George W. Bush Like or dis.

[Nin`]

Originally Posted by maxpower

First off I would like to thank Wikipedia for this great information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_powers_of_the_State

Your quite welcome since it was I who actually included these quotes edited within the Wikipedia (please note that I did not write the entire article).

maxpower.

Before we continue this discussion I suggest you read some, if not all, of what I have already written on page two of this thread. This may supply you with the answers and citations you desire. If you are still confused then I will come back at some point to continue our discussion here.

In the meantime you may like to chew on these little numbers:

Afghanistan. Mission Still Not Accomplished:
[Lucifer] All claims here to the contrary, Afghanistan is still a mess and getting worse.

Source: Yahoo
Authors: Tahir Atmar, Yousuf Azimy and Kamal Sadaat
Dated: 2006-05-16

MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan (Reuters) - Suspected Taliban insurgents tossed a crude bomb into an Afghan girls' classroom, wounding a teacher and five students, a headmaster and police said on Tuesday.

Taliban have launched numerous attacks on schools as part of an intensified insurgency that has produced some of the worst levels of violence since the end of Taliban rule in 2001.

Headmaster Gul Mohammad said a small bomb was thrown through a window into a girls' class at his school, in the Chamtol district of the northern province of Balkh, on Monday.

A teacher was seriously wounded and five girls were slightly hurt with burns in the attack, he said.

Another school in the district was burned down early on Tuesday after its guards were beaten up, police said.

"The Taliban are behind this," said district police chief Mohammad Hashim, referring to both attacks.

The militants attack schools as symbols of the Western-backed government and foreign influence. Seven children were killed when a rocket hit a school in an eastern town last month.

The Taliban were ousted by U.S.-led forces in late 2001 after refusing to hand over Osama bin Laden, architect of the September 11 attacks on the United States. [Lucifer: This very clever simplistic misportrayal is why many people continue to believe that the invasion of Afghanistan was justifiable even if it was illegal.]

But nearly five years later, their insurgency shows no sign of ending.

AIR STRIKE, OFFICIALS BEHEADED

Violence has surged in recent months and more than 500 people have been killed this year.

The unrest comes as NATO members are sending reinforcements to boost their peacekeeping force from 9,000 to 16,000.

With about 23,000 troops, the United States now has its largest force in Afghanistan since its military involvement began in October 2001. The United States had been hoping to trim its Afghan force to 16,500 by early this year.

Elsewhere on Tuesday, U.S.-led forces killed four militants in an air strike in Uruzgan province in the volatile south, the U.S. military said.

"The extremists were responsible for launching numerous attacks against civilians and the Afghan National Army," the U.S. military said in a statement.

In other violence, Taliban raided two police posts near the Pakistani border, killing two policemen and wounding six.

A government office in the same area was attacked and a woman in a nearby house was wounded, a Khost provincial police spokesman said.

Security forces later captured 13 suspected Taliban, including some who were burying a body, he said.

In the southern province of Helmand, where British forces are in charge of security, police found the beheaded bodies of two government workers who had gone missing last week.

In Ghazni province, just south of the Kabul, a man had his hands blown off and was blinded when a mine he was planting exploded.

His target was believed to have been a U.S.-funded road project, a provincial security official said.

[Lucifer] So now we engage in "precision" bombing of religious meetings and shooting up crowds of protestors. This sounds like the desperate actions of a totalitarian state. Oh yes. Exactly.]

Source: The Guardian
Authors: Not Credited (Staff and agencies)
Dated: 2006-05-29

Around 50 Taliban fighters were killed in a US-led air strike in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province today, military and Afghan officials said.

Several Taliban leaders were among those killed in the pre-dawn attack in the Kajaki district, Amir Mohammad Akhundzada, the deputy provincial governor said.

"The Taliban were meeting in a mosque when the bombardment took place," Mr Akhundzada told Reuters. "More than 50 of them have been killed."

Major Quentin Innes, a Canadian spokesman with US-led troops in the south, said aircraft had dropped two 500lb bombs which had targeted a "compound" rather than a mosque.

The spokesman said the strike happened after a group of Taliban ambushed a troop convoy but did not inflict any casualties. "The group then fled into a compound ... and we estimate that up to 50 of the attackers may have been killed," he added.

A Taliban spokesman said no fighters had been killed and that all the victims were civilians.

US-led troops have carried out operations in rural areas of the south in the past two weeks, with the air strike taking the death toll to more than 370.

Most of those killed have been militants, but many civilians, dozens of Afghan security personnel and four soldiers have also died.

Before today's violence, up to 372 people, mostly militants, have been reported killed since May 17, according to military and Afghan figures.

Southern Afghanistan has seen some of the heaviest fighting since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001 as US-led forces have responded to increased attacks from the Taliban in their former stronghold.

In a separate incident today, five Canadian soldiers were wounded in a gun battle after their convoy was ambushed by Taliban guerrillas in the neighbouring Kandahar province, a Canadian military spokesman said.

Meanwhile, thousands marched through the capital, Kabul, after security forces opened fire on protesters, killing at least seven Afghans and wounding 40. The clashes followed a fatal traffic accident involving a US military convoy.

A truck went out of control and crashed into a dozen vehicles, killing at least one person and injuring six. Afghans threw stones, smashing windows in the convoy vehicles, a US military statement said.

