Since the war began, or at least since we figured out there were no WMDs and Iraq had as many connections to Al Qaeda as they did to Al Bundy, the most popular argument for the Iraq War came in the form of a knee-jerk response question: “So what, you’re saying Iraq would be better if Saddam stayed in power?” Well Kofi Annan apparently has the answer to that.

He said he agreed with Iraqis who claim that life is worse now than it was under Saddam. “I think they are right in the sense of the average Iraqi’s life,” he told interviewer Lyse Doucet, who spoke to him on Friday. BBC provided a transcript of the interview.

“If I were an average Iraqi obviously I would make the same comparison — that they had a dictator who was brutal but they had their streets, they could go out, their kids could go to school and come back home without a mother or father worrying, ‘Am I going to see my child again?” Annan said.

Ouch. It’s as I quoted from an article in a magazine I lost so long ago. Back under Saddam you were repressed, but chances are you’d only die if you broke the law, as terribly repressive as those laws were. Now you can die at any time, anywhere, for no reason at all.

Curfews are the norm and people are dying on the way out of mosques, on their way to school, even at funerals. Bodies are found in ditches with evidence of brutal torture, bombs explode randomly. We hear about the big explosions, but we don’t hear about the people who just up and vanish, at least not until their corpses are found.

Well, it took five years plus for the FBI to finally allow another video from the attack on the Pentagon, but here it is. Unlike the original, this one is a little clearer. Like the original, there is a distinct lack of plane visible.

[youtube]H285_DWX_bQ[/youtube]

Now I can hear you already, “But Hanlon, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence!” And you’re correct. However, there are a multitude of tapes of the Pentagon attack. Gas stations and hotels in the area had perfect angles. All were confiscated, and now so far we’ve seen two of them, both of which show no plane.

There are many explanations for why there is no plane in the wreckage, why the bodies are missing, etc. However, the lack of plane in the released footage so far paints an interesting picture. Plane is missing after, plane is missing before. They release two videos, one years after the fact, that show nothing. Why those?

As razors go, Occam’s is another fun one. The South Park boys tried to play that game to disprove the attacks were anything but what we were told, but humor me. Which makes more sense: a 757, hijacked by an unskilled pilot, performed a spectacular aerial maneuver necessary to hit that spot of the building, managing to both avoid the defense systems and stay out of sight on all local security cameras, and then completely vaporized on impact… or a small unmanned craft/missile was shot into the building and the revealing footage is being withheld?

You know, I’ve been reflecting a lot on our so-called War on Terror. The article I wrote earlier, combined with the email I received from Tom, highlighted to me that there really isn’t much of a terrorism threat here in the ol’ US and A. We receive a handful of attacks a year on average and more people die skiing into trees than from said attacks.

But what I also noticed was that while our War on Terror (the “Global” part got dropped, presumably because the globe realized we don’t care about them) is solely focused on brown terrorists, it seems as though we here in the USA are at surprisingly little risk from them, even within the scope of what terrorism we DO receive.

In fact, what I found was that we are far more at risk, both us citizens and more high-profile targets, from white bread American-born terrorism than anything else. In my digs through the old records I found that a bunch of attacks came from two groups: the similarly named Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, both severely tree-hugging type groups. Arson seems fairly popular. From the ELF:

As firefighters scrambled to snuff out the flames consuming a West Jordan home-improvement store, Justus Ireland took his place among the spectators. He thought they would never catch him. His only lament was he didn’t have a camera to capture the pandemonium. Days later, when members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force said they wanted to chat, Ireland kept his cool. In fact, he was elated. The same man who displayed speeding tickets in his home, who thrived on sparring with police, was ready to play. Scott McCullough, a state Probation and Parole agent, and FBI Special Agent Matthew Miller met Ireland in the parking lot of a Provo restaurant.

Awesome. And the ALF isn’t a heck of a lot better. Poke around on their website if you want to. I must admit the image of a guy dressed up like a guerrilla combatant holding a puppy is pretty effin’ funny.

Anyway, if you haven’t heard much about these two groups, don’t feel bad. Most haven’t. After all, these guys aren’t terrorists, they’re just crazy liberals who happen to kill people now and again. “Crazy liberals?” I hear you say, “They’re all crazy!” Well don’t get too confident, we also forgot about a pretty popular form of right-wing terrorism: going after abortion clinics. To wit, an attack you probably didn’t hear about on The O’Reilly Factor:

Had the criminal, David McMenemy, been Arab or Muslim, this would have been headline news for weeks. But since his target was the Edgerton Women’s Health Center, rather than, say, a bank or a police station, media have not called this terrorism — even after three decades of extreme violence by anti-abortion fanatics, mostly fundamentalist Christians who believe they’re fighting a holy war.

