-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: February 1, 2007 12:19:12 PM PST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: All 4 Terrorist Plots Bush "Foiled," Claimed in State of
the Union Address, NEVER EXISTED
BUSH SHOOTS FOR ‘JAWS,’ DELIVERS ‘JAWS 2’
PRESIDENT CLAIMED TO STOP 4 TERROR PLOTS,
BUT WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?
SPECIAL COMMENT
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC-TV's 'Countdown,' Jan 30, 2007
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16893899/
West Yorkshire in England has a new chief police constable.
Upon his appointment, Sir Norman Bettison made one of the strangest
comments of the year:
“The threat of terrorism,” he says, “is lurking out there like
‘Jaws 2.’”
Sir Norman did not exactly mine the richest ore for his analogy of
warning. A critic once said of the flopping sequel to the classic
film: “You’re gonna need a better screenplay.”
But this obscure British police official has reminded us that
terrorism is still being sold to the public in that country — and
in this — as if it were a thrilling horror movie and we were the
naughty teenagers about to be its victims.
And it underscores the fact that President Bush took this tack,
exactly a week ago tonight, in his terror-related passage in the
State of the Union.
A passage that was almost lost amid all the talk about Iraq and
health care and bipartisanship and the fellow who saved the
stranger from an oncoming subway train in New York City.
But a passage ludicrous and deceitful. Frightening in its hollow
conviction.
Frightening, in that the president who spoke it tried for “Jaws”
but got “Jaws 2.”
I am indebted to David Swanson, press secretary for Dennis
Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, who has blogged about the
dubious 96 words in Mr. Bush’s address this year and who has
concluded that of the four counter-terror claims the president
made, he went 0-for-4.
“We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our
allies have prevented,” Mr. Bush noted, “but here is some of what
we do know: We stopped an al-Qaida plot to fly a hijacked airplane
into the tallest building on the West Coast.”
This would, of course, sir, be the purported plot to knock down the
73-story building in Los Angeles, the one once known as the Library
Tower — the one you personally revealed so breathlessly a year ago
next month.
It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the
structure as the “Liberty Tower.”
But within hours it was also revealed that authorities in Los
Angeles had had no idea you were going to make any of the details —
whether serious or fanciful — public.
Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?
A year ago next month, the Los Angeles Times quoted a source —
identified only by the labyrinthine description “a U.S. official
familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism” —
who insisted that the purported “Library Tower plot” was one of
many al-Qaida operations that had not gotten very far past the
conceptual stage.
The former staff director of counter-terrorism for the National
Security Council — now a news analyst for NBC News and MSNBC —
Roger Cressey, puts it a little more bluntly.
In our conversation, he put the “Library Tower story” into a
category he called the “What-Ifs” — as in the old “Saturday Night
Live sketches that tested the range of comic absurdity:
What if ... Superman had worked for the Nazis?
What if ... Spartacus had had a Piper Cub during the battle against
the Romans in 70 B.C.?
More ominously, the L.A. Times source who debunked the Library
Tower story said that those who could correctly measure the
flimsiness of the scheme “feared political retaliation for
providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the
president.”
But Mr. Bush, you’re the decider.
And you decided that the Library Tower story should be scored as
one for you.
And you continued with a second dubious claim of counter-terror
success. “We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming
operatives for attacks inside the United States,” you said.
Well, sir, you’ve apparently stumped the intelligence community
completely with this one.
In his article, Mr. Swanson suggests that in the last week there
has been no reporting even hinting at what exactly you were talking
about.
He hypothesizes that either you were claiming credit for a ring
broken up in 1995 or that this was just the Library Tower story “by
another name.”
Another CIA source suggests to NBC News that since the Southeast
Asian cell dreamed of a series of attacks on the same day, you
declared the Library Tower one threat thwarted, and all their other
ideas, a second threat thwarted.
Our colleague Mr. Cressey sums it up:
This “Southeast Asian cell” was indeed the tale of the Library
Tower, simply repeated.