One of the US vehicles appeared to fire in the air. Afghan police also opened fire when they came to the assistance of the US troops.

It was unclear who was responsible for shooting into the crowd. Some eyewitnesses blamed the US troops, others blamed the police and some blamed both.

"There are indications that at least one coalition military vehicle fired warning shots over the crowd," a US military statement said.

A Reuters reporter at the scene saw one man shot dead and several wounded people being taken away, while rioters set two police cars alight.

At least seven civilians were killed during the protest, Karim Rahimi, a spokesman for the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said.

The US said no troops had been hurt, and an investigation into the rush hour incident on Kabul's northern outskirts had begun.

By early afternoon, up to 2,000 protesters had gathered in central Kabul, some marching on parliament and some on the presidential palace.

Several hundred more congregated at an intersection leading to the heavily fortified US embassy, chanting "Death to America" and burning US flags.

"We don't accept Karzai any more as a president. We protest against him - death to Karzai!" Jaweed Agha, one of the protesters, shouted.

A few dozen people forced their way past a police cordon guarding the road to the US embassy and threw stones at vehicles carrying foreigners into the compound, prompting the occupants to fire into the air before turning back.

The protesters outside the embassy were later dispersed by police and Afghan army troops who fired into the air.

At last. Improved Proliferation.

Source: Cato Inst
Authors: John Mueller
Dated: 2006-09-11

With the fifth anniversary of 9/11, a central question repeatedly asked is whether that country has become safer from international terrorism or not. I have never quite understood precisely what this question means, but let me explore six possibilities.

[1] Is the likelihood that an individual American will be killed by international terrorists higher or lower than before 9/11?
This is a tricky concept to deal with because the number of Americans killed within the United States by international terrorists in the five years since 9/11 is the same as the number killed in the five years before: zero. Although polls continue to show Americans notably concerned that they or members of their families might die at the hands of terrorists, astronomer Alan Harris has calculated that, at present rates and including the disaster of 9/11 in the consideration, the chances any individual resident of the globe will be killed by an international terrorist over the course of an 80-year lifetime is about 1 in 80,000, about the same likelihood of being killed over the same interval from the impact on the Earth of an especially ill-directed asteroid or comet. At present, Americans are vastly more likely to die from bee stings, lightning, or accident-causing deer than by terrorism within the country. That seems pretty safe.

[2] Are Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda types more or less capable of inflicting damage on the United States?
International terrorists would have to increase their capabilities considerably to change such astoundingly low probabilities. Even if they were able to pull off "another 9/11″ every three months for the next five years, the chance an individual American would be killed in one of them would still be two one-hundredths of one percent. Although there is concern that they will become vastly more dangerous by obtaining and setting off nuclear weapons or something like that, they do not seem to have become more capable generally since 9/11. The number of Americans who have been killed worldwide by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda types has increased considerably since 9/11, but this is almost entirely because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the "are we safer" question is focused on the dangers to Americans at home, not abroad. Outside these war arenas, the number of people worldwide (few of them American) who have been killed by such terrorists may have gone up a bit since 9/11, but in five years the number killed in explosions set off by Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda types stands at 900 or so—notably smaller than the number who have drown in bathtubs (300-400 per year) in the United States alone during the same period.
Moreover, whatever they may be doing overseas, they don't seem to be here: a secret FBI report in 2005 reported that after more than three years of intense and well-funded hunting, the agency had been unable to identify a single true Al Qaeda sleeper cell anywhere in the country—rather impressive given the 2002 intelligence estimate that there were up to 5000 people loose in the country who were "connected" to Al Qaeda. [1] Some attribute this to luck, good protection, the distractions of the war in Iraq, patience in planning additional attacks, or the breaking up of the Afghan training camps, but, as I have argued elsewhere, the evidence could be taken to indicate either that they aren't trying very hard or that they are far less dedicated, diabolical, and competent than the common image would suggest.
The recent alleged bombing plot in London doesn't so far suggest much in the way of enhanced terrorist capacities (and, of course, those guys were over there, not over here). The author of the dramatic claim that the plotters were envisioning "mass murder on an unimaginable scale" said when pressed that he meant "on a scale never before witnessed in Britain," rather deflating the import of the initial widely-quoted assertion. And security expert Bruce Schneier has noted that chemists have been debunking the likely effectiveness of the scheme and that the plot was hardly imminent: none of the conspirators had bought airline tickets while some didn't even have passports.

[3] Are there more people out there who hate the United States?
Polls around the world strongly suggest the answer to this is a decided "yes." The post-9/11 events that seem to have inspired this change are the American attack upon (and, increasingly it seems, debacle in) Iraq and now the destruction inflicted on Lebanon by U.S.-supported Israel.
However, the United States was far from beloved in the most relevant area, the Middle East, before 9/11 either, and hatred for American Middle East policy is what principally drove the attacks. It was in the mid-1990s when America's UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright was asked on television's "60 Minutes" whether she thought the sanctions-induced deaths of perhaps half a million Iraqi children was "worth it." Without taking issue with the death toll estimate, she replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price–we think the price is worth it." [2] Although this remarkable acknowledgement amazingly provoked no comment at the time in the United States, it quickly became famous in the Arab world.

