The Terrorist Speaks!

One of Barry's "associates" will be interviewed on ABC tomomrrow morning...

Just in Case You Forgot

Coming up on 7 years ago, some bad people did some very bad things in America.

The Republicans think, I guess, that you might have forgotten. So they made up a video of what happened to show to their delegates and the nation during the convention.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Olbermann went nuts over it, and, as usual, he was a little bit too melodramatic, but we agree that it was really kind of creepy how they threw this in there.

I know what the cynical me thinks that I'm supposed to take away from their decision to show this video...

Sequel to A Few Good Men?

This is great....

George Clooney's production company has purchsed the rights to the book about Osama's recently-convicted driver buddy.

George has his sights set on playing his lawyer in a David v Goliath sort of storlyine.

The picture on the left is from his days appearing on The Facts of Life.

Expect a big story on this from BillO tonight on the Factor.

Your Government Is Your Friend

Well, this is a nice way to start your weekend...with a feel-good article about the good ole' government going after The Archive.

I've linked and mentioned them before here both for their amazing Grateful Dead live music collection as well as the fascinating Way Back Machine.

Archive's mission, as you can gather, is to archive pretty much everything it can electronically, including the way web pages looked Way Back when.

Well, the FBI was curious about someone who'd registered there and sent them some kind of subpoena which forbade them to discuss it with anyone.

That's pretty nifty, eh?

Well, they got the ACLU and the EFF involved and fought back...and won. The pigs backed off...at least for now.

I heard about this story first on Buzz Out Loud, CNET's Podcast of Indeterminate Length.

Picture of the Day

Friends in Terrorist Places...With the Clintons.

Live by The Law...

I'm no defender of whatever it is Eliot Spitzer did in his personal life. It seems pretty rotten and the guy seemed pretty due for a little comeuppance.

But I do have to say that I found this article by former Congressman Bob Barr to be very disheartening.

He lays out a case that Spitzer was busted for getting his freak on with a hooker because of reporting required by the USA PATRIOT Act.

All praise to Allah.

I think I am going to barf the next time I hear W or one of the other jackals in Washington tell me that the PATRIOT Act is to be used solely to save me from the "evildoers." My sphincter starts to tighten when I'm told to trust my government and that they'll only use the provisions covered when they believe the towel heads are up to no good.

>> On a side note, I guess old Bob is thinking very hard about running for President under the Libertarian banner. Now that would be very cool to see and his might just be a candidacy I could get excited about.

New OBL Tape Coming?

CNN and others are saying that a new tape, presumably made before yesterday's assassination, is on its way from the bearded one.

CYA and the CIA

I was reminded this morning of Fawn Hall, whose famous line, after finding herself in the middle of a document shredding incident in the Iran-Contra affair, said that sometimes you have to go above the law.

Shrub and the rest are continuing to go outside the law, common sense and decency with the news late this week of the "enhanced interrogation technique" videos from Gitmo that have been destroyed. This was done, according to the agency, because they posed no real value and could endanger national security were they leaked.

Of course, W and Big Time found out about it on Thursday just about the time the rest of us did.

If you believe that...

I've almost gotten to the point where I'm just getting desensitized to all of this. With every passing week, I hear more and more BS going on there in the name of a war on evildoers that I have trouble getting fired up over it anymore. Maybe I should check out the job market in Montreal...or go sign up with Oprah on the Barack campaign...more on that later.

Osama...Yo Mama.

Perhaps this is what went on behind the scenes when the mastermind put together his recent op-ed tape. Very funny...

Well, We Are Approaching New TV Show Season

We're Screwed

That's pretty much the only thing approaching a coherent thought that came to mind this morning as I perused the front section of this morning's New York Times print edition.

The top of the page has more splashes, this time from folks close to Shrub, basically saying that we have not made a hell of a lot of progress...and may even be worse off than we were...in the last 6 years.

Something big's about to happen, kids...I can just feel it.

The charming and beautiful Ms. Dowd says it better than I can. Copied below for those without full access to the site.

Hey, W! Bin Laden (Still) Determined to Strike in U.S.