Repeated, Mr. Bush, in consecutive sentences in the State of the
Union — in your constitutionally mandated status report on the
condition and safety of the nation.
You showed us the same baby twice and claimed it was twins.
And then you said that was two for you.
Your third claim, sir, read thusly: “We uncovered an al-Qaida cell
developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America.”
Again, the professionals in counter-intelligence were startled to
hear about this.
Last fall, two Washington Post articles cited sources in the FBI
and other governmental agencies who said that hopes by foreign
terrorists to use anthrax in this country were fanciful at best,
farcical at worst.
And every effort to link the 2001 anthrax mailings in this country
to foreign sources has also struck out. The entire investigation is
barely still active.
Mr. Cressey goes a little further. Anything that might even
resemble an al-Qaida cell “developing anthrax,” he says, was in the
“dreaming” stages.
He used as a parallel those pathetic arrests outside Miami last
year in which a few men wound up getting charged as terrorists
because they couldn’t tell the difference between an al-Qaida
operative and an FBI informant.
Their “ringleader” seemed to be much more interested in getting his
“terrorist masters” to buy him a new car than in actually
terrorizing anybody.
That’s three for you, Mr. Bush.
“And just last August,” you concluded, “British authorities
uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over
the Atlantic Ocean.”
In a series of dramatic raids, 24 men were arrested.
Turned out, sir, a few of them actually had gone on the Internets
to check out some flight schedules.
Turned out, sir, only a few of them actually had the passports
needed to even get on the planes.
The plot to which President Bush referred was a plot without bombs.
It was a plot without any indication that the essence of the
operation — the in-flight mixing of volatile chemicals carried on
board in sports drink bottles — was even doable by amateurs or
professional chemists.
It was a plot even without sufficient probable cause.
A third of the 24 arrested that day — exactly 90 days before the
American midterm elections — have since been released.
The British had been watching those men for a year.
Before the week was out, their first statement, that the plot was
“ready to go, in days,” had been rendered inoperative.
British officials told NBC News of the lack of passports and plans;
told us that they had wanted to keep the suspects under
surveillance for at least another week.
Even an American official confirmed to NBC’s investigative unit
that there was “disagreement over the timing.”
The British then went further. Sources inside their government told
the English newspaper the Guardian that the raids had occurred only
because the Pakistanis had arrested a man named Rasheed Raouf.
That Raouf had been arrested by Pakistan only because we had
threatened to do it for them.
That the British had acted only because our government was willing
— to quote that newspaper, The Guardian — to “ride roughshod” over
the plans of British intelligence.
Oh, by the way, Mr. Bush, an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan
reduced the charges against Mr. Raouf to possession of bomb-making
materials and being there without proper documents.
Still, sir — evidently, that’s close enough.
Score four for you!
Your totally black-and-white conclusions in the State of the Union
were based on one gray area, and on three palettes on which the
experts can’t even see smudge, let alone gray.
It would all be laughable, Mr. Bush, were you not the president of
the United States.
It would all be political hyperbole, Mr. Bush, if you had not, on
this kind of “intelligence,” taken us to war, now sought to
escalate that war, and are threatening new war in Iran and maybe
even elsewhere.
What you gave us a week ago tonight, sir, was not intelligence, but
rather a walk-through of how speculation and innuendo, guesswork
and paranoia, daydreaming and fear-mongering, combine in your mind
and the minds of your government, into proof of your derring-do and
your success against the terrorists.
The ones who didn’t have anthrax.
The ones who didn’t have plane tickets or passports.
The ones who didn’t have any clue, let alone any plots.
But they go now into our history books as the four terror schemes
you’ve interrupted since 9/11.
They go into the collective consciousness as firm evidence of your
diligence, of the necessity of your ham-handed treatment of our
liberties, of the unavoidability of the 3,075 Americans dead in Iraq.
Congratulations, sir.
You are the hero of “Jaws 2.”
You have kept the Piper Cub out of the hands of Spartacus.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
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