War

More.

Go read Steve Gilliard’s post on the subject.

Even the comics I read for fun are getting political.

Bush went to Buffalo yesterday to promote the Patriot Act. He chose it because it was the location of the prosecution of the “Lackawanna Six,” but that’s not a case that provides a convincing argument.

Even now, after the arrests and the anger and the world media spotlight, the mystery for neighbors in this old steel town remains this: Why would six of their young men so readily agree to plead guilty to terror charges, accepting long prison terms far from home?

…

But defense attorneys say the answer is straightforward: The federal government implicitly threatened to toss the defendants into a secret military prison without trial, where they could languish indefinitely without access to courts or lawyers.

That prospect terrified the men. They accepted prison terms of 61/2 to 9 years.

“We had to worry about the defendants being whisked out of the courtroom and declared enemy combatants if the case started going well for us,” said attorney Patrick J. Brown, who defended one of the accused. “So we just ran up the white flag and folded. Most of us wish we’d never been associated with this case.”

The Lackawanna case illustrates how the post-Sept. 11, 2001, legal landscape tilts heavily toward the prosecution, government critics contend. Future defendants in terror cases could face the same choice: Plead guilty or face the possibility of indefinite imprisonment or even the death penalty. That troubles defense attorneys and some legal scholars, not least because prosecutors never offered evidence that the Lackawanna defendants intended to commit an act of terrorism.

I bring this up because of the suicide car bomber in Riyadh today.

A suicide car bomber destroyed a Saudi security forces building in the capital Wednesday, killing a senior officer and at least nine other people.

Medical and security sources in Riyadh said more than 60 people were wounded in what an official said was the sixth attempt to mount such a “terrorist attack” in a week. Five others had been foiled.

The blast, which coincided with a visit to the city by a top U.S. official, tore the front off the six-storey administrative block. Saudi television showed uniformed security force personnel in hospital and said some children were also injured.

The kingdom, a key U.S. ally and the world’s largest oil exporter, is battling a tide of Islamist militancy linked to Saudi-born Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network, which Washington accuses of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on U.S. cities.

Last year, suicide bombs killed 50 people in Riyadh.

If a police state like Saudi Arabia can’t prevent attacks with such tactics, what makes people think curtailing our liberties will make us safer?

Go here for the rest.

After two days of firefights, a marine packed the personal effects of 12 fallen comrades at the combat outpost in Ramadi on Thursday. [Maurizio Gambarini/European Pressphoto Agency]

The President of the United States is on vacation again, but it’s OK — he’s not skiing. Emphasis mine in the quote below:

Democrats criticized Bush for taking the Easter-week vacation while U.S. forces are struggling to put down an uprising in Iraq. Campaigning in Milwaukee, Sen. John F. Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, said: “I notice President Bush is taking some days off down at Crawford, Texas, and I’m told that when he takes days off, you know, he totally relaxes: He doesn’t watch television, he doesn’t read the newspapers, he doesn’t make long-term plans, doesn’t worry about the economy. I thought about that for a moment. I said, sounds to me like it’s just like life in Washington, doesn’t it?”

White House communications director Dan Bartlett retorted that Bush is “not skiing” in Texas, as Kerry did on a recent vacation in Idaho. He said Bush remains in contact with his military advisers and is spending Easter weekend with his family. “Most Americans will understand that,” Bartlett said.

This is Bush’s 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.

233 days since January 2001, or almost 80 days per year? Yeah, he’s just a “regular guy.” U.S. workers take an average of 10.2 vacation days a year after three years on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

If I were President, I would probably not have continued with my month-long vacation after receiving a briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States.”

[I found the image above on the NY Times web site, but there was no link to make it larger. If someone finds a better version of the image I will replace it.]

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UPDATED: I realize now that the briefing discussed was given to Bush after he was already in Crawford, Texas for his month-long vacation.

I was struck by the huge range of ages, ethnicities, and types of people in the demonstration today.

This is how the NY Times presents that diversity:

The protesters were middle-aged mothers, tongue-pierced students, veterans and bearded professional dissenters, who all came together in what organizers described as a broad-based protest of the Bush administration’s foreign policy not just in Iraq, but in Haiti and Israel.

This is what the Washington Post, not particularly good on coverage of the Iraq War, had to say:

The crowd along Madison Avenue represented an array of professions, ages and backgrounds from the East Coast. They arrived by bus, caravan and subway.

Look at the photos that James took of the people we saw today. The Times is becoming Fox-like in its approach to news.

