Bush-Cheney Causing Increased Terrorism
September 24th, 2006

Anyone who's been paying attention to the news from reporters in Iraq and throughout the Middle East has known for some time that terrorist attacks and radical Islamic groups have been on the rise ever since the US invasion of Iraq. However, reading the headlines from the incredibly timid and cowed New York Times over the last several years would never have given you that impression. Until today that is, when the headline read: “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat”.

It's nice to see the New York Times actually coming to grips with the abysmally stark realities that the United States has created in the Middle East by invading a country that never attacked us. However, it was not merely the unprovoked attack on Iraq that caused the increase in resentment and hatred against the United States, rather it was the extremely blundered attempts to install a puppet democracy there that have caused the tidal wave of terrorism. Everything from permitting post invasion looting, to disbanding the Iraqi police force and army, to Abu Ghraib, to the lack of reconstruction, to the heavy-handed tactics used to try to root out terrorists in Iraqi towns and cities - all have created a seething hatred of the American occupation.

The intelligence report viewed by the New York Times paints the bleakest picture to date on the state of international terrorism. The report entitled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States’’ documents how the US-led invasion of Iraq has dramatically stimulated the Islamic Jihadist movement throughout the world. The report suggests that if the trend continues we can expect more terrorist attacks against US targets at home and abroad.

What the New York Times article does not touch on, however, is the possibility that Bush and Cheney actually want to increase Islamic terrorism in order to generate support for their so-called “war on terror”. If the threat is decreasing, they have less ammunition to stoke the fires of war. Keep in mind that these aging Cold Warriors benefited greatly from the communism scare, and the threat of nuclear war. If there is one thing they understand it's that they need a perceived enemy to enable and promote their war plans. If the enemy is weakening, or worse yet, vanquished, their rationales for war evaporate.

Maybe the New York Times will catch on in the next five years. Maybe not.

Be prepared for Bush, Cheney and administration officials to be foaming at the mouth about the war on terror as the November elections approach. They will say the Democrats are weak on the war on terror, when what they really mean is the Democrats might institute rational foreign-policy plans, and spoil their trumped up war in Iraq and chances for keeping the public terrified of boogiemen. One thing is clear, Bush and Cheney have no intention of protecting the United States against terrorists, in fact, they are probably hoping for a pre-election terrorist attack to drum up more Republican votes.

JRM

Voting in the Maryland primaries yesterday made it clear to just about everyone how dilapidated, disorganized, and totally flawed our voting system is. When I arrived at the polls at about 10 a.m., long after they had opened, the poll workers were still frantically trying to figure out how the electronic systems work, and why many of them didn't work. They were arguing back and forth about what was causing problems with inserting memory cards into the machines, but I was unable to decipher precisely what the problem was.

When they tried to initialize a card to give me to bring to the polling machine it gave them an error message that they did not recognize. Something about the card not having been logged on a master machine. One of the women there said that it was just a glitch and told the other woman to just hit a certain button to skip that part. Of course that makes me wonder if my votes will be counted.

I took the memory card to the voting machine, which greeted me with the infamous Diebold moniker as the screen came on. I was able to vote quite easily on the machine, and it did show me a summary of all the votes I cast. Going through the votes it appeared as though it had recorded all of my voting correctly, that is assuming it was showing me the actual votes that would be reported to the master system.

Apparently, my experience was far better than many of those in Montgomery County. In several places machines were delivered without power cords so they could not be used. In other places the machines simply did not work, or the poll workers who were supposed to bring the memory cards never arrived on time. In some polling places people were forced to use provisional ballots, and when those ran out, voters were forced to use scraps of paper. Polls were kept open until 9pm to give people more time to vote, but that was a pitiful attempt which was much too little, much too late. This is the current state of the voting system here in Maryland, and probably in many other counties across the nation.

Perhaps the oddest and most suspicious occurrence was in neighboring Prince Georges county where 20 voting system technicians quit just before they were supposed to deliver and set up the machines yesterday morning. So far, there is no word on why so many technicians would opt to quit just when they were needed to set up the voting machines. I will be interested to find out if they were supposed to be servicing primarily Democratic precincts.

Considering that the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount in 2000 because they said that different standards were being used to count the votes in different precincts, I can't understand how this is legal to have such different voting systems in different voting precincts throughout the country. It should be illegal, and it is definitely unacceptable. We have allocated $500 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we can't even set up a simple, accurate voting system across the United States. It is shameful, it is inexcusable.

I will be writing my senators and congressman to let them know of my extreme displeasure at how my tax dollars have been spent to supposedly improve the voting system in Maryland. It is not improved, and in fact it is broken. Voting and counting the votes properly is the most basic foundation of any democratic system, and it's one that we do not currently have in the United States of America.