[4] Do the haters see more or less value in striking the United States?
In his excellent book, The Far Enemy, Fawaz Gerges argues that mainstream Islamists–the vast majority within the Islamist political movement–have given up on the use of force except perhaps against Israel, and that the remaining jihadis who are still willing to apply violence constituted a tiny minority before 9/11. But he goes on to note that the vast majority even of this small group primarily focuses on various "infidel" Muslim regimes and consider those among them who carry out violence against the "far enemy"–mainly Europe and the United States–to be irresponsible and reckless adventurers who endanger the survival of the whole movement. From this perspective, suggests Gerges, the 9/11 attacks proved to be substantially counterproductive by massively heightening concerns about terrorism around the world. The key result among jihadis and religious nationalists was a vehement rejection of Al Qaeda's strategy and methods, particularly after reactions to the 9/11 attacks and subsequent terrorism in Muslim countries brought suppression of the movement.
Thus a reasonable conclusion is that, while we are less safe in that more people around the world hate the United States (or least its foreign policy) than did so before 9/11 (or, actually, before the U.S. invasion of Iraq), we are more safe in that even fewer people than before 9/11 think striking the U.S. directly makes much sense.

[5] Are we more or less vulnerable to attack?
Compared to what? (as Henny Youngman replied when asked, "How's your wife?") Being invulnerable? All societies all the time are "vulnerable" to tiny bands of suicidal fanatics in the sense that it is impossible to prevent every terrorist act. There is no way to make everything completely safe from that any more than every store can be protected against shoplifting or every street can be made permanently free of muggers. This fundamental condition has hardly altered since 9/11—and essentially it cannot substantially be altered. Nor is it new or dependent on modern technology. As a friend of mine has pointed out, 19 dedicated, suicidal, and lucky terrorists could probably have scuttled the Titanic, drowning all aboard.
After 9/11 Homeland Security officials set out at Congressional urging to tally up a list of potential targets in the United States. By 2004, they had enumerated 33,000, to the apparent dismay of Homeland Security czar Ridge. Dismay was premature: within a year, the list had been expanded to 80,000. Although the list has remained secret–we wouldn't want to put ideas into the head of your average diabolical terrorist, after all, as they argue over whether target 52,789 is more or less attractive than target 21,347. However, there have been a number of leaks indicating that miniature golf courses have been included on this exquisite exercise in self-parody, as well as Weeki Wachee Springs, a roadside waterpark in Florida notable for its mermaids.

"Homeland security cannot be had on the cheap," proclaims Senator Joseph Lieberman. The problem is that it cannot be had on the expensive either. It is possible to make any individual target—like the Washington Monument–more secure from terrorism. But, unless funds are infinite, society can't defend against every possibility—or even against a large number of them. To be blunt (and obvious), it is simply not possible to protect every bus, every shop, every factory, every tunnel, every bridge, every road, every mall, every place of assembly, every mile of railroad track. Some relevant statistics: in the United States there are 87,000 food-processing plants, 500 urban transportation systems, 80,000 dams, 66,000 chemical plants, 590,000 highway bridges, 5,000 airports, 12,800 power plants, 2 million miles of pipelines, and 2 billion miles of cable, not to mention some 13,000 McDonald's (at this writing). Meanwhile, the Post Office handles nearly 200 billion pieces of mail each year. Nor is it possible to secure every border or have perfect, or for that matter, semi-perfect, port security—a particular vulnerability, among billions, that has attracted the focused attention of many worriers, if not so far of any actual terrorists. The United States can import over a billion dollars' worth of shoes in a single month, notes Schneier–is each shoe box to be inspected?
Moreover, if one tempting target becomes less vulnerable, your inventive terrorist could simply move on to others. Thus, if airplanes have become more difficult to hijack and fly into targets (not so much because of enhanced security measures but because, as demonstrated in the fourth plane on 9/11, passengers and crew will now fight), there are still plenty of trains and buses out there. If the Washington Monument seems to have become a difficult target after years of expensive renovation, the agile terrorist might be led to cast an eye about for other notable tall, pointy objects—the Seattle Space Needle, for example. A displacement effect might even increase casualties: the destruction of the Washington Monument might be more embarrassing than that of the Space Needle, but it would probably cost fewer lives.
To simplify things, it might seem to make more sense to come up with a list of things that aren't prospective targets. A tree in the middle of a forest might seem a likely prospect for this list. But what about forest fires? Five skilled terrorists, each armed with a match, could set off five of those simultaneously. They would be aided in their efforts by the park service's propensity prominently to publicize which forests at any given moment are the driest and most tinderbox-like. Maybe in our determined quest to inconvenience terrorists we'd need to classify that information, hoping that campfire builders as well as smoking backpackers and motorists (but not your wandering malevolent terrorist) would have enough sense to be able to tell whether they are venturing through forested areas that are dry or not.
Since international terrorists active in the United States—thus far at least—have eschewed trees to concentrate on buildings in major cities, many think it reasonable to suggest that protective efforts should disproportionately focus on major cities. Thoughtful and presumably well-paid planners had by 2003 come up with a terrorist hitlist of seven: New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Houston, and Los Angeles. This exercise in metropolitan chauvinism, however, proved to be notably unpopular in places like, for example, Columbus, Ohio–not to mention Oklahoma City, kept off the list presumably because, although it suffered far more deaths from terrorism than all but two of the cities on the list, it had been the target merely of a domestic terrorist. Accordingly, the list was quickly expanded to 30 and, by 2005, to 73 (including Oklahoma City). It is not at all clear how one can even begin to "protect" large (or even not-so-large) cities against random acts of terror that can be carried out by a single individual with a bomb in a backpack.
Moreover, it is entirely possible that international terrorists might one day come to realize there is more payoff for them in hitting more ordinary and typical targets because that would scare more people. Of particular appeal to terrorists, perhaps, would be towns that tend to be synonymous with ordinary America, in part because they have peculiar or amusing names, like Peoria, Illinois, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Pocatello, Idaho, Azusa, California, or Xenia, Ohio. After all, if a bomb goes off in one of those, it can go off anywhere.
Actually, although the big-city premise holds thus far for the United States, terrorists overseas, even since 9/11, have often targeted tourist areas that are not in major cities, particularly hotels, in the case of Egypt, and a nightclub, as in the case of Bali.
Massive efforts to screen communications are also likely to prove to be wasteful exercises. Some people have characterized the process as trying to find a needle in a haystack by adding more hay. The effort principally leads to the accumulation of monumental amounts of data, and it creates an impossible number of false positives. Not only does this effort cost a large amount of money (no one yet seems to have tallied up how much), but it has not led to the detection of many–or maybe even of any–real terrorists in the United States. Moreover, notes security expert Schneier, gathering massive surveillance banks of such data not only constitutes an invasion of privacy, but the databases themselves become hugely attractive targets for criminals and identity thieves.
The process is also expensive and disruptive. In what can only be called an act of highest heroism, American Enterprise Institute analyst Veronique de Rugy has actually tried to figure out the budget of the Department of Homeland Security. She comes up with an extensive list of highly questionable expenditures. One that might be added stems from the way the Pentagon has extrapolated extravagantly from 9/11 to conclude grandly that "it is unsafe to have employees in urban office buildings," and is in the process of moving tens of thousands of people in its more obscure agencies out of the area with little consideration about how they will manage to get to work on highways that are already congested.It would seem to make more sense to substantially abandon the quixotic policy of seeking to make everything (or even a lot of stuff) safe, and then use the money saved to repair any terrorist damage and to compensate any victims.