Oh, as it turns out, they’re not on the run.
And, oh yeah, they can fight us here even if we fight them there.
And oh, one more thing, after spending hundreds of billions and losing all those lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re more vulnerable to terrorists than ever.
And, um, you know that Dead-or-Alive stuff? We may be the ones who end up dead.
Squirming White House officials had to confront the fact yesterday that everything President Bush has been spouting the last six years about Al Qaeda being on the run, disrupted and weakened was just guff.
Last year, W. called his “personal friend” Gen. Pervez Musharraf “a strong defender of freedom.” Unfortunately, it turned out to be Al Qaeda’s freedom. The White House is pinning the blame on Pervez.
While the administration lavishes billions on Pakistan, including $750 million in a risible attempt to win “hearts and minds” in tribal areas where Al Qaeda leaders are hiding and training, President Musharraf has helped create a quiet mountain retreat, a veritable terrorism spa, for Osama and Ayman al-Zawahiri to refresh themselves and get back in shape.
The administration’s most thorough intelligence assessment since 9/11 is stark and dark. Two pages add up to one message: The Bushies blew it. Al Qaeda has exploded into a worldwide state of mind. Because of what’s going on with Iraq and Iran, Hezbollah may now “be more likely to consider” attacking us. Al Qaeda will try to “put operatives here” — (some news reports say a cell from Pakistan already is en route or has arrived) — and “acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear material in attacks.”
(Democrats on cots are ineffectual, but Al Qaeda in caves gets the job done?)
After 9/11, W. stopped mentioning Osama’s name, calling him “just a person who’s now been marginalized,” and adding “I just don’t spend that much time on him.”
This week, as counterterrorism officials gathered at the White House to frantically brainstorm on covert and overt plans to capture Osama, the president may have regretted his perverse attempt to demote America’s most determined enemy.
W. began to mention Osama and Al Qaeda more recently, but only to assert: “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September the 11th.” His conflation is contradicted by the fact that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, as the Sunni terrorist group in Iraq is known, did not exist before 9/11.
Fran Townsend, the president’s homeland security adviser, did her best to put a gloss on the dross but failed. She had to admit that the hands-off approach used by Mr. Musharraf with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan, which always looked like a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup, was a nutty way to give Al Qaeda room to regroup.
“It hasn’t worked for Pakistan,” she conceded. “It hasn’t worked for the United States.”
Just as we outsourced capturing Osama at Tora Bora to Afghans who had no motive to do it, we outsourced capturing Osama in Pakistan to Mr. Musharraf, who had no motive to do it.
Pressed by reporters on why we haven’t captured Osama, especially if he’s climbing around with a dialysis machine, Ms. Townsend sniffed that she wished “it were that easy.” It’s not easy to launch a trumped-up war to reshape the Middle East into a utopian string of democracies, but that didn’t stop W. from making that audacious gambit.
The Bushies, who once mocked Bill Clinton for doing only “pinprick” bombings on Al Qaeda, now say they can do nothing about Osama because they can’t “pinpoint” him, as Ms. Townsend put it. She assured reporters that they were “harassing” Al Qaeda, making it sound more like a tugging-on-pigtails strategy than a take-no-prisoners strategy.
We’ve had it up the wazir with Waziristan. Surely there are Army Rangers and Navy Seals who can make the trek, even if it’s a no-man’s land. If it were a movie, we’d trace the saline in Osama’s dialysis machine, target it with a laser and blow up the mountain.
W. swaggers about with his cowboy boots and gunslinger stance. But when talking about Waziristan last February, he explained that it was hard to round up the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders there because: “This is wild country; this is wilder than the Wild West.”
Yes, they shoot with real bullets up there, and they fly into buildings with real planes.
If W. were a real cowboy, instead of somebody who just plays one on TV, he would have cleaned up Dodge by now.

Did Yasser The Terrorist Die of AIDS?

There's some interesting speculation posted on National Review's blog this afternoon and a quick Google search on the topic confirms that it's not exactly brand new...

There are people who have reason to believe that Yasser Arafat died of AIDS.

The Review post puts this in the context of what a cross-dressing exercise his Fatah movement really was.

