GRIM AND GRIMMER

I really wish we could be talking about shoes, sex, drunkeness, Captain Midnight, obscure movies, or how great I think my new novel is now I’m reading the page proofs, but everyday the shit piles up, and the atmosphere becomes even more tainted. As Madrid suffers its worst taste of hell since the Spanish Civil War, a link to an excellent site, the Daily Mis-leader, (http://www.misleader.org/) raises the old but still-nagging-and-spectral question. “What did the goddamned president know and when did he know it?”

As President Bush visits a memorial for victims of the 9/11 attacks today, he continues to refuse to clarify dishonest comments he and his national security adviser made denying they had any warning that a terrorist attack was imminent before 9/11. In May 2002, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice claimed, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that [Al Qaeda] would try to use an airplane as a missile." Similarly, President Bush denied having any idea about the threat, saying on 5/17/02, "Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people." The problem is that these denials contrast sharply with warnings the White House did receive prior to 9/11. Specifically, the Administration was warned before 9/11 that Al Qaeda was planning to use airplanes in an attack against the United States and that the terror group had recently considered using airplanes as missiles. ABC News and Dateline NBC reported that White House officials acknowledge that U.S. intelligence officials delivered a one-and-a-half page document to President Bush on August 6th that warned that "bin Laden's terrorist network might try to hijack American planes." Those warnings came at the same time that U.S. and Italian officials were warning that "Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the [July 2001] Genoa summit of industrialized nations." These warnings came at the same time top Administration officials were being told to change their own personal flight plans because of "threats." Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines and instead began "traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines" because of "what the Justice Department called a 'threat assessment."8 (To this day, the details of that threat assessment have never been made public.) Similarly, Newsweek reported that the day before the 9/11 terror attacks "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns."

fidicen, who supplied the link, waxes considerable more agressive...

I know you surely know about this, but seeing this information go more mainstream is just so tantalizing. I've got to believe Kerry will unleash it at the right time. I mean, where does chimp go when people find out he had a specific warning about planes and terror on 6 August 2001--while he was beginning the second longest commander in chief vacation of all time (one day short of the record) in the midst of a major economic recession and a mere six months into his term, meanwhile his minions went from public to taxpayer-funded private airline travel and both he and his administration vehemently denied they had anything to inform them that plane attacks were pending but regardless have opposed the Attacks Commission every step of the way and continue to stonewall on testimony and documentational disclosure but constantly use images from the attacks to display their unique fitness for four more years of office. I mean, FAWK, you just can't win an election in the face of that? Can you?? I suppose you could always foment terror in Europe throughout the summer and pin it on towel wearing Ay-Rabs, thus creating the specter of fear amongst an already quivering populace of fat, ignorant chickens without actually doing it in Der Homeland itself and inviting more inquiry into one's intelligence failures and regime machinations. I suppose you COULD try that as a last resort, especially if the markets were tanking, gas prices were spiking, and jobs of both collar colors were being exported, with a li'l help from federal tax incentives and programs, to the subcontinent and far east. I reckon it wouldn't hurt either if it helped the electability and powers of your stooges over there. So I suppose you COULD.Though I would still expect you to lose a fair election by at least five points--in the popular vote if nothing else.

AND GRIMMER STILL

I firmly believe, and I wish I didn’t, that WMDs – that’s plain speaking for fucking atom bombs – will soon be on sale for about the price of their weight in cocaine while we're being distracted by gay marriage, radio decency, and Jesus. The following is clipped from yesterday’s NY Times (which is probably illegal, but frankly, my dears, I don’t give a damn)...

But all in all, the risks of a nuclear 9/11 are increasing. "I wouldn't be at all surprised if nuclear weapons are used over the next 15 or 20 years," said Bruce Blair, president of the Center for Defense Information, "first and foremost by a terrorist group that gets its hands on a Russian nuclear weapon or a Pakistani nuclear weapon." One of our biggest setbacks is in North Korea. Thanks to the ineptitude of hard-liners in Mr. Bush's administration, and their refusal to engage in meaningful negotiations, North Korea is going all-out to make warheads. It may have just made six new nuclear weapons. Then there's Iran, which has sought nuclear weapons since the days of the shah, and whose nuclear program seems to have public support. "I'm not sure there is a way to get an Iranian government to give it up," a senior American official said. Finally, there's the real rogue nation of proliferation, Pakistan. We know that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Islamist father of Pakistan's bomb, peddled materials to Libya and North Korea, and we don't know who else. It may be that A. Q. Khan & Associates already have passed bomb-grade nuclear fuel to the Qaeda, and we are in for the worst," warns Paul Leventhal, founding president of the Nuclear Control Institute. It's mystifying that the administration hasn't leaned on Pakistan to make Dr. Khan available for interrogation to ensure that his network is entirely closed. Several experts on Pakistan told me they believe that the administration has been so restrained because its top priority isn't combating nuclear proliferation — it's getting President Pervez Musharraf's help in arresting Osama bin Laden before the November election. Another puzzle is why an administration that spends hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq doesn't try harder to secure uranium and plutonium in Russia and elsewhere. The bipartisan program to secure weapons of mass destruction is starved for funds — but Mr. Bush is proposing a $41 million cut in "cooperative threat reduction" with Russia.

AND TALKING OF RADIO DECENCY

My thoughts about Howard Stern are nailed down in today's LA CityBeat...
http://lacitybeat.com/article.php?id=740&IssueNum=40

CRYPTIQUE – Nuke ‘em from orbit.