arabian Ambassador describes 9/11 as a major failure of U.S. Intelligence. The information was available to the U.S. Intelligence agencies to prevent 9/11. From CNN:

Speaking to the Arabic satellite network Al-Arabiya on Thursday, Bandar -- now Abdullah's national security adviser -- said Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision."

"If U.S. security authorities had engaged their Saudi counterparts in a serious and credible manner, in my opinion, we would have avoided what happened," he said.

The hijackers were known, and they were under observation by the Saudi Arabians.

Cheney and Bush did not believe that terrorism was going to be a problem unless it was state-sponsored. This was in spite of repeated warnings by Clinton and Clinton's White House staff, and in spite of Clinton leaving Richard Clarke at the National Security Council to coordinate anti-terrorism activities.

Instead of listening to the warnings, the Bush White House downgraded Clarke and ignored him. Is it any surprise that the Intelligence agencies did not ask the Saudi Arabian Intelligence agencies what they knew?

The only question remaining unanswered about the Bush failure that permitted 9/11 is whether that failure was intentional or just simple stupidity. Since the Bush White House has demonstrated repeatedly that they are both nasty enough to permit 9/11 in order to justify their already-planned invasion of Iraq, and they they are sufficiently incompetent in running government to simply not know how to deal with a problem like terrorism, we need further evidence to determine if it was malice or stupidity.

[h/t to Laura Rozen.]

Giulianni running as 'pro-life;' also changes his birthday to 9/11

Giulianni, in addition to running his basic campaign based entirely on 9/11, appears to be attempting to appeal to the pro-life social Republicans. This strategy will require more continued use of the term 9/11 in all campaign events while making statements to reverse his well-known pro-choice position and support for Planned Parenthood. The appeal to the social Republicans has begun with statements from Giulianni allies.

Pro-life Texas Congressman Pete Sessions announced on TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network that Rudy Giulianni is actually a pro-life politician.

Considering Rudy's long support for Planned Parenthood and the pro-choice movement, this has to be viewed as a desperate attempt by the Guilianni camp to make inroads into the strong single-issue anti-abortion Christian right. This announcement by Rep. Sessions isn't just one ally going off message. Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y., also a Guilianni supporter, made a similar announcement on MSNBC last night.

This extreme reversal in Giulianni's position on the legal status of abortion can't be merely desperation as he attempts woo social conservatives to win the Republican nomination for President. More likely it is part and parcel of Rudy's repeated statement that "9/11 changed everything!"

I predict that this radical switch in Rudy's political position on abortion is just a preliminary to the surprise announcement that he will be changing the celebration of his birthday to September 11. His reversal of position on abortion will also become part of his complete and total rebirth which occurred September 11, 2001.

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[Revised for clarity October 6, 2007.]

The reaction to 9/11 was an overreaction to the wrong threat.

So, after the attack on 9/11 what went wrong? Susan Faludi nails the problem.

The enemy that hit us on September 11 was real. But our citizenry wasn’t asked to confront a real enemy. The arrest and prosecution of our antagonists seemed to be of only secondary concern. Instead, we were enlisted in a symbolic war at home, a war to repair and restore our national myth of invincibility.

This quote is at the core of Jane Hamsher's discussion of the problem we are facing with the Bush administration and terrorism. The so-called Global War on Terrorism has been a big bait-and-switch scheme by conservatives who recognize that America no longer has the kind of international power that it had coming out of WW II.

They see much of the rest of the world catching up (and in many ways surpassing) America economically as a real decline in American power, and they have long wanted to do something about it. They saw the stalemate in Korea and then the clear military defeat in Vietnam as being symptoms of America's decline, something they blamed on the push for Civil Rights and on the raucous counterculture which did not respect their successes demonstrated by promotions in the business hierarchy.

Conservative followers are people who innately cannot deal with ambiguity. They expect The Leader to winnow down the various possible alternatives to a single idea, problem or ideology, then direct them in how to act to resolve that one defined problem or limited and related set of problems.

When that process fails, it is because people are acting "immorally" and cannot be trusted to work with them to solve "The Problem." So part of the solution is to corral the immoral people and force then to helm resolve "The Problem" or to exclude them from much of society through imprisonment or ostracism/segregation.