The apple does not often fall far from the tree.

Know Thy Terrorist Logo

An interesting collection of logos from various terrorist and other fringe groups.

I couldn't find the People's Front of Judea or the Judean People's Front, though...those wankers.

Welcome to the Jungle, Gordon Brown

I've had a busy week at work and have more or less let the passing of the guard  in the UK pass my attention, but we will see, now, what the new PM is made of.  The coincidence is lost on no one that before moving to Downing Street, Mr. Brown is a native of Glasgow.

I was planning to tune into the Beltway Boys, but Geraldo is manning the desk at Fox now.  From the tone of his voice, I think it's a good thing the camera is only showing him from the chest up.  He's quite excited to be reporting for duty.

Interesting First Day on the Job For New British PM!

This could have been spooky....

Viva Assad!

In a stunning victory for the righteous cause of Middle East Democracy (could this be a residual victory of the Mission in Iraq?), President Bashar Assad earned a landslide re-election victory, earing 97% of the vote.

Amazing!  Another 7 years in office!

Hopefully the peanut farmer will weigh in on this soon.

Agreement with Handsome John and Big Mouth Biden

While it's by no means the first time we've had a semantics debate on what exactly the "war on terror" is, perhaps its resurgence is another benefit of the early Presidential cycle this time around.

Joe Biden and John Edwards get a write-up on this topic in the Politico today.

At issue is whether there actually is a "war on terror" going on and if we are, what exactly that means. The two Democrats would like to see the term go the way of the Edsel.

I, for one, agree with them.

It's no more intellecually honest to say we are at war with terror now than it would have been for FDR to declare a war on surprise attacks in December 1941.

"Terror is a tactic. Terror is not a philosophy."

Joe Biden, probably quoting someone else ;-)

If you happen to believe that we're at war with a bunch of backward-thining theocrats who are frustrated with how the world has passed them and their antiquated way of life by, then be a man and say it. Don't hide behind this insulting term that both allows you to not really say who you are at war with, but also allows you to do just about anything you want to any group or idea that can be broadly classified as "terrorist."

Link to New Zawahiri Video

I was able to find a downloadable copy of the al-Zawahiri tape in which he mocks the bill Congress just passed that had the withdrawl timetables in it.

The tape is an hour long and the subtitles are a bit hard to read, so dl only if you're really committed or curious.

Actually, this Laura Mansfield has a pretty cool site w/ lots of translated terrorism-related material.

Gary Hart on Rudy Giuliani

Rudy Giuliani, seen here snuggling up against the ass of his police chief, Bernie Kerik
 

I've often wondered how Rudolph Giuliani gets away with running so hard on a terrorism/9-11 campaign in his bid for the GOP Presidential nomination.

To date, my criticism has mainly focused around the question of what actions he took post-9-11 that either made a real difference in the so-called war against terror or that distinguished him from any other person with a high profile office.

Former Colorado Senator and Presidential hopeful Gary Hart, however, takes issue with the behavior of Mayor Happy Pants before 9-11 and what he did (or didn't do) with information he had that could have prevented terrorist actions.

It's not reasonable to think that Mayor Rudy could have single-handedly prevented the terrorist attacks on 9-11.  However, by running so hard on his own credentials (as yet largely unknown to me) and of questioning the abilities of those on the other side of the aisle to deal with terrorism as effectively as a Republican like George W. Bush, he simply invites these sorts of questions.

Game on.

Rudy the Realist

I'll jump all over Democrats when they make ridiculous claims, but this kind of nonsense from Mayor Happy Pants is downright offensive.

At a Town Hall meeting in New Hampshire the other day, Rudy looked at the tealeaves to predict that Republicans, himself specifically, were better at predicting and thwarting terrorist attacks than Democrats.

America's mayor had this to say:

“If any Republican is elected president —- and I think obviously I would be the best at this —- we will remain on offense and will anticipate what [the terrorists] will do and try to stop them before they do it... But the
question is how long will it take and how many casualties will we have? If we are on defense [with a Democratic president], we will have more losses and it will go on longer.”

Rudolph Giuliani