[6] Are we more or less likely to commit suicide if attacked?
In 2003, while Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge bravely declared that "America is a country that will not be bent by terror" or "broken by fear," General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was ominously suggesting that if terrorists were able to engineer an event that managed to escalate 9/11's damage by killing 10,000 Americans, they would successfully "do away with our way of life."[3] The sudden deaths of that many Americans–although representing less than four thousandths of one percent of the population–would indeed be horrifying and tragic, the greatest one-day disaster the country has suffered since the Civil War. But the only way terrorist acts could conceivably "do away with our way of life" would be if, bent and broken, we did it to ourselves in reaction. The process would presumably involve repealing the Bill of Rights, boarding up churches, closing down newspapers and media outlets, burning books, abandoning English for (North) Korean, and refusing evermore to consume hamburgers.
After predicting with great assurance that there would be terrorist events in connection with the 2004 elections, alarmist Michael Ignatieff of Harvard insists with equal certainty in his book, The Lesser Evil, that "inexorably, terrorism, like war itself, is moving beyond the conventional to the apocalyptic." Unlike Myers, he goes on patiently to explain how the United States has become more likely to kill itself in response to a terrorist attack. Although Americans did graciously allow their leaders one fatal mistake in September 2001, they simply "will not forgive another one." If there are several large-scale attacks, he confidently predicts, the trust that binds the people to its leadership and to each other will crumble, and the "cowed populace" will demand that tyranny be imposed upon it, and quite possibly break itself into a collection of rampaging lynch mobs devoted to killing "former neighbors" and "onetime friends." The solution, he thinks, is to crimp civil liberties now in a desperate effort to prevent the attacks he is so confident will necessarily impel us to commit societal, cultural, economic, and political self-immolation.
I find these dire scenarios implausible. The United States is unlikely to be toppled by dramatic acts of terrorist destruction, even extreme ones. As it happens, officials estimated for a while last year that Hurricane Katrina had inflicted 10,000 deaths–the tolerance level set by General Myers. Although this, of course, was not a terrorist act, there were no indications whatever that, while catastrophic for the hurricane victims themselves, the way of life of the rest of the nation would be notably done away with by such a disaster. It is also easy to imagine scenarios in which 10,000 would have been killed on September 11–if the planes had hit the World Trade Center later in the day when more people were at work for example–and indeed, early estimates at the time were much higher than 3000. Any death is tragic, but it is hardly likely that a substantially higher loss on 9/11 would have necessarily have triggered societal suicide.
We already absorb a great deal of tragedy and unpleasantness and still manage to survive. We live with a considerable quantity of crime, and the United States regularly loses 40,000 lives each year in automobile accidents. Moreover, countries have endured massive, sudden catastrophes without collapsing. In 1990 and then again in 2003, Iran suffered earthquakes that nearly instantly killed some 35,000 in each case. The tsunami that hit Indonesia and elsewhere in 2004 killed several times that many. But the countries have clearly survived these disasters: they constitute major tragedies, of course, but they hardly proved to be "existential" ones.
Thus the country can readily absorb considerable damage if necessary, and it has outlasted far more potent threats in the past. To suggest otherwise is to express contempt for America's capacity to deal with adversity.
However, although the alarmists may exaggerate, a proclivity that is by nature (and definition) central to their basic makeup, the subtext of their message should perhaps be taken seriously: ultimately, the enemy, in fact, is us. Thus far at least, terrorism is a rather rare and, appropriately considered, not generally a terribly destructive phenomenon. But there is a danger that hysteria over it could become at least somewhat self-fulfilling should extensive further terrorism be visited upon the Home of the Brave.
A key element in a policy toward terrorism, therefore, should be to control, to deal with, or at least productively to worry about the fear and overreaction that terrorism so routinely inspires and that generally constitutes its most damaging effect.

