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Our leader, George W. Bush, in an October 30th interview conducted by the heroic Sean Hannity, has again defined Evil for us in the simplest terms, so that we will understand why our government is the exact opposite - Good - in our “generational struggle” with the Terrorists:

“Evil people kill innocent life to achieve political objectives.”

Got that?

Video here - the beginning of part 3.

Thomas R. Pochari, editor of World Affairs Monthly interviews Antiwar.com founder and managing director Eric Garris about the web, the universe and everything.

Real Audio file here.

It was 13 years ago today that the New York Times revealed how easy it would have been for the Feds to have stopped that bombing before it started:

Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast
Thursday October 28, 1993

By Ralph Blumenthal
Page A1

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad A. Salem, should be use, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City’s tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manattan Federal Court in that attack.

Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian army officer, was used by the Government to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists now charged in two bombing cases: the World Trade Center attack and a foiled plot to destroy the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the trade center blast, he was feuding with the F.B.I.

Supervisor ‘Messed It Up’

After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I.. supervisor who, he said, “came and messed it up.”

“He requested to meet me in the hotel,” Mr. Salem says of the supervisor. “He requested to make me testify and if he didn’t push for that, we’ll be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn’t do that.”

The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau’s failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

“He said, I don’t think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C.” Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him.

Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem’s account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the New York people: “Well, of course not, because they don’t want to get their butts chewed.”

Mary Jo White, who as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting defendants in two related bombing cases, declined yesterday to comment on the Salem allegations or any other aspect of the cases. An investigator close to the case who refused to be identified furher said, “We wish he would have saved the world,” but called Mr. Salem’s claims “figments of his imagination.”

The transcripts, which are stamped “draft” and compiled from 70 tapes recorded secretly during the last two years by Mr. Salem, were turned over to defense lawyers in the second bombing case by the Government on Tuesday under a judge’s order barring lawyers from disseminating them. A large portion of the material was made available to The New York Times.

In a letter to Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey, Andrew C. McCarthy, an assistant United States attorney, said that he had learned of the tapes while debriefing Mr. Salem and that the informer had then voluntarily turned them over. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of “security and other issues,” Mr. McCarthy said.

William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Government this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcripts he had seen, he said, “were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct.” But citing the judge’s order, he said he could not provide any details.

The transcripts do not make clear the extent to which Federal authorities knew that there was a pan to bomb the World Trade Center, merely that they knew that a bombing of some sort was being discussed. But Mr. Salem’s evident anguish at not being able to thwart the trade center blast is a recurrent theme in the transcripts. In one of the first numbered tapes, Mr. Salem is quoted as telling agent Floyd: “Since the bomb went off I feel terrible. I feel bad. I feel here is people who don’t listen.”

Ms. Floyd seems to commiserate, saying, “hey, I mean it wasn’t like you didn’t tray and I didn’t try.”

In an apparent reference to Mr. Salem’s complaints about the supervisor, Agent Floyd adds, “You can’t force people to do the right thing.”

The investigator involved in the case who would not be quoted by name said that Mr. Salem may have been led to believe by the agents that they were blameless for any mistakes. It was a classic agent’s tactic, he said, to “blame the boss for all that’s bad and take credit for all the good things.”

In another point in the transcripts, Mr. Salem recounts a conversation he said he had with Mr. Anticev, saying, “I said, ‘Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both know that we could avoid that.’” At another point, Mr. Salem says, “You get paid, guys, to prevent problems like this from happening.”

Mr. Salem talks of the plan to substitute harmless powder for explosives during another conversation with agent Floyd. In that conversation, he recalls a previous discussion with Mr. Anticev. “Do you deny,” Mr. Salem says he told the other agent, “your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?” Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev did not deny it. “We was handling the case perfectly well until the supervisor came and messed it up, upside down.”

The transcripts reflect an effort to keep Mr. Salem as an intelligence asset who would not have to go public or testify. A police detective working with the F.B.I., Louis Napoli, assures Mr. Salem in one conversation “We can give you total immunity towards prosecution, towards, ah, ah, testifying.” But he adds: “I still have to tell you that if you’re the only game in town in regards to the information,” then, he says, “you’ll have to testify.”

Studied for Signs of Illegality

The transcripts are being closely studied by lawyers looking for signs that Mr. Salem and the law enforcement officials, in their zeal to gather evidence, may have crossed the legal line into entrapment, a charge that defense counsel have already raised.

But the transcripts show that the officials were concerned that by associating with bombing defendants awaiting trial in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Mr. Salem might have been accused of spying on the defense.

In an undated conversation, Mr. Anticev tries to explain the perils.

“We’re not allowed to have any information regarding that,” he tells Mr. Salem. “That could jeopardize, you know, if you go to see a lawyer, ah, you know, the the defendant’s friend or whatever like that, and you’re talking about things we’re not suppose to, ah, condone that. We’re not supposed to make people do that for us. That’s like sacred ground. You can’t be priveleged, ah, you can’t know what’s being talked about at all.”

Mr. Salem seems to bridle. “I, I, I don’t think that’s right,” he says.

