For the Record

Oo, this is fun

Watch Clinton pulverize Fox News scum here.

Today GWB defeated ObL ...

... in killing Americans:

The announcement Sunday of four more U.S. military deaths in Iraq raises the death toll to 2,974 for U.S. military service members in Iraq and in what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.

The 9/11 attack killed 2,973 people, including Americans and foreign nationals but excluding the terrorists.

(Of course the Bush numbers only count the "war on terra".)

The real connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda

Notwithstanding that the administration has refused to provide the Sept. 21 2001 President's Daily Brief, even on a classified basis---astonishing, when you think about it, and indicative of how the 9-11 commission was a total Bush admin whitewash---various sources are leaking the contents:

Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.

The information was provided to Bush on September 21, 2001 during the "President's Daily Brief," a 30- to 45-minute early-morning national security briefing. Information for PDBs has routinely been derived from electronic intercepts, human agents, and reports from foreign intelligence services, as well as more mundane sources such as news reports and public statements by foreign leaders.

One of the more intriguing things that Bush was told during the briefing was that the few credible reports of contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda involved attempts by Saddam Hussein to monitor the terrorist group. Saddam viewed Al Qaeda as well as other theocratic radical Islamist organizations as a potential threat to his secular regime. At one point, analysts believed, Saddam considered infiltrating the ranks of Al Qaeda with Iraqi nationals or even Iraqi intelligence operatives to learn more about its inner workings, according to records and sources.

This is your government on neo-con acid.

The generally unhinged condition of political discourse in America

Leiter on a must-read tear.

Washington's greatest fear

bizarre:

what has caught the attention of the U.S. intelligence community is the strangely conciliatory nature of Bin Laden's new message, said some government officials and outside experts.

These experts said Bin Laden appeared to be intensifying his campaign to "re-brand" himself in the minds of Muslims worldwide, and become known more as a political voice than a global terrorist.

"In some ways the tone of the message is as intriguing, and alarming, as the timing," said a U.S. official familiar with the tape, and the intelligence community's analysis of it. "The absence of an explicit threat does represent a different point of emphasis for this guy.

"Is he still an enemy? Absolutely. Is he still focused on terrorism? Yes," continued the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But the tone of this is something we're looking at very closely to see where this guy is placing his emphasis."

The official said "a political spinoff [of Al Qaeda] is one of the greatest fears" of U.S. counter-terrorism authorities, with Bin Laden and his network following the path of the Palestine Liberation Organization, Hezbollah and the Irish Republican Army. Over the years, those organizations evolved from violent militant groups into broader organizations with influential, widely accepted political wings.

Now why would Washington's greatest fear be a broadly supported, politically active, less violent, version of a nationalist (as well as fundamentalist, of course) Al Qaeda? Clearly, this wouldn't be fearsome if Washington's goal were to end violence.

What does this tell us about Washington's actual goal? The bad thing about the politicization of PLO, Hez, IRA is that they actually managed to achieve get some of what they wanted. Familiarly, Osama's goal is to kick the US-western empire out of the Islamic world to re-establish the Caliphate. Al Q's current methods are pretty ineffective in undermining domestic US political support for Washington's imperialism; on the contrary, as the events of early 2003 firmly attest. OBL has wised up to this (or maybe the transition is part of a longstanding long-term strategy), and he's moving toward trying to make a separate peace with US people (as distinct from US elites); undercutting Bushco's rhetoric of endless war against an enemy trying to wipe out or enslave for instance Cortland, NY. If so, the reasonable conclusion is that Washington's goal is to maintain its empire regardless of the cost in (domestic and foreign) lives.

But we knew this already. -- Benj

OBL's speech

UPDATE: Got a better transcript and solid link.

"O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.

"Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden for example.

"It is known that those who hate freedom do not possess proud souls like those of the 19, may God rest their souls. We fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security we squander yours.

"I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.

"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed -- when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

"In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.

"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.

"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings ... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.

"He (Bush) adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism.....

"We had agreed with the (the Sept. 11) overall commander Mohammed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice.

"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This had given us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God...

"Your security is not in the hands of (Democratic presidential candidate John) Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.

-- Benj

Safer, are we?

Details here.

Countering right wing F911 talking points

here -- Benj

Maybe we should just hold it 2 days early

Counterterrorism officials consider postponing election in event of a terrorist attack.

We interrupt this convention to bring you OBL

The fix is in: Bush and gang are pressuring Pakistan to capture OBL, Mullah Omar, or Zawahiri preferably during the first three days of the Democratic convention; if not that, during the last ten days of July; but definitely before the election:

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism. In April, Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, publicly chided the Pakistanis for providing a "sanctuary" for Al Qaeda and Taliban forces crossing the Afghan border. "The problem has not been solved and needs to be solved, the sooner the better," he said.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. "Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn't change because of an election," says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack. But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."

A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

This is, of course, no surprise, but my sense of revulsion brought on by this confirmation of the complete depravity of the band of utterly amoral thugs in power here is reaching new levels, perhaps irrationally. -- Benj