Notes

[1] Bill Gertz, "5,000 in U.S. Suspected of Ties to al Qaeda; Groups Nationwide Under Surveillance," Washington Times 11 July 2002: A1.
[2] "Punishing Saddam: Sanctions Against Iraq Not Hurting Leaders of the Country, But the Children Are Suffering and Dying," 60 Minutes, CBS, May 12, 1996.
[3] Jennifer C. Kerr, "Terror Threat Level Raised to Orange," Associated Press, December 21, 2003.

History ignored

President's men rebrand 'War on Terror' as World War III

Source: WorkingForChange
Authors: Geov Parrish
Dated: 2006-09-12

The aide (a senior advisor to President Bush) said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernable reality" ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." -- as reported by Ron Suskind, in the New York Times Magazine, 10-17-2004

In the two weeks leading up to this week's fifth anniversary of 9-11, President Bush and his shock team –- Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and the rest -– have rolled out a well-oiled, electoral-season attack campaign, once again politicizing 9-11 and national security for their hoped-for personal gain. This time, along with ever-more-extreme equations of domestic criticism and abetting of terrorists/Islamofascists/The Bogeyman, Bush et al. have taken to that favorite conservative trope, World War II. Not only are Chamberlain and appeasement frequently (and illogically) invoked, but some of The President's Men are even renaming their Global War on Terror, aka The Long War, by what they seem to think is a more appealing and salable label: World War III.

The World War II nonsense, of course, is used for what, upon reflection, is an unflattering reason: over 60 years of continuous American militarism have passed since the surrender of Germany and Japan, yet that conflict is the last one in which few of us have any moral doubts as to America's morally superior role in the war. (Of course, there are the small matters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo, and other Allied mass murders of civilians on a previously unimagined scale, but who's quibbling?) As the ultimate pop culture personification of evil, Hitler has been inspiring lazy propagandistic comparisons for so long that (in this case) the failure to properly stand up to Hitler both carries special resonance and is trite beyond endurance. And so, we see the Republican's new rhetorical wrinkle in their familiar electoral campaign of fear. It is the selective, if not judicious, use of history.

It's a pity that in making their actual post-9-11 policy decisions, these clowns so completely ignored history. That ignorance -– or, in the words of that anonymous White House aide, that contempt for the "reality-based community" –- is a big reason the Global War On Terror has been such a catastrophic mess. From the day of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Bush administration decisions have been based on historical ignorance (or, more likely, arrogance that the rules of human nature no longer applied) and faulty premises. And here we are.

The most basic tactical (and moral) mistake, of course, was to immediately label 9-11 an act of war, as opposed to a heinous crime, and crafting a primarily military response to a non-military problem. With the exception of destroying Al-Qaeda's Afghanistan training camps, which any administration would have done, the major triumphs in defending the U.S. against further terror attack have all been administrative and investigative: intelligence work, police work that foiled subsequent plots (without need for any of the vastly expanded state powers 9-11 has been the pretext for), enhanced security measures, tracking and shutting down terrorism's financial networks.

America's hugely costly (in money and lives) military actions over the past five years have had little to do with any of this. Instead, they have made the terror threat exponentially worse –- both because the Bush cabal has done bin Laden's terrorizing (i.e., fear-mongering) work for him, and because terrorism becomes pointless without public support. But rather than work to cement the broad sympathy of the Muslim public for the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, Bush has done everything possible to obliterate it and legitimize Al-Qaeda and its ilk in Muslim eyes.

More to the point here, the reliance on permanent war as a response to terrorism is not only counterproductive, and preposterous (waging war against a tactic?), but deeply ahistorical. The chances that terrorism can seriously threaten America's future are minimal; the fact that militarism, global overreach, and arrogance destroys global empires from within is well-documented throughout recorded history. Meantime, at least two other current crises pose far more of a threat to our national security: our horrific trade and budget deficit, which has left our economy completely at the mercy of China, Japan, and other foreign creditors who don't care for our global pretensions; and global warming, which could easily destroy the U.S. and global economies and cost countless lives even at home. (C.f. New Orleans.) Both, of course, have been made worse by the Bush Administration's so-called Global War On Terror, a prime factor (along with free trade and tax cuts for the rich) in our economic vulnerability, and, through its recasting into Wars of Aggressions Against Countries With Oil, that much more of an embrace of fossil fuel technologies threatening to kill us all.

But our MBA President needn't even have had a liberal arts grounding in world history to have recognized the fallacy of his actions. Judicious or even cursory awareness of recent history, and specifically another more recent war that we "won," would have sufficed. That "war" was the intentional and successful U.S. effort to lure the Soviet Union into Afghanistan in 1979, a gambit (of the much-derided Carter administration, mind you) that did a lot to hasten the USSR's dissolution.

