And They Wonder Why We're Cynical
President Bush said the following in his speech this past Wednesday:
Wow, that sounds like scary stuff. Thank goodness disaster was averted. But why so vague? Just what was this "attack being planned for inside the United States" and who was the evil mastermind apprehended at the border?
Well, an article in Sunday's New York Times fills in the picture a little more:
Oh.
Within months of September the 11th, 2001, we captured a man known as Abu Zubaydah. We believe that Zubaydah was a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden. . . . Abu Zubaydah also provided information that helped stop a terrorist attack being planned for inside the United States -- an attack about which we had no previous information. Zubaydah told us that al Qaeda operatives were planning to launch an attack in the U.S., and provided physical descriptions of the operatives and information on their general location. Based on the information he provided, the operatives were detained -- one while traveling to the United States.
Wow, that sounds like scary stuff. Thank goodness disaster was averted. But why so vague? Just what was this "attack being planned for inside the United States" and who was the evil mastermind apprehended at the border?
Well, an article in Sunday's New York Times fills in the picture a little more:
Mr. Zubaydah . . . identified Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been charged with terrorism-related crimes. But Mr. Zubaydah dismissed Mr. Padilla as a maladroit extremist whose hope to construct a dirty bomb, using conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials, was far-fetched. He told his questioners that Mr. Padilla was ignorant on the subject of nuclear physics and believed he could separate plutonium from nuclear material by rapidly swinging over his head a bucket filled with fissionable material.
Oh.
posted by A.L. at 12:03 AM
6 Comments:
And, of course, Ashcroft waited more than a month after Padilla was arrested before making the announcement from Russia - just a few days after Coleen Rowley testified before congress. The administration apparently needed something to distract the attention away from their shortcomings.
http://rawstory.com/news/2006/Olbermann_The_Nexus_of_politics_and_0815.html
If you want a better perspective of what is going on today, watch this:
http://www.brasscheck.com/videos/cia/cia3.html
Thank god someone else noticed this. So THIS is why Padilla was held in detention & denied his civil rights for roughly 3 years?
Maybe there's a reason why Bush & Co. don't want suspected terrorists to have access to American courts, and it has nothing to do with preventing future attacks, gaining "intelligence" from the enemy, or the possibility of endangering ongoing investigations.
It's much worse than that, since Zubaydah himself is not any kind of "high level operative," but another pathetic, deranged person -- like Moussaoui, but even more crazy and less dangerous. Check out Juan Cole on this (www.juancole.com). He's written several times about it. Zubaydah has multiple personality disorder and worked as a kind of "travel agent" for AQ types, but was never anything like a "high level operative." Nonetheless, he has been held for years in a secret prison, and tortured. All the info he gave up, as a result of being tortured, was information the CIA already had, or was useless, e.g., the Padilla thing. This is more of Bush's "breathtaking dishonesty," as A.L. has discussed below. It's just flat out lying.
Anonymous said...
http://www.brasscheck.com/videos/cia/cia3.html
If that is anywhere near the truth, it is a shot thru my heart.
thebigerns - check this one out too
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8AdSHKywEU
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