Red Alert: Bush Endangers Us All


Everything essential about the meaning for us of the uncovered terrorist plot in England to set off bombs on airliners is in this paragragh, by Marc Ash:

What worked in foiling the plot to destroy the airliners was good old fashioned police work and a solid investigation. Not military action. The tools used by British authorities are tools that were available on September 11th 2001. They were available the day the US invaded Iraq, and they are available today. We have always had good tools to safeguard our security. Launching massive invasions is not helping, it's adding to the rage that fuels the madness.

But the U.S. of Bush has not taken this approach. It declared war on the concept of terrorism and invaded Iraq. To date all of the alleged conspirators were British citizens, some of them apparently having never been outside the country, let alone in, say, Iraq.

Nor have the Bushites effectively anticipated such attacks as the British stymied. In a front page article Saturday, the New York Times began: The Department of Homeland Security has taken significant steps since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to make it much harder to turn a plane into a flying weapon. But a nearly obsessive focus on the previous attacks may have prevented the federal government from combating new threats effectively, terrorism experts and former agency officials say.

The nation is still at risk from the same “failure of imagination” cited by the 9/11 commission as having contributed to the success of the 2001 attack, several argued.

For example, the kind of explosives this plot was supposed to use, and now responsible for millions of flyers going without liquids, was a problem that security experts isolated years ago but the Bushites have done nothing about, according to former CIA analyst Larry Johnson.

The New York Times editorial on Saturday begins: The most frightening thing about the foiled plot to use liquid explosives to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic is that both the government and the aviation industry have been aware of the liquid bomb threat for years but have done little to prepare for it.

Now we learned according to the Associated Press that: While the British terror suspects were hatching their plot, the Bush administration was quietly seeking permission to divert $6 million that was supposed to be spent this year developing new homeland explosives detection technology. This failure is so blatant that even some of the Rubber Stamp Republicans in Congress rebelled. Homeland Security's research arm, called the Sciences & Technology Directorate, is a "rudderless ship without a clear way to get back on course," Republican and Democratic senators on the Appropriations Committee declared recently. "The committee is extremely disappointed with the manner in which S&T is being managed within the Department of Homeland Security," the panel wrote June 29 in a bipartisan report accompanying the agency's 2007 budget.

The terrifying conclusion? In a separate AP article: After two wars, thousands of deaths and many billions of dollars, the United States is still vulnerable to terrorists. That painful reality has ignited a political frenzy over who's to blame and who's best qualified to protect Americans. The one thing that Republicans and Democrats agree on is this: Five years after the Sept. 11 disaster, terrorists want to strike again and the country is not safe. To hear both sides talk, the wonder is that America hasn't been hit yet.

Incompetence is way too weak a word to describe the Bushite approach to terrorism. Homeland Security is rife with quantified corruption and failure. To compound the threat rather than diminishing it, Bushite foreign policy failures have done everything any Islamacist terrorist could dream of, and more. The Middle East is more aroused against the U.S. and the West than ever before, provoked by our wanton destruction of Iraq, profiteering and criminal behavior as well as killing.

The latest debacle involving Israel has provoked anger which is bound to increase terrorism against Americans and allies. As Helen Thomas writes in her devastating analysis of Condi Rice's recent failures: Retired Army Lt. Gen. William Odom recently zeroed in on a fundamental truth about the Hezbollah-Israel war when he said U.S. policies in Iraq "opened the door for Iran and Syria to support Hezbollah." The U.S. presence in Iraq has had a "radicalizing impact" in the region, Odom recently wrote.

Bush and his minions are not only intent on destroying the future. They're going to make this a much nastier present. Immediately after the British plot was revealed, the Bushites tried to play the terror card again in a Republican fundraising appeal. The only way to make America safer is to get some accountability in Congress, and the only way to do that is to elect Democrats in November.