The agent insists: “Yeah, but that’s just a guideline. If that ever happened, ah, you can back and reported on the meeting between, ah, you know, Kunstler and Mohammed A. Elgabrown. Forget about it. I mean a lot of people ah the case can get thrown out. You understand?” The references were to the defense lawyer, Mr. Kunstler, and his client in the second bomb case, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny.

Mr. Salem seems to reluctantly agree.

“They want you to have a hand in it,” Mr. Anticev goes on, “But they’re afraid that when you get that kind of, ah, too deep, like me, it’s almost like, especially with all this legal stuff going on right now.”

If it were just intelligence gathering, the agent says, “You can do anything you want. You could go crazy over there and have a good time. Do you know what I mean?”

The agent goes on: “But now that everything is going to court and there is legal stuff and it’s just, it’s just too hard. It’s just too tricky, if, this, you know. And then there’s the fact if you come by with the big information, he did this, ah, let me talk about this with the other people again.”

“O.K,” Mr. Salem says. “All right. O.K.”

———————————–

For the full story, see 1,000 Years for Revenge by Peter Lance.

Update: See also James Bovard.

Update: Salem’s audio of his conversation with John Anticev.

That’s the phrase my old high school history teacher used to described the two political parties in America, and the evidence for her case just keeps piling up.

Take for instance, this blog entry, by investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss, who noticed that the Republican incumbent in Pennsylvania’s 10th congressional district, Donald “Capital Hillside Strangler” Sherwood, is sending out mailers citing the article, “The Lie Factory” which Dreyfuss co-wrote with Jason Vest for Mother Jones in 2004. This article remains one of the best reports on the neocon “cabal” in Douglas Feith’s office which lied the American people into war in Iraq.

Now why would the Republican be highlighting such malfeasance?

Because the Democrat, Chris Carney, worked for Feith in the “Policy Counterterrorism Evaluation Group” making up tall tales about Iraq’s relationship with Osama bin Laden.

Ha!

Now Richard Perle is holding fundraisers on his behalf.

I suppose Jane Harman plans to appoint this guy to the House Intelligence Committee if he and the Democrats win in November.

Interestingly, Dreyfuss and Vest never mentioned Chris Carney in “The Lie Factory,” but his role has been mentioned elsewhere, such as this New Yorker article by Jeffery Goldberg.

From the New York Sun:

“Voters in Pennsylvania’s rural, conservative 10th Congressional District received an unlikely mailing earlier this month accusing a former Navy lieutenant of helping start the Iraq war.Quoting a 2004 article, “Lie Factory,” that appeared in Mother Jones magazine and relied on interviews with a former Pentagon analyst turned White House foe, Karen Kwiatkowski, the mailing highlights Christopher Carney’s role in a small intelligence analysis shop inside the Pentagon before the Iraq war. The top of the mailing warns voters, “Chris Carney failed our nation once.” “Don’t give Chris Carney a chance to FAIL us again,” the next page says.

The mailing may seem par for the course in an election season in which Republican incumbents are vulnerable to attacks on their support for an unpopular war. But its return address is the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania. The mailing’s target is Mr. Carney, who some see as one of the national Democratic Party’s brightest hopes to wrest control of the House of Representatives in 2006.

The political dissonance was amplified on October 19 when President Bush stumped for Mr. Carney’s rival and the Republican incumbent, Donald Sherwood.Two days earlier, Mr. Carney was in New York for a fund-raiser hosted by one of the president’s original foreign policy advisers in 2000, Richard Perle. …

Mr. Carney stands by his intelligence work. Yesterday, nearly two weeks before Election Day, he said: ‘Some of the party disagrees with me on this, but I know what I saw. Nonetheless, the party respects that I was in a unique position to know this. They like the idea they have a Democrat strong on national defense joining their ranks, especially on the war on terror.’”

Since we seem to be stuck with this two party system, we should consider replacing the Republicans and Democrats with the War Party of Taxes, Tyranny and Death for the members of both and making a brand new one for those of us who care about liberty. We’d probably still lose, but at least we could have an honest debate.

Video here.

Poor old George Bush Jr. He’s got nothing left but straw men and circular logic to keep American soldiers in Iraq.

First he implies that his critics believe the “sophisticated propaganda” of the enemy terrorists that “our” presence is the cause of all Iraq’s problems - a case I’ve never heard made by anyone, American or otherwise.

Then he breaks out the trusty old sunk-cost routine:

“I’ve met too many wives and husbands who’ve lost their partner in life, too many children who’ll never see their mom or dad again. I owe it to them and to the families who still have loved ones in harm’s way, to ensure that their sacrifices are not in vain.”

Highfalutin emotional rhetoric aside, you don’t have to be David Henderson to see the mistake in the Great Decider’s reasoning. From the Skeptics Dictionary:

“When one makes a hopeless investment, one sometimes reasons: I can’t stop now, otherwise what I’ve invested so far will be lost. This is true, of course, but irrelevant to whether one should continue to invest in the project. Everything one has invested is lost regardless. If there is no hope for success in the future from the investment, then the fact that one has already lost a bundle should lead one to the conclusion that the rational thing to do is to withdraw from the project.

To continue to invest in a hopeless project is irrational. Such behavior may be a pathetic attempt to delay having to face the consequences of one’s poor judgment. The irrationality is a way to save face, to appear to be knowledgeable, when in fact one is acting like an idiot.”

Lukery explains.

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