Afghanistan turned out to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam : a protracted, brutal guerrilla war that exposed and accelerated the rot within the Soviet military and disillusioned the people back home. The story of how the CIA and its allies in the Pakistani ISI funded and trained mujahadeen Islamicists, including Osama bin Laden and many of the other fundamentalists now railing at the U.S. and the West, is well known. 9-11 was, indeed, the mother of all blowback.

But that ten-year war also had clear lessons for what Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld should never have done after 9-11, in either Afghanistan or Iraq: mistake a quick, easy march to a nation's capital and overthrow of the government with victory. The "victory," in Kabul in 1979 and 2001, and in Baghdad in 2003, was only the beginning of what should have been a long counter-insurgency slog, involving lots of troops, tremendous patience, and a huge investment in building civil society. Then, maybe, you can win.

Instead, our history-invoking President has done nearly everything exactly wrong.

It's already forgotten, but the aerial bombing campaign and proxy Northern Alliance troops (a collection of warlords and thugs much despised by most Afghans) didn't ever defeat the Taliban. Instead, the Taliban made a tactical decision to retreat to the mountains in advance of oncoming winter –- a move that, as most Afghans knew but most Americans didn't, also allowed the bombing to stop before winter's onset and aid convoys to reach the U.N.-estimated seven million rural Afghans at risk of starvation that winter. Washington was fully prepared to let them all starve; the Taliban weren't. Afghans remember that.

That was the Taliban's first tactical "victory" in what they always considered to be a long war, just as expelling the Soviets –- a campaign many Taliban fighters are veterans of -– was also protracted. But in a country continuously civilized (and frequently overrun by invaders) for thousands of years, a decade of warfare to expel a foreign occupier is but a moment in time. Native fighters in both Afghanistan and Iraq know this; Washington, with its eye ever on polling and the next election cycle, doesn't.

The Taliban promised, when they withdrew in 2001, that they'd be back. But it's unlikely they ever thought it would be this quick. The Soviets, with hundreds of thousands of troops and brutal policies to go with their puppet regime, took ten years to give up. Today, the Taliban are far ahead of that timeline, and they have George Bush to thank. Within weeks of the Taliban's retreat, Bush had abandoned his pledges to rebuild Afghanistan and stay for the long haul ("stay the course," if you will), instead redeploying troops and money for his desired invasion of Iraq. Afghanistan became the War on Terror's backwater, a placeholder patrolled by NATO and governed, allegedly, by a former CIA asset who has never had control of much more than the capital city of Kabul, and that only during daylight hours. The rest of the country was carved up, with U.S. and CIA assistance, among the various Northern Alliance warlords, and life for ordinary Afghans, men and women alike, was no better than under the Taliban –- only now non-Muslim foreign occupiers were calling the shots. Victory number two for the Taliban.

Last week, buried in U.S. media beneath the overheated rhetoric of the Bush camp, the crumbling empire was manifest. British Lt. Gen. David Richards, head of the NATO forces in Afghanistan, warned that, in the words of the USA Today headline, "Deadline to Break Taliban: Six Months." If the Taliban aren't in full retreat by then, Richards warned, the country would be lost. They won't be, of course. Later last week, the respected European outfit the Senlis Council issued another of their periodic assessments of Afghanistan. Their verdict: the Taliban now control fully half of Afghanistan (far more than Karzai's irrelevant government); poppy production, reintroduced after the fall of the Taliban, is now at record levels, 50 percent above its previous peak and enough this year to supply 130 percent of the world's heroin; U.S./NATO efforts to eradicate the crop, the only viable economic support for much of the rural countryside, are creating a humanitarian crisis; and the Taliban, by opposing those eradication efforts (in exchange for a cut of the drug proceeds, the same scam their warlord enemies have run since 2001), are gaining more and more popular support.

Last week, a suicide bomber killed 16, including two U.S. soldiers, in the capital city of Kabul. Per capita, more U.S. soldiers are now dying in Afghanistan than in Iraq. And the total number of War on Terror U.S. soldiers killed reached 2,974 -- one more than the number killed on 9-11. Bush has now killed more Americans than bin Laden.

The warnings, eerily similar, were sounding in Iraq last week, too. As the parliament of an Iraqi government confined to the Green Zone and irrelevant in the rest of the country reconvened, its Sunni speaker warned that the country of Iraq has only three or four months to avoid complete collapse. Meanwhile, the fundamentalist Shiite party with the largest number of parliamentary seats unveiled a bill that would codify the steps for breaking the country into three semi-independent states -– a step certain to exacerbate all-out civil war. As with Afghanistan, Bush and company have pissed off (and raped, tortured, and especially killed) the natives, committed too few soldiers to keep the peace, completely abandoned investment in reconstruction and civil society (thus empowering Iraqi civil society's only surviving institutions, the fundamentalist clerics), and more generally assumed that since they couldn't smell the stink of their own shit, there must not be any.

Any and all of this could have been and was predicted by anyone who knew anything about Middle East societies, or about how history has tended to work, both in the recent past and for millennia.

Bush and his entourage are the last people who should be invoking history. Instead, for generations to come, history will invoke them. It will not be Chamberlain who the politicians of 2070 use to deride their opponents. It will be George W. Bush.

