A Day of Observing Bush's Blame for Allowing Al-Qaeda Safe Haven

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence is not our frowning battlements, our bristling seacoast, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not the reliance against the resumption of tyranny in our fair land. --Abraham Lincoln, Edwardsville, Illinois, on September 11, 1858

Last October, in a desperate bid for attention and struggling to keep their republican presidential candidates from straying from the Bush foreign policy doctrine, the White House threw their political kindred a lifeline by refashioning their counterterrorism strategy to warn of a strengthened al-Qaeda still determined to attack the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction. The administration report concluded that al-Qaeda was enjoying "safe haven" in the tribal areas of Pakistan, and claimed that those in Iraq who'd identified themselves as al-Qaeda were the most likely and capable branch of the terrorist organization to carry out the threats they describe.

The new White House terror threat assessment was remarkable in it's seeming obliviousness to its own admission of the administration's failure to either capture or stifle the influence of the individuals that Bush himself declared directly responsible for the killings on 9-11. There they were, without shame or apology, declaring that after over six years since the killings and thousands of lives squandered "fighting them there" -- in Iraq, instead of in Afghanistan/Pakistan -- the best they could do was to tell us that an enemy Bush promised in 2001 to apprehend, "dead or alive," is "persistent" and still "dangerous."

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