Bush Madness Becomes Apparent

By Bill Gallagher
Created Dec 19 2006 - 9:54am

- from the Niagara Falls Reporter (posted here with permission) [1]

DETROIT -- George W. Bush is bloody nuts. There's no other way to describe
this dangerous madman. A chorus of experts and the Iraq Study Group have
concluded that the present course is not working. Diplomatic initiatives are
required to prevent Iraq from exploding into a regional maelstrom and
humanitarian catastrophe. The Army chief of staff says his branch of the
military "will break" without a fresh infusion of thousands of new active
duty troops.

The White House has ordered Pentagon planners to come up with an option for
a major troop surge. Bush and his puppeteer Dick Cheney's fingerprints are
all over this madness. Last Friday, they attended the farewell ceremonies
for ousted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Bush offered effusive praise for the man he sacked the day after the midterm
elections, not for incompetence, but for political expediency. "This man
knows how to lead and he did," Bush gushed, "and the country is better off
for it."

Bush suggested the myth that Rummy should be considered a liberator, a
master nation-builder: "On his watch, the United States military helped the
Iraqi people establish a constitutional democracy in the heart of the Middle
East."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice skipped Rummy's send-off. But neocon
nuts and former Rumsfeld aides Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were on
hand, along with Gen. Peter Pace, the apple-polishing chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff. America would be more secure if everyone who attended the
Rumsfeld ceremony were permanently banned from making any military and
national security decisions.

The Busheviks' dependence on the military to protect us from terrorists is a
failure as we continue to fail to commit the resources to intelligence and
border security measures that could make a difference in preventing another
9/11 nightmare. While we squander billions of dollars in Iraq, a system to
track whether foreign visitors leave the country when their visas expire is
stalled because the Busheviks say it's too expensive. The exit-monitoring
system known as U.S. Visit was to be in operation at the 50 biggest land
border crossings by next December. Congress actually authorized the creation
of the system in 1996.

But The New York Times reports it could take five to 10 years to get the
system operational. "Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7
billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue
that creating the program with the existing technology would be
prohibitively expensive," according to the Times story.

In an interview with the Times, Stewart A. Baker, the assistant secretary
for Homeland Security, said the exit system would cost "tens of billions of
dollars," and the report notes, "the department had concluded that such a
program was not feasible, at least for the time being."

Jonathan Alter of "Newsweek" magazine reminds us that that a section of the
Iraq Study Group Report explains our diplomatic efforts have a serious
handicap because, as the study notes, "our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic
speakers, just six of whom are the level of fluency. In a conflict that
demands effective and efficient communications with Iraqis, we are often at
a disadvantage."

That language gap is deliberate and negligent, and the State Department is
not alone. The FBI's record with Arabic-speaking agents should cause us all
sleepless nights. Bassem Youssef, the FBI's highest-ranking Arab-American
agent, infiltrated the terrorist cell of the "blind sheik" Omar
Abdel-Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing at the World Trade Center.
Youssef has been cut out of any significant role in the war on terror. He
claims his exclusion is the result of discrimination and he's sued the FBI.
The lawsuit has revealed a stunning lack of knowledge among top FBI
counter-terrorism officials about the basic tenets of Islam.

FBI Director Robert Mueller was in Detroit last week, and the local bureau
flak promised he would deign to give the media 20 minutes of his precious
time. We were ordered to be assembled at 10:30 a.m. Half an hour later,
Mueller appeared and made a brief statement about how well the Detroit FBI
is doing with a local joint terrorism task force and then turned to
questions.

I raised the issue of the scant number of agents with advanced Arabic
language skills and the abysmal ignorance of Islam the FBI brass showed in
sworn depositions, including the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

"I'm not sure your facts are all accurate," Mueller said dismissively. He
went on to claim he was "always interested in recruiting more individuals
with those language skills in the bureau," and added, "So to put it in
context, it's not as dire as you purport to believe it is."

Did Mueller mean his underlings had not given sworn depositions on the
Sunni-Shiite distinction, I asked.

"I have not read their depositions," he now said. "I did not understand that
was an issue in their depositions. It may have been."

Using videotaped excerpts, NBC reported on their testimony on Dec. 4.
Several other news organizations picked up on the explosive story. So the
FBI director who claims he has not looked at the depositions presumes that
my reliability, having read them, is suspect. You decide.

Dale Watson, the FBI's top counter-terrorism official before and after 9/11,
now retired, was asked by Bassem Youssef's lawyer, "Do you know who Osama
bin Laden's spiritual leader was?"

Watson: "Can't recall."

Lawyer: "And do you know the difference in the religion between Shiite and
Sunni Muslims?"

Watson: "Not technically, no."

The same question was posed to John Lewis, who until recently was the FBI's
assistant director of counter-terrorism.

Lewis: "You know generally. Not very well."

Lawyer: "Was there any relationship between the first World Trade Center
bombing and the 9/11 attacks?"

Lewis: "I'm aware of no immediate relationship other than all emanates out
of the Middle East, al-Qaeda linkage, I believe. Not something I've studied
recently that I'm conversant with."

Don't bother studying anything important. Be like Bush -- run with your gut,
lump everything in the Middle East together and brand it as terror. The FBI
director is tolerating this inexcusable ignorance and he should be held
accountable for it.

Lawmakers responsible for overseeing U.S. intelligence are not much better.
"Congressional Quarterly's" National Security Editor Jeff Stein asked the
man incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tapped to chair the Intelligence
Committee what branch of Islam al-Qaeda is linked to.

Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, answered, "They are probably both." Then he
said, "Predominantly probably Shiite." Nice try. He had a 50-50 chance and
was flat wrong.

Stein was amazed and told CNN, "If you're the baseball commissioner and you
don't know the difference between the Yankees and the Red Sox, you don't
know baseball. You're not going to have the respect of the people you work
with."

But Reyes is safe. He only has to watch over George W. Bush, another early
retiree. Recall, when Bush was part owner of the Texas Rangers, he aspired
to become baseball commissioner. The other owners rejected him as someone
with a famous name but weak on ability and experience. Baseball's break is
the world's tragedy.
_______
BILL GALLAGEHR

About author Bill Gallagher, a Peabody Award winner, is a former Niagara
Falls city councilman who now covers Detroit for Fox2 News. His e-mail
address is gallaghernewsman@sbcglobal.net [2].

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson