Parrot Cage

9-11 again and again

It is the five year anniversary of 9-11, and what have we learned?  Possibly nothing.  Here's our very incomplete list of what we should have learned by now:

The FBI may not have talked with the CIA...

and neither talked with the INS...

Bush may have ignored all warnings...

airport security may have been left in the hands of minimum wage temps to save the airlines some more money...

the Taliban may have harbored Al Queda within their tenuously secured borders of Afghanistan...

Osama may have drawn up the plans and given the orders...

...but, the 19 men who cooperated with each other to commit massive acts of terrorism are the ones most responsible for the events of September 11.

Understanding their motives could be the most important step in preventing future attacks.

However many religious maniacs believe their gods direct them to kill, very very few of these people actually follow through in maintaining the murderous directives of their psychotic gods.

Understanding this phenomenon could be helpful in preventing future attacks.

Giving guns and training and shoulder-mounted anti-aircraft rockets to radical Muslims in Afghanistan who were absolutely known to slaughter teachers for their book-learning and to torture and kill women for being women was, as it turns out, not preferrable to godless Communism.

Religion kills.

George Bush was in fact the only human being on the planet who, once he was told of the terrorist attack, didn't gasp and run to find out more information.

There are greater evils in the world than Presidents who freeze up in moments of crisis.

No matter how badly a politician or political party may clusterfuck the country, war wins elections.

The quickest and most sure way to effectively destroy any lingering worldwide goodwill towards your militant, prosperous country is to invade a defenseless third world country whose only source of revenue is its rich oil fields.

When the country who owns a significant amount of your national debt and floods your trade deficit with cheap goods is a corporate dictatorship who regularly threatens its neighbors and possesses and tests massive quantities of weapons of mass destruction, then nobody can take seriously any claims to democratizing the Middle East, one oil field at a time.

The blood of Iraq will not protect us.

Religious sociopaths won't stay bumbling and incapable forever.

The evils of religion will not be abated by more religion.

After the untold millions who have been killed intentionally or unintentionally around the world through the evil militarism and global strategy of the United States government's foreign policy in the last 100 years...

...3,000 dead Americans is still unforgivable.

The Threat of the Homegrown Jihadi Heart

The Justice Department has scored some serious jail time in their War on Terror at home.  Mind you, almost everyone serving time under terrorism-related charges since 9-11 has copped to plea bargains, thus sparing the Justice Department the effort of actually having to prove their cases.

In Lodi, where the Justice Department won their case against a young Muslim immigrant, they based their prosecution on his "Jihadi heart" rather than any real evidence against him.  And even in that case, a juror came forward and said that she was intimidated into voting for conviction by jurors who wanted to hang the accused even before the trial had commenced, and engaged in other misconduct.

And lest we forget the biggest feather in Bush's domestic terrorism-prevention cap, the 18 Middle Eastern men who were convicted for, in some ways, trying to purchase licenses to transport hazardous materials.  Even the prosecutors in those cases no longer pretend that it had anything to do with preventing terrorism.  The men, most of whom are on probation now, were mostly refugees of the first Gulf War and thought of America as their sanctuary.

So it should come as no surprise that the Justice Department has arrested seven members of a "terrorist cell" in Miami for allegedly plotting to blow up the Sears Tower.  Actually, the non-surprise lies in the apparent lack of anything much incriminating about the seven individuals other than the testimony of an informant in regard to their "Jihadi hearts".

Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez has admitted that the suspects lacked any weapons, explosives, knowledge of their supposed target, or even a basic strategy.  Justice Department officials have even balked at confirming whether or not their informant wore a wire, or if they are simply making arrests based on the informant's word.  In case anyone has forgotten, the Bush people have an abysmal history with their sourcing.

Of course, the Justice Department should be doing all it can to prevent terrorist attacks.  We just wish they were smarter, and more interested in preventing terrorism than making headlines to boost their dismal poll numbers.

War On

Yet another bombing in Bali further befuddles those trying to comprehend the motives of terrorists as well as those trying to obfuscate the motives of terrorists.  Unlike the car-bomb attack on night-clubbing tourists in 2002, this act was of the strap-on suicide variety, leaving evidence of the perpetrators for all to see.  This is an escalation: those willing to carry out mayhem in Indonesia seek celestial glory in their murderous plots.  They think themselves Holy Warriors engaged in Holy War, so why are they killing other Muslims and tourists?  And for those who think Al Qaeda are the only sadistic thugs with an Islamic cant, think again.

In contradiction to those who asserted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq did not hamper Katrina relief, the pentagon's own study shows that it most certainly did.  And with precious little to show for it either in stamping out terrorism or in dropping oil prices.  Oops, that was never the intended goal.  In Iraq, the factional in-fighting is heating up and jeopardizing whatever self-government is there pretending to self-govern.  The situation is grim by all accounts, and we're not sure the upcoming elections will do much to alleviate the situation.  Especially given the rousing success of Afghanistan.