Op-Ed

Last December, when Congressman John Conyers released a huge report documenting the evidence that Bush and Cheney had lied us into a war, he also introduced a bill (H. Res. 635) to start a preliminary investigation of the matter and make recommendations on impeachment.  This showed far more courage, not to mention long hours of work, than any other member of Congress had mustered at that time or since.  But it was disingenuous.  Impeachment is itself an investigation; a preliminary investigation is redundant.  And any investigation is unnecessary when the impeachable offenses are part of the public record.

So, Osama Walks into This Bar, See? and Bush says, "Whad'l'ya have, pardner?" and Osama says...

But wait a minute. I'd better shut my mouth. The sign here in the airport says, "Security is no joking matter." But if security's no joking matter, why does this guy dressed in a high-school marching band outfit tell me to dump my Frappuccino and take off my shoes? All I can say is, Thank the Lord the "shoe bomber" didn't carry Semtex in his underpants.

Today's a RED and ORANGE ALERT day. How odd. They just caught the British guys with the chemistry sets. But when these guys were about to blow up airliners, the USA was on YELLOW alert. That's a "lowered" threat notice.

According to the press office from the Department of Homeland Security, lowered-threat Yellow means that there were no special inspections of passengers or cargo. Isn't it nice of Mr. Bush to alert Osama when half our security forces are given the day off? Hmm. I asked an Israeli security expert why his nation doesn't use these pretty color codes.

He asked me if, when I woke up, I checked the day's terror color.

"I can't say I ever have. I mean, who would?"

AUSTIN, Texas -- We have nothing to fear but fear itself, especially since fear is now being fomented and manipulated for political purposes by a bunch of shameless hacks. Who is trying to make you afraid and why? This Karl Rove tactic is getting quite threadbare, in fact, and so much so that it is getting dangerously close to comedy.

My favorite episode, of course, was the Miami terrorists, a fearsome horde of seven described by the FBI's deputy director as, "More inspirational that operational." That means wanna-bes. An FBI informant posing as a member of al-Qaida offered to supply the plotters with material for the jihad, so they asked for boots and uniforms. Every terrorist needs a uniform.

Of course, even a nincompoop can succeed occasionally -- but the list of wanna-bes keeps growing. Seventeen people were arrested in Canada for intending to behead the prime minister. Has anyone in all of history ever cared that much about a Canadian prime minister?

Their national motto is, "Now, let's not get excited."

Aug. 11, 2006 -- UPDATED. According to knowledgeable sources in the UK and other countries, the Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt, cleverly cooked up a new "terror" scare to avert the public's eyes away from Blair's increasing political woes. British law enforcement; neo-con and intelligence operatives in the United States, Israel, and Britain; and Rupert Murdoch's global media empire cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally borrowing from the failed 1995 "Oplan Bojinka" plot by Pakistan- and Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11 trans-Pacific airliners bound from Asia to the United States. In the latest plot, it is reported that liquid bombs were to be detonated on 10 trans-Atlantic planes outbound from Britain to the United States.

British and American authorities permitted a man with a liquid bomb to board a U.S.-bound flight in Heathrow on Aug. 6 -- the pilot foiled secret UK-US attempt to hype an incident en route to or at Boston Logan.

SEATTLE -- Ricky Clousing, a Sergeant in the U.S. Army, and a veteran of the Iraq War who has been AWOL for a year announced today at the Veterans for Peace convention in Seattle that he will turn himself in later today at the gates of Fort Lewis and face whatever punishment the military chooses to impose.

  Clousing said he did not apply for conscientious objector status because he is not certain he would oppose every possible war, such as one fought in self-defense.  He said he has spent the past year trying to figure out how to turn himself in, that the military has refused to comment on his status and that he is now choosing to force them to deal with it. 

"Everyone in Utah can tell you a story - or take you to a cemetery and show you where loved ones are buried . . ."