The big problem of America's decline over the last six decades is not one that has a clear solution. Part of the problem is that economically it has been a problem of competing nations being more successful than America so that they have grown more rapidly. But a relative decline still feels like a real decline. Part of the problem is that the social changes over the last six decades are a direct result of improved communications. The social changes are actually solutions to much older severe problems, but they force individuals to adapt to a world very unlike the one they grew up and were successful in.

The only area in which America has not declined significantly has been the ability to project military power anywhere in the world. The loss of the USSR as a competitor made much of the existing American military power redundant, so it has begun to be cut back. The attack on 9/11 offered a way to use the still overwhelming military power that American can wield.

But 9/11 itself was a new problem. It was conducted by a non-state actor. The overwhelming American military power was designed to be used against a clearly identified state enemy. Afghanistan was to some extent an appropriate target for our military forces, if used sparingly. The Taliban did control Afghanistan, and they also were allies and supporters of bin Laden's al Qaeda. The Taliban was locally disliked and fighting a civil war, so all we had to do was help the other side in an on-going war, then watch and assist as they put their own nation back together. Our military could do much of that, and the CIA's special operations people could pick and choose appropriate targets while supporting the preferred winning side in the civil war.

But Iraq was a severe overreach. Conservatives have a large set of institutions and publicity organizations designed to create simple solutions to complex and frightening problems. Their interest in the peoples in other nations are largely defined by how much money they can make trading there. Since a free-market small-government philosophy allows them to make the most money, they assume that everyone really wants their country to be run that way, and that the reason most are not is the entrenched powers of government bureaucrats and immoral people.

9/11 allowed the conservatives in the Bush administration to break the restrictive entrenched powers of government bureaucrats and use fear to get the electorate to overcome their distaste for starting an unnecessary war. Thus the preemptive invasion of Iraq. It was supposed to create a conservative free-market small-government society in the center of the Middle East and convince the rest of the nations in the Middle East how wrong they had been before and how outstanding the future in a free-market small-government mostly Libertarian society would be.

Since education hadn't overcome the entrenched interests to create this, America's very powerful military would do so. As a side effect, the reasons for terrorism would disappear. As another side-effect, the American military would be permanently located close to the Middle East oil fields after world oil passed Peak Oil. The mechanics of these things were not explained. They were just assumed to be inevitable.

As I said, conservatives work hard to apply simple answers to very complex and generally ambiguous problems.

Very few of the conservatives who made the decisions to go to war had any experience in the military or even much military education. They thought of war as being a strategic exercise like playing chess or 'Risk.' They did not accept the idea that if we attacked Iraq, even those people who were very oppressed by Saddam would be angry at the invaders first.

Then they just assumed that governments operated because the leaders wanted to oppress the people. Police existed just to oppress the Iraqis, not to stop criminals. In the Libertarian Paradise, people do not commit crimes because their reputation is too precious to them - or something. Ownership of Property is not something government makes happen. It is a natural characteristic of society given by God.

Then they assumed that a state-run economy would easily become a free-market economy when the 'dead hand of government' was removed. Again, this is a natural characteristic of society, given to men by God. No planned mechanisms would be necessary. In a free market those magicians called 'Entrepreneurs' would make all these things happen.

Hadn't Saint Ayn Rand (and Grover Norquist, her prophet) said these things were all true?

Ask the conservatives. America had gone into decline for the last sixty years after WW II because of the dead hand of government bureaucracy and immoral people. The solution was to bring back John Wayne with his six-guns, clean up the town by killing all the bad guys and everyone would ride off happily into the sunset.

9/11 was the trigger that fired off this fantasy crossbow. The constant, perhaps even growing fear of America's decline among conservatives has been the tension in that crossbow, a tension strengthened as each indicator of America's economic and moral decline was reported. Gays? Parading and demanding marriage rights? That's what happens when Blacks and Whites are allowed to marry (1967 Supreme Court decision.)

And Iraq? An easy target that our military could easily deal with, as they had proven in 1991. Oh, and they conveniently sit on top of the second largest known pool of oil in the world, so there was a reason why conservatives might even know they existed.

Simple solutions to complex problems. Terrorism isn't the threat. Big government and social immorality is. And a free-market small-government demonstration project in the Middle East was to be the solution.

So Osama bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center for the second time in 2001, and the conservatives invaded Iraq. Bin Laden wasn't the problem. America's decline because of bloated government, restrictions on business and immorality was.