JRM

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Letter to my Senators and Congressman: 

Today Maryland's voting system is a laughingstock across the country, but for people like me who went to vote yesterday, it was no laughing matter. I am a constituent of yours, and I wrote to you on numerous occasions asking you to not support the purchasing of Diebold voting machines because they were prone to problems, expensive, and did not offer a paper trail. Maryland went ahead and purchased these systems anyway, and yesterday gave us a glimpse of the kinds of nightmares we can expect in November 2006.

Everyone involved in the election debacle yesterday should be fired immediately and replaced with competent, nonpartisan staff. I expect court cases from the disenfranchisement that occurred yesterday, and I hope that the end result is that Maryland scraps the Diebold systems in favor of more reliable systems with a paper backup trail.

I am disgusted that after all this time Maryland officials have still been unable to assemble a functioning reliable voting system for us to cast ballots on. It is a disgrace and it is inexcusable. If this is not enough of a wake-up call for you, then I don't know what could possibly motivate you to fix the system once and for all. Our expensive voting system has failed us completely and I hold all elected officials in Maryland responsible. Voting is the most basic, bedrock foundation of a democratic society, and yet we do not have a functioning voting system in Maryland. You let us down, and we will not forget it.

Sincerely,

Dr. John R. Moffett

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Reply from Senator Mikulski (within 3 hours)

Read Here

ABC is frantically scrambling to cut and paste their right-wing Crock-umentary “the Path to 9/11” to try and remove propaganda elements which came straight from the right wing blogosphere. The question is, if ABC executives knew that the miniseries contained numerous factual errors that just happened to coincide perfectly with right wing talking points, how did they let it get this far towards airing without any attempt to correct the errors?

Obviously this happened because the entire project was conceived and funded by a right-wing buddy of Rush Limbaugh's, so ABC knew from the start what they would be getting for their $40 million investment. There are even questions as to whether Thomas Kean, the Republican chair of the 9/11 commission, was perhaps even paid to endorse the program.

There is still an entrenched feeling among the news media that conservatism is the new way in America, and that liberals are irrelevant and easily ignored. ABC and Disney are finding out that we are not so easily ignored. It used to be the case that Republicans and conservatives had a lock on talk radio and the mainstream media, but because of the Internet, that has changed and they can no longer count on having the only say on particular matters of national importance.

Getting the history of 9/11 straight is not only important for the historical account, but also so that we do not make similar mistakes again. If the historical facts become distorted, then any future responses or preparations will also be distorted relative to reality. But conservatives don't care about preparing for anything, to them government is just a way to exercise power over other segments of the population.

Republicans hate the federal government, and they are showing it every day as they dismantle agencies meant to protect the American people. With this rewriting of history, they are again putting politics above the safety of the American people. If Americans come away thinking that Bill Clinton was responsible for 9/11, rather than Condoleezza Rice and George Bush, that will give the Bush administration even more leeway to lie and distort the important issues facing us. It will let them off the hook rather than holding them accountable for their egregious failures and criminal acts.

I will be very interested to see if this Crock-umentary airs tomorrow night. In 2003, CBS was forced to pull a miniseries on Ronald Reagan due to conservative pressure. In 2004 Disney, the parent company for ABC, refused to distribute Fahrenheit 9/11 because they said it was too politically charged. Somehow I doubt ABC will pull this series now due to pressure from Democrats and liberals. Media organizations do not fear liberals the way they fear conservatives. Let's all work together to make that miscalculation painfully obvious to ABC and Disney.

JRM

What could be more despicable than creating a docudrama packed with lies and falsehoods blaming the September 11^th attacks on the previous president, Bill Clinton, rather than the president who was commander in chief when the attacks occurred? Not much.

But that's what ABC and Disney have in store for the United States, not to mention school children all across the nation. A right wing activist wrote the script for a completely false version of what happened prior to 9/11, and ABC is not only going to air the false account on national TV, they are urging teachers all across the nation to force schoolchildren to watch this rewriting of history.

Attacking Bill Clinton has been a major media cash cow for over a decade now, and as the profits on such ad hominem attacks dwindle, large media corporations like ABC and Disney long for the good old days when a good Clinton bashing would bring in millions of dollars in profits. What seems so curious is that they have not used the same rationale to make money by bashing President Bush.

It's not that there isn't a ton of money to be made attacking the worst president in American history, it just doesn't fit the political agenda of rich corporate media types. So it's back to Clinton bashing we go, with pathetic attempts to rewrite history and blame President Bush's utter failures on someone else.

I will be boycotting ABC and Disney in all their media outlets if they do not respond to public pressure and halt the airing of this absurd attempt to shift the blame for the most serious attack on the United States away from President Bush - the person who ignored the president's daily briefing on Osama bin Laden preparing to attack the United States. I urge all Democrats and liberals to boycott everything ABC and Disney does. If a new Disney movie comes out, don't go to see it. Write letters to the advertisers at ABC and tell them you will no longer be buying their products as long as they advertise with ABC.

Above all, write to ABC and tell them how you feel about their egregious decision to air such garbage.

JRM