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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (14021)	4/11/2004 8:14:31 PM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

The news from an alternative universe By Kathleen Parker The Orlando Sentinel NEW YORK - President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise after almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan. Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the United States. Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on Larry King Live, said the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal probably would bring charges of genocide against Bush. Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest, and illegal search and seizure. Kerry's campaign mantra -- "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" -- clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's Sept. 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president nor national security adviser Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9-10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry. The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified? The main target of the attack was bin Laden, friend to Afghanistan's brutal Taliban regime, as well as al Qaeda training camps in that war-ravaged nation. Al Qaeda, an international terrorist network, has been blamed for numerous attacks on U.S. interests, including the USS Cole bombing, which killed 17 sailors. Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped, and al Qaeda continues to flourish. Some intelligence sources speculate that bin Laden's operatives may be trying to secure weapons of mass destruction from Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Even though Saddam continues to send money to the families of Palestinian terrorists and is believed to have programs for developing WMDs, Kerry says he is committed to containing Saddam through continued sanctions and the U.N. oil-for-food program. In any case, experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program is just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al Qaeda was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Clinton. In a Jan. 25 memo to Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al Qaeda and a response to the USS Cole. At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big." With no other details on the "big," and weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9-11. Under questioning by the "9-10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bipartisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the United States to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world. Last week, Saddam and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat joined French and German leaders in condemning Bush and urging American voters to cast their ballots for regime change in America. Kerry's election was the clear response to that call. In a flourish of irony and the spirit of bon vivant for which the president-elect is widely known, Kerry gave his acceptance speech from Windows on the World, the elegant restaurant atop the World Trade Center's Tower One.

To: American Spirit who wrote (14021)	4/12/2004 9:14:47 AM
From: rrufff	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 81568

You didn't answer my post. Where's the perjury? How would you handle the "warning" in that memo. The memo says nothing. Anyone who read newspapers would know that OBL desired to hit the US and that he might hijack planes or he might use explosives or he might use suicide bombers. Would he attack the Golden Gate bridge, a train station, a dam, a chemical company, an electric power grid, a commercial cargo ship, an LNG tanker, a cruise ship, Amtrak, or even the city where YOU live? and WHEN? Nobody, I repeat nobody, knew that he would fly planes into WTC on 9/11!!! There are thousands of warnings every day. Do you put 100 agents on each one? That's 100,000 agents at a minimum for each day's warnings. It's a needle in a haystack. I agree that the system is inefficient and needs change, change that has to be a partnership between Congress and the W/H, so that protections for civil rights are not trampled but that obsolete prohibitions on FBI, CIA and DIA are not the excuse for future 9/11's. This is what Kerry should be saying, not your silly attempts to place blame where there is enough blame to go around way before Clinton. The blame game will prevent real questions and real solutions. Other than shuffling around personnel, are the bureaucracies really working better and more "together" today than pre 9/11? Have we truly stopped our "allies" the Saudis and the Pakistanis from support of terror, financially and physically? These questions won't even be addressed if the "blame" game continues for political reasons.