Ask your frightened neighborhood conservative.

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See also Scarecrow's What Should Have Followed 9/11 at Firedoglake.

Why hasn't America been attacked by terrorist since 9/11?

To answer that question you can take the Bush administration's self-serving excuses. Those are that 1. "We are fighting them in Iraq so that they won't come over here.

Yeah, right. We invaded a country without a connection to the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11, and only after we invaded and occupied their country, destroyed their government and economy, did they create an all new set of terrorists to try to force our occupying forces out. This stops terrorists from attacking America -- how? The mechanism is, to put it politely, highly unclear.

What is clear is that by invading Iraq with no justifiable reason the American Republican Party was starting an unnecessary war that would create its own opponents. the opponents, facing the most powerful military in the world they adopted asymmetric warfare and invited outside help for training and materials from existing terrorist organizations.

Then, not only did the Bush administration Republicans motivate the creation of bands of insurgents who had to use what the Republicans call "terrorist" techniques of fighting, they stupidly failed to control Iraq while they destroyed the Iraqi Army and Police who might have stopped the growth of the insurgency.

Now Iraq has numerous militias and insurgent groups using asymmetric warfare on each other and on the occupying American troops. The American troops in Iraq are a great recruiting and fundraising tool for the insurgents and militias, and the fighting teaches them the best and most effective techniques with which to take on the most powerful military in the world.

The so-called terrorists in Iraq were not their before the Republican invasion of that country. They are a creation of the U.S. Republican Party militarists and nationalists. They wouldn't have been there had George Bush and Dick Cheney not created them!

Then we get Bush excuse no. 2. The terrorists have not attacked America because the newly created Department of Homeland Security has greatly increased America's defenses against terrorists.

It is hard to know whether DHS has actually been in any way successful, since The Bush administration keeps everything behind a wall of secrecy. The secrecy itself is a major destruction of open democratic government, but the secrecy seems primarily intended to protect the Republican Party rather than to keep "terrorists" from learning the more effectively attack America.

But the secrecy is doing the job it was intended to do. It keeps Americans from knowing what their government is doing to them.

For a more extensive description of how effective DHS has been, go read Amy Zegart at the Reality-Based community.

This is all an American-centered view, focused on why there has been no follow-up to the 9/11 attack. But there is more information to look at, and James Wimberly asks the next great question - Why Hasn't Spain Been Attacked Since 11-M?, then provides a short set of answers.

Gen. Petreaus was asked the key question during his interview Monday. Is America safer for the invasion of Iraq? Gen Petreaus waffled and did not answer at that time, getting a rebuke from his boss, George Bush. More lies and secrecy from the Bush administration.

Democracy does not work when the leaders of the government are allowed to keep their actions secret and lie to the public. Bush, Cheney and the Republican Party are working hard to destroy the American democracy and replace it with an authoritarian government run by plutocrats like themselves. There is no other explanation for what is happening.

Not only are we not safer from terrorists than we were September 11, 2001, they have successfully changed the subject to the (relatively minor) threat of Islamic-based terrorism while they put basic American democracy into grave threat!

The Republicans are pushing fear again. - That process started WW I, too.

Kevin Drum points out that all we are hearing from the media is "al Qaeda this" and "al Qaeda that." But what they don't say is that the various supposed branches of al Qaeda are not really connected. Al Qaeda as headed by Osama bin Laden does not contribute to or direct the actions of AQI (al Qaeda in Iraq.) This is all part of the Myth of AQI.

When Gen. Petreaus says that Americans are fighting al Qaeda, he means the organization in Iraq which was created by the jordanian Zarqawi, not the al Qaeda which is headed by Osama bin Laden.

It is to the advantage of the Whahabi extremists like Osama bin Laden to make themselves appear more effective than they really are. The AQI have a similar motivation to appear more threatening, so they have adopted the name (but not the direction) of al Qaeda.

This all gives George Bush and the Republican Party an excuse to make the Islamic terrorist threat both much larger than it really is, and make it appear to be a real threat to the existence of America.

It ain't.

The Wahhabi terrorist threat is little more than the threat presented by the Anarchists early in the twentieth century. The Anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated The American President William McKinley. The anarchist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. Either would have been happy to crash a hijacked airliner into their target, but airliners did not exist in those day. The overreaction of the Austrians against their Serbians enemies that set off WW I was a problem if the command structure of the Austro-Hungarian government, not the direct result of the assassination of the Archduke.