Ahhh, a white guy going after baby-killers. That’s not terrorism, that’s just plain righteous (granted, he ended up going after a standard OB/GYN type doctor, not an abortion clinic, but it’s the thought that counts). I’m sure Jesus would smile on guys like that, he seemed to really be big on killing and hatred and all of those good Christian values. After all, there’s the Army of God. These guys are all about both Jesus and killing people.

Case in point: their hero Paul Hill. Here’s a guy who shot not one, but two abortionists and is lauded as an icon on the website. Take a look at this little bit he wrote himself.

I realized that many important things would be accomplished by my shooting another abortionist in Pensacola. This would put the pro-life rhetoric about defending born and unborn children equally into practice. It would bear witness to the full humanity of the unborn as few other things could. It would also open people’s eyes to the enormous consequences of abortion—not only for the unborn, but also for the government that had sanctioned it, and those required to resist it. This would convict millions of their past neglect, and also spur many to future obedience. It would also help people to decide whether to join the battle on the side of those defending abortionists, or the side of those defending the unborn.

Gulp. That’s that Christian love and brotherhood for you. People willing to kill people to show them how terrible killing is. After all, if you hadn’t aborted that baby, he could have grown up to a good and righteous man who went on to gun down doctors for doing something you have a religious problem with. You don’t want THAT on your conscience, do you?

But that’s all standard stuff. Liberals hate meat-eaters and hunters, religious crazies hate medicine and science. I can’t really imagine a Jihadi chaining himself to a tree or throwing a molotov cocktail into a Planned Parenthood building. So what about things that are more serious, like going after the government? That’s pretty terrorism-y. Surely we’d hear about that.

Well… no. Apparently not.

Demetrius “Van” Crocker of McKenzie, convicted in April of attempting to obtain a chemical weapon and possession of stolen explosives, was sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday by U.S. District Judge James Todd in Jackson.

Crocker, who told undercover FBI agents of his desire to explode a briefcase bomb while Congress was in session, was found guilty by a jury in about 90 minutes in April.

As the article linked to by C&L says, imagine if that was a Muslim man talking about the glorious victory of Allah over the infidels. Sean Hannity would be on the radio talking about this guy every day. But no, there’s none of that to be found.

Now, keep in mind we’re in a “war” on “terrorism”. Now let’s think that over. War is pretty easy to define, though nebulous given our trend of warring on poverty and drugs as well as brown people with exaggerated facial hair. Let’s just say we’ll call any concentrated effort to eliminate something a war against that something. Terrorism? The United Nations took care of that for us.

The second part of the report, entitled “Freedom from Fear backs the definition of terrorism - an issue so divisive agreement on it has long eluded the world community - as any action “intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.“

So let’s take a look at our examples. The arson against places deemed “cruel” to animals:

• Intended to cause death: maybe
• Purpose of intimidating: definitely
• Intimidation to do or abstain from an act: yep

We’ll call that 2 yes’s and a maybe, so that’s 2.5 out of 3. That gives the ELF and ALF about an 83% on our Terrorism Aptitude Test. How about the abortionist doc killers?

• Intended to cause death: yep
• Purpose of intimidation: obviously
• Intimidation to do or abstain from an act: yes sir

Wow, a 100% for the Army of God. How about the Congress Blowing-upper guy? I’m not sure I need to do that one out the long way, he obviously gets an A+ on our test.

So they’re definitely terrorists, but the guys screaming about our War on Terror don’t seem to care about ‘em. You won’t often hear Rush deliver a tirade against the wackos who would dare murder a doctor simply for daring to help those who ask him for it, and chances are no one’s going to bat an eye about someone who wants to bomb Congress. The loonies setting fires? Maybe, they’re tree-hugging hippie crazies.

But as soon as we get a group of idiots in a crummy apartment complex who talked to a guy they thought was involved with Al Qaeda, well now we’re talking about an international incident that proves that the threat is real. I would bet any money that if these guys were buying ammunition from local thugs and equipment off of eBay no one would have ever heard of “The Miami 7″.

I think we all care about terrorism, but I don’t think anyone would call me paranoid or overly cynical if I said our War on Terror was more about xenophobia than security.