Look, Look Over Here ~ Oh No! Another Terrorist!

The Bush Administration is nothing if not reliably predictable. Whenever things get really rotten-smelling, such that even the most gullible, naiive & right-wing voters can't miss the stench, it attempts to refocus attention on the event that made their careers ~ 911. No, can't get too much mileage out of that old worn retread! There's still some life in that old story, & Bushco is not about to let us move on.

Today's big "not news" is the effort to distract us from all the bad news for Bushco emanating out of Washington ~ political purges of prosecutors too mild for Bushco's ravenous tastes, calls for 'Berto's head over that & the FBI's indiscriminate use of the spying powers granted by ill-conceived antiterrorism legislation, the determined expansion of the war in the Mideast despite its huge unpopularity with American voters, & continued calls to shut Gitmo & all the other American-run gulags down.

Bushco's response is to pull yet another evil demon terrorist out of its ass, parade him in all his dishevelled, broken-English glory before the court of public opinion, & shout: "Torture works! Torture works! We made him confess!"

And, oh, never mind that these tribunals are mind-numbingly piss-poor excuses for a real court of law. We've been over all this before. I won't bore my readers, nor myself, by going over the reasons why that's so yet again.

If you've been living in America the past 5 years & you don't know that yet, you should be forced to forfeit your citizenship & your voter registration, turn in your keys to the gym, & fork over your credit cards & your privileges to marketed "lifestyle" consumerism. We'll send you to Iraq to enjoy a long vacation.

A review of the big not-news in Slate summary-style:

"The New York Times and Washington Post point out it's not clear exactly how involved Mohammed could have been in all the plots he detailed. The Sept. 11 commission at one point described Mohammed as someone with extravagant ambitions who had a vision that was "a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star, the superterrorist." But the Los Angeles Times quotes a terrorism expert, who says most of the plots he described did seem to have some leadership from Mohammed. USA Today points out that the majority of the targets described by Mohammed "were not hit," such as the Panama Canal, the New York Stock Exchange, and Big Ben. The Wall Street Journal says many of the plots "never got beyond the planning stage."