What is the difference?

Technology.

The idiot assassins who attacked America on September 11, 2001 had technology that the earlier Anarchists couldn't touch. Ten men took down the World Trade Center by merely high-jacking two airliners. (Who remembers the Pentagon? - less than the Murragh Building in Oklahoma City.)

So the new terrorists/Anarchists are more dangerous than the Anarchists, right?

That depends. They can each kill a few more people in each attack, but they have no more power to change American society than Leon Czolgosz or Gavrilo Princip did.

Timothy McVeigh killed a lot more people in Oklahoma City (168) than either Czolgosz or Princip dit, with no more reason and no more danger to American society. Same motivation, but an advance in technology. That's all.

But Gavrilo Princip started World War I, right? No, that was the responsibility of the military high command and the Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (who tried to use the assassination as an excuse to solve their Serbian problem) and Kaiser Wilhelm who promised the Austro-Hungarian Emperor that he would back them up if the Russians mobilized to support their Serbian fellow Slavs.

Emperor Franz Ferdinand had a lot more reason to feel threatened by the radical Serbians than George W. Bush had to feel threatened by the Iraqis, but the idiotic reaction to start a war was very similar.

The military overreaction by Bush and the Republican Party is creating a lot more enemies than it is suppressing.

Rudy is lying about 9/11. See video

The former Director of Emergency Management for New York says that Rudy Giuliani is lying about what he did in advance of September 11, 2001, what he did not that date, and what he did afterwards. Then Rudy "...profited financially from his association with the tragedy after leaving office in 2001."



I guess from the Republican point of view that somehow does qualify him to run for President. He is another lying, incompetent crook with a sense of grandiosity and entitlement. Who else are the Republicans going to nominate?

This is what happened to our national Press Corps

Glenn Greenwald interview Helen Thomas to find out how she felt about the relationship between the Press and the President. Here is a very revealing part of an excellent interview:

GG: You have covered every President since John Kennedy. I wanted to ask if you could identify how the White House press corps has changed over time, if it has, and what differences are there in terms of how journalists cover presidents?

HT: Well, that's a big order. But I do think that in the good olden days, reporters were really straight reporters. I worked for a wire service, UPI, for 57 years, and I covered the White House for UPI from the 70s onto Bush, and then became a columnist. So I certainly know both sides.

As a wire service reporter, I played it straight, with the facts, which is absolutely required of a wire service reporter. But that doesn't mean I bowed out of the human race. I permitted myself to think, to care, to believe, but it didn't get in my copy.

I did think that tough questions were always very important. With Kennedy, we knew he enjoyed the banter with the press, and he had the first live televised news conferences. And it made a big difference in terms of really capturing the imagination of the public. It was the first time they really saw reporters in action, they saw a witty president that was able to dodge questions as deftly as anyone, and he had great eloquence. That was the first time the American people really became interested in presidential news conferences.

And then Johnson had a love-hate relationship with the press. He couldn't live without us, and yet at the same time, he thought we were hurting him every day. The words "credibility gap" were created in that era.

With Nixon, that is when news management and manipulation really began. Now, every president wants to put his best foot forward, and always be able to manage and manipulate news coverage.

All presidential candidates, especially, vow to run an open administration. But they step foot in the Oval Office and the Iron Curtain slams down. Suddenly, all information that I think belongs in the public domain becomes their private preserve.

The manipulation of the press has become greater and greater. This is the most secretive administration I have ever covered. And they're all secretive.

GG: Has the press corps that covers the White House played a role in why the White House is so manipulative and why they're able to get away with such secrecy?

HT: Very much so. Reporters, after Watergate, realized that we had let so much go by us. They got much tougher when President Ford took over. It wasn't animosity. It was anger that we hadn't asked the right questions. And the press became tougher.

But they really went soft after 9/11. Reporters, I'm assuming, did not want to be called unpatriotic and un-American when we were in a national crisis.

And I don't think the corporate heads exactly wanted anyone to rock the boat at that time.

But I kept asking questions about the validity of going to war against a country that had done nothing to us.

Intimidation works on the Press Corps, too. There are a few exceptions, though. Helen Thomas is one, and the McClatchy News Service is another.

Go look at the entire interview. It is very good.