Category: Politics

Perfect example of the manipulation of the media in order to manipulate Congress in order to manipulate the public into thinking they are being made safe.

The White House dismissed as “outlandish” on Wednesday suggestions that it disclosed the capture [JAW—over a month ago] of a man suspected of planning a “dirty bomb” attack in order to help President Bush’s homeland security plan and to deflect criticism of U.S. intelligence agencies.
….
Ashcroft raised eyebrows at the White House and elsewhere by his decision to announce Padilla’s capture in a television appearance on Monday from Moscow, where he was on unrelated business, and his claim that U.S. officials had disrupted an “unfolding terrorist plot to attack the United States.”

We want to solve the [crime], but not ask why it was done.
The answer would cancel out the entire illusory campaign.

But Bushie has assured us, “This guy Padilla is a bad guy.”
So there you are. No more questions.
Note that Mr. Padilla is an American citizen, that he was picked up as a material witness only, that he has not been charged with any crime, that he is not known to have gotten beyond the discussion stage of any alleged wrongdoing (no dirty bomb in his backpack or under his bed, in spite of the hysterical headlines), but the Administration needs him in it continuing war on the Constitution, and on the America that is not it.
Their real enemy is us.
I have a horrifically beautiful Sue Coe print, created just prior to our first Gulf war, which bears the text, “The enemy is here, not in Kuwait!” It’s sad, but in a more innocent time, I really thought the piece would quickly become dated.

The Bushies are at it again. They just can’t shut up, can they?

“The free societies we love face unprecedented threats,” Bush told the International Democrat Union, a worldwide association of moderate to conservative politicians. “We face cold-blooded killers that hate the freedoms we cherish.”
….
“Grave threats are accumulating against us, and inaction will only bring them closer,” Cheney said. “We will not wait until it is too late.”

The Govament’s up to something big, perhaps real soon. Grab the flintlock and stock the cellar, Mother!

It looks like Afghan women will not let themselves be shut out, in spite of the way the cards have been dealt for the Loya Jirga. The New York Daily News manages a report of its own today, scooping and shaming the more high brow “Grey Lady.”

“If there is any obstacle, we will definitely boycott the loya jirga,” threatened 47-year-old Zia Karkar of Laghman province.
She and five other women took center stage yesterday, warning their male counterparts that despite coming from different tribes, they are united in their demand for a greater role in government and society.
….
Topping the women’s list of demands is a seat on the panel that will write Afghanistan’s version of the Bill of Rights for its 30 million people.

So, The NYTimes takes the men of Afghanistan at their word that “the Afghan people are being given some say in their future.” In a long article explaining the process and makeup of the Loya Jirga, not a word is said about the fact that women are almost ignored as participants or candidates in the voting which selected the delegates. You have to look in a separate fact box, or in other news sources, to find that women constitute only somewhere between 10 to 14 percent of the delegates, and most of those numbers are the result of “selection” not election, therefore something like a gift from the men.

The United Nations mission in Afghanistan has made painstaking efforts to work out a power-sharing deal that would be widely acceptable to the different ethnic groups and factions around the country.

That is, male ethnic groups and factions.
Remember that The United States Constitution recognized that blacks were to be counted as 3/5ths of whites, even as they were counted as slaves. What does it say that our own media today has no problem with counting the significance of women as somewhere between nothing and 1/4th that of men?

In Brussels wednesday, our oh so brilliant secretary of war, er, defense, attempted to defend the Bushie administration’s position that we cannot wait for proof before acting against other countries and groups who are suspected of copying our own posession and employment of weapons of mass destruction. I don’t think he made himself quite clear however:

“The message is that there are no knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns, that is to say there are things we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — things we do not know we don’t know.
“So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say ‘well, that’s basically what we see as the situation’, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns.”

And then we go in and bomb the hell out of, whomever or whatever.

Did our insane obsession with a “war on drugs” cost us September 11, and will it continue to compromise our defense against repeat attacks, even after the Bureau’s vaunted reorganization plans?

While Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida minions were diligently preparing for their murderous mission, the FBI was looking the other way with equal determination. More than twice as many FBI agents were assigned to fighting drugs (2,500) than fighting terrorism (1,151). And a far greater amount of the FBI’s financial resources was dedicated to the war on drugs.
And this pathological prioritization of the drug war extended well beyond the allocation of money and manpower. It was ingrained in the culture. Counterterrorism units were treated like the bureau’s ugly stepchildren, looked down upon by FBI management because they weren’t making the kind of high-profile arrests that spruce up a supervisor’s resume and make the evening news.

The Washington regime is not disappointing those who expected the worst. [Sad, didn’t we once think that “the worst” was what they would do to mess us up at home?]

White House talk of never-ending-war to “make peace” is being actualized . Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defense and civilian head of U.S. armed forces (formerly known as the Secretary of War), has been dispatched to make “peace” between India and Pakistan. George Tenet, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the war-abetting organization of spooks that has an indelible image of fomenting division, distrust and mortal combat around the globe, has been dispatched to the Middle East to “make peace”. And we wonder “why do they hate us?”

In a note with an argument both succinct and timely, a NYTimes reader suggests how we can end the hostilities in at least one “war.”