[Lucifer] It is also worth noting:

"It's unacceptable to think there's any kind of comparison between the behavior of the United States of America and the action of Islamic extremists who kill innocent women and children to achieve an objective" said Bush, growing animated as he spoke.

Lucifer notes that Our Dear Misleader sensibly did not attempt to claim that American troops have not bombed, shelled, burned, squashed, shot, raped, killed and otherwise disposed of large numbers of Iraqi and Afghan women and children whose "innocence" must, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, be presumed. So, given that the "killing" behavior exhibited by "Our extremists" is at least as bad as, and possibly worse than that of the "Islamic extremists", the key difference in the behaviour which Our Dear Misleader considers unacceptable to compare has to be that despite our extremely violent behaviour, the United States has no objective.

Careful examination of the news reveals that despite the fact that Our Dear Misleader was the person to announce this, it is very probably quite true.


Lucifer

[Nin`]

Five Years of High Crimes and Misdemeanors

Bush After 9/11

[Lucifer: I'm delighted to discover that there are those well to the right of me who also consider that the only ethical course is to impeach Bush ASAP. This greatly increases the likelihood that something along those lines is possible.]

Source: Counterpunch
Authors: Dave Lindorff
Dated: 2006-09-11

The fifth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001 are a good time to take stock of where we've come since that day, and it is not a pretty picture.

Others are writing about what has been done to make the country safer from such attacks in the future (answer: not much), and about how the Iraq War, far from being a part of that project, was a duplicitous diversion that had nothing to do with combating terror, and everything to do with establishing the president as a "commander in chief."

I want to write about the five-year crime spree against the Constitution and the American people that began almost immediately as the buildings fell, and that today has the American Republic teetering on the brink of a totalitarian future. Because it is clear that Bush and his advisors, far from acting to unite the country and protect it from attack, used that horrible tragedy half a decade ago as an excuse to terrorize Congress and the American public, and as an excuse to set the nation on a permanent war footing, so as to aggrandize unchecked power and to usurp the powers of the Congress and the Courts, thus converting the presidency into a dictatorship.

We know the Bush team had their sights set on an invasion of Iraq from even before the president took his first oath of office. The ousted Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, a member from the outset of the White House National Security Council, has reported that at the first meeting of that body, several days into the first Bush term and long before the 9-11 attacks, the focus was on how to get the U.S. into a war against Iraq. "Find me a way to do this," O'Neill quotes our draft-dodging president as saying.

Within days of the attacks, the White House had cobbled together a massive document composed of hundreds of police-state measures submitted to Congress by police and right-wing legislators, and summarily rejected, over the years and cynically called it the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act. Barbara Olshansky, my co-author on our new book The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, May 2006), and deputy director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says that many of the pages of the initial draft of that nightmarish legislation still had the old bill numbers of the rejected legislation that they had begun life as. Passed without discussion or debate, the new law effectively gutted the First, Fourth and Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments of the Constitution's Bill of Rights. But that was just the start.

In attacking Afghanistan and the Al Qaeda organization operating there, the president appropriately sought, and was granted by Congress, an Authorization for the Use of Force. But he has subsequently interpreted that authorization to pursue terrorism in Afghanistan and other jurisdictions around the world to mean he had been given the permanent title of commander in chief in a "war on terror" that has no conceivable end, and no boundaries (it includes the domestic U.S. in his view), and that this title authorizes him to override acts of Congress, orders of the Courts, the rules of government laid out in the U.S. Constitution, and international treaties and laws adopted by the U.S.

In short order, the president ignored Congress's passage of a funding bill for the war in Afghanistan, and called off the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, illegally shifting troops and personnel in that country away to Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other areas around Iraq, in preparation for an invasion of that country.

While Bin Laden was left free and continue his plotting, a secret conspiracy was then organized by the Bush Administration, which included creation of an alternative intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, in the Pentagon, and a propaganda arm, the White House Iraq Group, all with the goal of manufacturing and pushing into the media fake evidence designed to frighten Congress and the American public into supporting war against Iraq. The OSP used lies and bogus "defectors" provided by the CIA-created Iraqi National Congress to gin up horror stories of germ weapons and chemical weapons programs, and even of a nonexistent nuclear weapons program by Saddam Hussein. One of the most elaborate hoaxes involved the use of forged documents purporting to be signed agreements by the government of the African state of Niger to provide 400 tons of uranium ore to Iraq.

These documents originated in Italy, where stationary and seals stolen from the Niger Embassy in Rome were used to give them a look of authenticity, but the forgers, apparently linked to the Italian intelligence service SISMI, were slipshod and signed the names of officials no longer in office in Niger. When the forgeries were easily spotted by U.S. intelligence experts, key members of the OSP, allegedly working together with Iran-Contra conspirator Michael Ledeen and notorious arms dealer and con-artist ManucherGorbanifar, as well as with the heads of Italian intelligence and defense, allegedly concocted a black-op scheme to recycle those forged documents through British intelligence, presenting them as "new" evidence of Hussein's nuclear ambitions.

It was this scheme that Cheney and Condi Rice were mendaciously citing when they referred ominously to a mushroom cloud threat in the fall of 2002, and that Bush lyingly referred to in his 2003 State of the Union message, when he said: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

The administration lies that launched the country into a war in Iraq were just that. Lies and a conspiracy against the public and against peace which have cost the lives of over 2700 American troops and of over 100,000 innocent Iraqi men, women and children. Even the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee has now admitted that the administration's claims, like one linking Hussein to Al Qaeda, were bogus-but the did the trick all the same, and the country continues to pay the price, in blood and money.

