Anyone still tenuously grasping their sanity may want to avoid this. Resolving a major point of contention between us liberal crackpots and the redcoats, Bush has admitted that there ARE secret CIA prisons, and a “small number” of terrorists are held in them.

“The most important source of information on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves,” Bush said in a White House speech with families of those killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, sitting in the audience. “It has been necessary to move these individuals to an environment where they can be held in secret, questioned by experts and, when appropriate, prosecuted for terrorist acts.”

Nowhere in his multiple “reasons” for these prisons is WHY they have to be held in secret. Indeed, all of the justification works equally well to a standard style of prison. You can question, you can keep them out of battle, and you can prosecute them. The only reason to keep the prisons secret is to avoid oversight.

This is yet another on the list of things that we were constantly told didn’t exist, another “crackpot liberal theory” that was unsubstantiated and just plain false. Take a look at all the things our government has going for it now.

• Spying on citizens
• Fearmongering
• Falsifying intelligence to achieve an end
• Cronyism
• Election fraud
• Religion pushing over science
• Bribery
• Secret prisons

The apologists are undoubtedly already saying that this isn’t a problem. It’s perfectly fine for this to be going on because, hey, we need to stop the terrorists. Bush said it’s a small number, so it’s probably fine.
Before you let yourself go too far down that path, consider that any time Bush is eventually forced to admit something small, that means it gets a lot bigger when we dig a few inches further down. Initially the NSA only looked at foreign calls that had a terrorist involved, eventually they admitted it was everyone. We have SECRET… CIA… PRISONS folks. We are the USSR.

Then ask yourself why they need to be secret? Why can’t we show evidence to the defendent? Frist’s take:

Frist “believes it is a dangerous idea that terrorists and those around them automatically receive classified information about the means and methods used in the war on terror,” said a senior Frist aide.

Try to wrap your head around that one. I dare you. The idea here is that prisoners aren’t allowed to see evidence brought up against them because it would be “dangerous”. Imagine that interrogation, if you will:

“What did you arrest me for?”

“You know what you did!”

“No, I don’t. You picked me up while I was on my way home.”

“Home from what? Orchestrating your next attack??”

“What makes you think I orchestrated an attack?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Do you have any proof?”

“I have LOTS of proof!”

“Can I see?”

“No. It’s classified.”

“Then how do I know you have it?”

“Because I just said I did!”

[tags]terrorism, cia, bush, prison, torture, al qaeda[/tags]

A video of Keith Olbermann’s latest commentary, this time concerning Bush and his boys’ newfound tactic of invoking Nazi Germany when discussing Al Qaeda, got me thinking. Who does embolden the terrorists?

The redcoats often like to accuse liberals of emboldening and aiding the terrorists by reporting on the Bush Clan’s latest scandal or what laws they’re breaking in order to “protect us”. But really, how does that “embolden”.

They would like us to believe that it shows we have “sympathy” for the terrorists, that we are “soft” on them and that opposition to the Iraq War means we don’t have “what it takes to get the job done”. That we’re showing them that they can force us to “back down”.

But what does a terrorist want? Bush tells us they want to take away our freedoms, but this is patently false. The goal of terrorists, as I’ve said so many times, is just what their title implies - terror. Fear. If their goal was to kill, they would be militants. If their goal was political, they’d be radicals. Terrorists kill or otherwise attack in order to instill fear.

These days, the name of Adolf Hitler is synonymous with terror. The scars on this world from WWII and The Holocaust still linger 60 years later, even to those who did not experience it or live to see it unfold. The Holocaust is a monolithic event in history, the most brutal and cruel mass murdering that most youths hear about in history class (though there are other genocides of equal scale). A swastika on one’s shirt is enough to enrage many people.

Equating Osama bin Laden with Adolf Hitler does one thing: it validates everything bin Laden has ever done. It tells him that what he did was so damaging, so huge, that the mere mention of his name can scare us five years later, and that we consider him as terrifying a figure as the perpetrator of the Holocaust. It tells him that we think he is as powerful a man as one who came within inches of conquering Europe.

Many have brought up the peculiarity of defending laws that take away basic civil liberties as necessary to protect us from those who would wish to take away our freedoms, but really that’s not the goal of a terrorist. At least not directly. A terrorist’s goal is to cause chaos. To frighten a population so much that they will throw out reason and be ruled by blind fear. A terrorist’s actions cannot directly take freedoms away, they require help. Help from the government of the attacked country.

To that extent, bin Laden has succeeded immensely. But not by himself, no. Thanks to Bush and the redcoats. Though he has done nothing since 2001, any videotapes he releases are shown as breaking news and are discussed for hours on end. His name is invoked in every public speech by the right, re-enforcing the image of bin Laden as the devil himself.

One attack has changed the course of history. It has sparked two wars and resulted in laws that would never have been passed at any other time in history. Those wars have created more terrorists than had been there initially and created a secondary star out of Al Zarqawi, a man who was little more than a thug with a penchant for beheadings.

The killing of 3,000 civilians in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania led to the killing of over 50,000 civilians in the Middle East from our hands. Al Qaeda itself has not attempted to attack the United States since 9/11, any foiled terror plots that we are told about have nothing to do with the original group, only cases like the Miami 7 where they desired to be involved with Al Qaeda.

Why haven’t they attacked us again? Because they don’t need to. That one attack did everything they could have hoped for and more. Despite this lack of action, every video/audio/written release is headline news today.

Less than a week before the fifth anniversary of the attacks, our country is divided more deeply than it had been prior. Those in support of our president and those against him are further split than any country reasonably should be. Our alliances the world over have been shattered. Our military is spread so thin that age and physical requirements have been forced to loosen up. Roughly one-third of our population believes the terrorists are or might be winning.

The redcoats tell Osama and the terrorists “yes, we are so terrified of you that even if you make a video tape talking about attacks, it is enough to get us into a frenzy”. They tell Al Qaeda that they don’t need to even attack us any more, simply existing is enough to scare us. They tell terrorists that what they do is so awful, so grand, that they are on par with The Holocaust in importance and effect on our lives. They say that we are so easily scared that someone who even looks like you can make us force an airplane to evacuate.

The left says that we will not be changed. If you attack us, we will eradicate you and our lives will move along unchanged. We will not throw out our constitution, we will not be led by fear, we will not let emotions overtake logic. We will stop you, we will kill you, but we will not be scared into forgetting what it was that made us so enviable in the first place. The left says that America is too strong to be frightened by jackasses living in caves.

So the question remains: who emboldens the terrorists?

[tags]bin laden, al qaeda, terrorism, bush, war, iraq, olbermann[/tags]