Alyson Heyrend, a spokesman for U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, was talking about the experience of being a "downwinder," and she could have been speaking for residents of Nevada, Idaho, Montana and other places as well, where large segments of the population were exposed to fallout from U.S. nuclear testing over the years; suffered dire health consequences and the premture deaths of loved ones despite glib assurances from the government that they were in no danger; who have finally cried, loudly enough to disrupt, at least temporily, the government's oblivious, WMD-smitten agenda, "No more!"

"We have stood down the experiment site and the workforce that was preparing the site for the experiment," read the dry, tersely worded statement issued by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency last week, referring to the "subnuclear" blast known as Divine Strake, initially slated to go off in early June at the Nevada Test Site and twice-postponed because of local uproar and environmental challenges.

Ned Lamont's primary victory over Joe Lieberman may turn out to be a key moment in stopping the Bush Administration's destructive policies. But that depends on what the rest of us do.

Lieberman, as a majority of Connecticut's Democratic voters just acknowledged, was Bush's fiercest Democratic ally, not just on the Iraqi war, but on issues from the bankruptcy bill to his regressive energy bill, tax plans, and judicial nominations, not to mention Terri Schaivo. The question now is whether Lieberman can hold his seat through a divisive third party run. Citizens throughout the country can play a crucial role by pressuring key elected leaders and organizations that initially supported him to switch their support. Some of this has already begun to occur, with Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer's strong statements that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will fully back Lamont, and Hillary Clinton's donation of $5,000 from her PAC. But the process needs to be taken still further.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed a decade and a half ago, nuclear weaponry has been mostly relegated to back pages and mental back burners in the United States. A big media uproar about nuclear weapons is apt to happen only when the man in the Oval Office has chosen to make an issue of them.

Sometimes a “nuclear threat” has been imaginary. During the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration went into rhetorical overdrive -- fabricating evidence and warning that an ostensible smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud. The White House publicly obsessed about an Iraqi nuclear-weapons program that didn’t exist.

In sharp contrast, North Korea really seems to have a nuclear warhead or two. And because the Pyongyang regime is apparently nuclear-armed, Bush isn’t likely to order an attack on that country, as he did against Iraq and as he has been not-too-subtly threatening to do against Iran.

By all credible accounts, Tehran is at least several years -- and probably more like a full decade -- away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. But America’s top officials and leading pundits have been sounding urgent alarms.

The reality that the Vietnam War was a hopeless catastrophe definitively penetrated the mass American psyche when CBS Nightly News Anchor Walter Cronkite---the "most trusted man in America"---faced the facts.

That was in 1968, shortly after the Tet Offensive shredded any pretence that an American victory (whatever that would mean) was possible in Southeast Asia. When Lyndon Johnson heard Cronkite had turned on the war, he knew it was over, and soon thereafter declined to run again.

Now Tom Friedman has done the same thing about Iraq and Southwest Asia. Has anybody noticed?

Friedman has long been the lead neo-liberal cheerleader for the American attack on Iraq. From his perch on the New York Times op ed page, Friedman has pontificated long and in earnest about the need for the US military to establish "democracy" in the land once run by Saddam Hussein, that horrific dictator installed by the US military, then fired in the wake of 9/11 attacks conducted by his bitter rival, Osama bin Laden.

Through the actions of a lone man with an unstable mental history, the Middle East wars have hit my community. Naveed Haq, from a middle class Pakistani-American family in eastern Washington State, shot six women at the Seattle Jewish Federation, in the city where I live. He killed one and left three critically wounded, saying "I am a Muslim American, angry at Israel." I've never been to the Federation offices, but I've worshipped at affiliated Seattle synagogues, attended Federation-sponsored events, and met one of the women who was critically wounded. So Haq's reprehensible attack felt personal. Aside from the shooting of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane and an ambiguous 1994 incident involving a New York taxi driver and a van of Hasidic students, this may be the first politically motivated killing of an American Jew by an American Muslim in the past sixty years. As such, it risks sharply increasing the level of fear in America's Jewish communities, and with it the reflex support of even the most questionable Israeli actions.