Bush also used his "commander in chief" title to justify his decision to exempt hundreds of people captured in Afghanistan, and hundreds of others kidnapped from all over the world, and held in Guantanamo Bay's detention center, from the protections of the Geneva Convention. The Supreme Court recently ruled that this decision was a violation not only of the Geneva Convention, but of the U.S. Criminal Code, which adopted the Third Geneva Convention on Treatment of POWs as a part of U.S. law in 1996. The president, that is to say, has already been declared to be a criminal by the highest court in the land. (I should note that some of the "terrorists" held for five years at Guantanamo were kids, some as young as seven and eight, at the time of their "capture"-a violation of the Geneva Accords. One of these children, brought to Guantanamo at age 12 from Afghanistan, was one of the three captives who committed suicide last June in despair at ever being released. Compounding the horror, the government had determined several weeks earlier, that he had been wrongly accused and had scheduled for him for release just three days after the day of his suicide. But government officials didn't bother to tell him. Though his attorney was told of his pending release, the government barred the attorney from contacting him.)

A lower federal court has also found the president to have criminally violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution for authorizing National Security Agency spying on the communications of tens of thousands of Americans without first seeking a warrant from the secret FISA Court.

When the Supreme Court slapped down the president's claim to have special powers as commander in chief, it effectively pulled the plug on his argument justifying other criminal abuses of power, including his refusal to provide information demanded by congressional committees and the bi-partisan 9-11 Commission, and his use of "signing statements" to invalidate all or part of over 850 laws enacted by Congress. The same court ruling undermines the president's claim that as commander in chief he has the power to declare any American to be an enemy combatant, subject to arrest without charge and detention without the right of habeas corpus access to the courts, or the power to authorize the use of torture against such individuals, or against other captured in the bogus "war" on terror.

The problem is that while the Supreme Court has made this determination regarding the president's criminal behavior, the president is constitutionally invulnerable from prosecution, even from war crimes. The only recourse is impeachment, which is the power to remove an elected president or any other federal official, and which belongs solely to the Congress.

Because both houses of Congress, and most importantly, the House of Representatives, are currently controlled by the Republican Party, which is in league with the president, there will be no impeachment of the president until at least this November.

At that point, however, if Democrats manage to gain the necessary 15 seats to gain a majority in the House, impeachment becomes not only a possibility, but a duty and a necessity.

It simply cannot be allowed for a president to commit the broad array of crimes against the Constitution and the People of the United States that President Bush has already committed, and for there to be no effort to impeach him. To allow that travesty to happen would not only be an insult to the memory of the Founding Fathers (and of those who died on 9-11, in whose names most of these crimes have so cynically been committed). It would also condemn us to a future in which subsequent presidents, of both parties, could commit the same crimes with impunity, citing the Bush presidency as a precedent.

Take just one crime-the use of signing statements to invalidate acts of Congress. If a Democratic Congress were not to impeach on this issue, and were to allow the president to continue with this abuse of his power, not one significant piece of Democratic legislation could pass into law without the president doctoring it to fit his own political needs. Moreover, a future president-say Hillary Clinton or Russ Feingold-could use the same tactic to invalidate laws passed by some future Republican Congress.

There are less than two months remaining before the November congressional election, at which all members of the House and a third of the members of the Senate must face the voters. The American people owe it to themselves, to the founders and to all the American soldiers who have died over the years fighting to defend America and the Constitution, to ensure that: 1) Democrats are given control of the House of Representatives, and 2) their own representative, whether Democrat or Republican, understands that this president is a serial Constitutional criminal who must be brought to justice.

That will be the best commemoration of 9-11: That Americans finally stood up as citizens of a great republic and demanded that their country survive not just the threat of terror from without, but the even more serious threat of tyranny from within.

[joesteel64]

First off, I agree and believe there should be immediate impeachment of our pres. he started a war without a reason except that Osama Bin Laden and Saddam were working together. Not True. The main reason for this is that Osama is a Shi'ite muslim and Saddam is a Sunni (I may have it backwards but you get the point). This makes them enemies. In fact to be quite honest, I'm not so sure Bin Laden planned the attacks on the twin towers. I believe that Saudi Arabia made have played a role. If the hijackers were of an asian terrorist groups and all but a few were Taiwanese, I would think that Taiwan played a part in it too.

Second; list of stupid things done in the presidency
-USA PATRIOT ACT, need i say more
-Support of the wire tapping policy
-Possible delivery of F-16s to Pakistan (they already hate us)
-Flying the Bin LAden family out of the country without questioning after the attacks (it has been rumored that the family has had contact with Osama)
-There are definitely more, but my brain is shot (excuse me dulled right now) don't wan't somebody to be accused of murder.

[fivetail_uzimaki]

I don't like President Bush. That's all there is to it! I would say why, but this site has a policy about swearing that I honor.

[Chez Daja]

This site also has a policy about spam... which you've just violated. In doing so, I'll need to issue a warning. Obviously you've had a look after, perhaps broken other rules in the past, but that's where the learning curve should come in...

This is a warning for spam...and quite the necro post, so on this subject, I'll close this thread off.

Have a nice day.