Right now, the NY Times home page has no mention of the anti-war demonstration here in NYC (we just got back but it’s not finished yet). Instead they have a photo of G.W. Bush at a rally in Florida. The Times doesn’t want to acknowledge that such as thing is happening in the city, but it’s hard to ignore 100,000 marchers.

There is a small link lower down on the page under another Iraq story about worldwide demonstrations, but if fails to mention the New York one.

Newsday has an AP story, which is where I got the 100,000 number. Also, on the page with the story is a link to a photo gallery.

James now has a photo gallery of his own up.

Of course, that won’t happen while the GOP is in charge of Congress. War and terrorism threats are useful tools to hold onto power, not things our country should actually do anything about.

They wanted to bomb Iraq after 9/11, even though they new it had nothing to do with it — dead Iraqis for “revenge.”

Frankly, I don’t understand right-wingers at this point. Do they honestly believe what this administration is doing will make us (or anyone else) safer?

See you all tomorrow!

From an article that TBOGG pointed out:

In truth, however, September 11 became a political football on September 11. Conservative columnist Andrew Sullivan, in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, blamed the Clinton administration. “The decision to get down and dirty with the terrorists, to take their threat seriously and counter them aggressively, was simply never taken,” wrote Sullivan. Senator Orrin Hatch referred in 1996 to the terrorist threats, threats which compelled Clinton to attempt the passage of a comprehensive anti-terrorism bill that would have gone a long way to stopping 9/11, as “Phony threats.” After September 11, he joined the ‘Blame Clinton’ chorus.

During his administration, Clinton offered legislation that would give the Treasury Secretary broad powers to ban foreign nations and banks from accessing American financial markets unless they cooperated with money-laundering investigations that would expose and terminate terrorist cash flows. The legislation was killed by Texas Republican Senator Phil Gramm, who was chairman of the Banking Committee. At the time, he called the bill “totalitarian.” It was revealed later, of course, that Gramm killed the bill because it would have blocked Enron officers from laundering stolen stockholder money through the same offshore conduits the terrorists were using. Gramm, from Texas, was beholden to Enron, and killed the bill at their behest. Of course, he joined the ‘Blame Clinton’ chorus after the attacks, and never mind the facts.

…

The Bush administration received a blizzard of warnings before September 11 that something huge was about to happen. The security agencies of Germany, Israel, Egypt and Russia delivered specific warnings about airplanes being used as bombs against prominent American targets. FBI agents were raising alarms in Minnesota and Arizona. Donald Kerrick was a deputy National Security Advisor in the late Clinton administration. He stayed on into the Bush administration. He was a three-star General, and absolutely not political. He has reported that when the Bush people came in, he wrote a memo about terrorism, al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The memo said, “We will be struck again.” As a result of writing that memo, he was not invited to any more meetings. No one responded to his memo. He felt that, from what he could see from inside the National Security Council, terrorism was demoted.

Richard Clarke was Director of Counter-Terrorism in the National Security Council. He has since left. Clarke urgently tried to draw the attention of the Bush administration to the threat of al Qaeda. Richard Clarke was panicked about the alarms he was hearing regarding potential attacks. Clarke is at the center of what has since become a burning controversy: What happened on August 6, 2001? It was on this day that George W. Bush received his last, and one of the few, briefings on terrorism. According to reports, the briefing stated bluntly that Osama bin Laden intended to attack America soon, and contained the word “hijacking.” Bush responded to the warning by heading to Texas for a month-long vacation. It is this briefing that the Bush administration has refused to divulge to the committee investigating the attacks.

Regarding Clarke, this was a non-partisan anti-terrorism professional and member of the National Security Council. His latest revelations are that the Bush administration wanted to bomb Iraq on 9/12, even though they knew it had nothing to do with 9/11:

A former White House anti-terrorism advisor says the Bush administration considered bombing Iraq in retaliation after Sept. 11, 2001 even though it was clear al Qaeda had carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Richard Clarke, who headed a cybersecurity board that gleaned intelligence from the Internet, told CBS “60 Minutes” in an interview to be aired on Sunday he was surprised administration officials turned immediately toward Iraq instead of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

“They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12,” Clarke says.

Clarke said he was briefing President Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld among other top officials in the aftermath of the devastating attacks.

“Rumsfeld was saying we needed to bomb Iraq. … We all said, ‘but no, no. Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan ,” recounts Clarke, “and Rumsfeld said, ‘There aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan and there are lots of good targets in Iraq.”‘