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“Fresh” Intelligence Is Three Years Old. Bush Ignites Fear. Osama Bin Laden Yawns.
- By James Boyne
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- OpEdNews.com
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- On Sunday, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced with all
due certainty that “new” intelligence reports showed that no fewer
than five important landmark financial buildings were imminent targets
for Al Quaeda terrorist attacks.
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- The Mayor of NYC, the Police Commissioner, the Governor of NY, and
all manner of Republican (mainly) officials instructed us NOT to
panic. GO TO WORK as usual. Do nothing different. Go about your
business. Don’t buy duct tape this time around. Just act normal.
Have a few drinks. Take a few Valium. And go about your normal
business. Don’t panic or be fearful or you will be giving into the
terrorists.
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- Oh yes, the color coded terrorist alert system is being raised for
NYC, Northern New Jersey and Washington DC would be raised to orange
from yellow; or from yellow to orange; depending upon whether you can
remember which was which in the first place.
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- Oh yes, look for suspicious packages. Make is a family outing. Take
a trip to NYC and wander around with the wife and kids around the NY
Stock Exchange or the Citicorp Building looking for suspicious
packages---kind of like an Easter Egg Hunt.
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- I did my own part as a patriotic American. Not being able to get
into NYC because they were diverting traffic all over the place with
barricades and SWAT teams with assault rifles at the ready, I went to
my local supermarket and stood near the checkout counter looking for
people with suspicious packages. And I found some. Some were paper and
some were plastic. They all looked suspicious. Packages, packages,
packages. Filled with lettuce, bread, milk, cantaloupes, canned goods,
and very suspicious looking deli meats. After thirty minutes the
manager kicked me out of the store because I myself looked suspicious.
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- I wonder, just wonder, if I could get a job at my local supermarket
looking for suspicious packages being bagged by suspicious looking
people in my suspicious little suburban town. I want a job as Director
of Suspicious Packages Surveillance. You can’t be TOO careful today.
Everyone is a potential terrorist.
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- And now it turns out that the “fresh” intelligence that spawned
all this heightened security and this high state of alert is THREE
YEARS OLD.
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- Yes, I know that Al Quaeda thinks long-term; that they plan ahead.
But surely Secretary Ridge could have told us that on Sunday so we
ourselves could have had a good chuckle at his stupidity. THREE YEARS
OLD. Surely our intelligence agencies can do better than stumble
across a terrorists laptop computer that has data about buildings in
NYC that is three years old. Is this what we call information that is
an imminent threat? Surely the Keystone Cops and Inspector Clouseau
could do better than this.
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- We have Saddam Hussein right in our very own hands, right now. We
have 500 recently captured Al Quaeda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay,
right now. Where is all the “fresh” intelligence from them? What
happened to all the “fresh” intelligence that we gleaned from the
23,000 Iraqis that passed through our “dog leash torture system”
at Abu Ghraib Prison? None of those sources had information that
warranted an Orange Level Alert Warning?
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- The “fresh” intelligence that we captured in a terrorists laptop
computer pre-dated 9/11 itself. One would think that such intelligence
was of limited value. Any normal thinking American could easily guess
that places like the NY Stock Exchange, the World Bank, or almost any
important building or location would be a nice terrorist targets. We
have tens of thousands of inviting targets.
We don’t need Tom Ridge to tell us. And we don’t need
President Bush and an army of Republican officials to scare the
beejeebees out of us on one hand and then tell us THEY WILL PROTECT US
on the other hand.
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- I just don’t get it. I
must be missing a piece of the puzzle. I don’t understand the logic
of all this. CNN spends all day long on the new, “fresh” terrorist
threat, that is, when Dr. Sonjay Guptha isn’t telling us about how
to whiten our teeth or lower our blood pressure. And the nightly news
programs inform the public with the utmost urgency about the imminent
terrorist threat, that is, in between the commercials for Viagra that
show hoards of horny, sexually deprived men dancing in the street; or
commercials for Leventril (or whatever) showing the shit eating grin
on the face of a woman who was formerly suffering from the dreaded
condition of “sexual lethargy”, but has now recovered.
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- Then I see President Bush hittin’ the ol’ campaign
trail---smiling, and waving on one hand and then in the next breath
President Bush is standing in all somberness with the heads of the
FBI, the CIA, the State Department, the Defense Department, the
National Security Department, etc. telling us about how he and his
Cabinet are “on top of things” and are going to implement the 9/11
Commission’s recommendations. What happened to “bring ‘em on”?
What happened to the 140,000 troops in Iraq? I haven’t heard a peep
about them lately. What happened to all the embedded reporters with
the 4th Infantry Division? How come Dan Rather, and Tom
Brokaw and Geraldo Rivera aren’t over in Baghdad anymore? The
140,000 troops still are. What is the piece of the puzzle that I am
missing?
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- On Sunday Tom Ridge really had me all excited. I was thinking that,
finally, we got our intelligence act together. We headed off the
terrorists just in the nick of time. Now, on Tuesday, I learn that the
“fresh” intelligence that indicated an imminent attack was found
in an laptop computer in Pakistan and that the stuff is all about
places that are obvious terror targets anyway, and that the
information is more than THREE YEARS OLD.
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- Surely, we can come up with something better than intelligence that
is three years old and then proceed to call it “fresh
intelligence” of an imminent nature just because we happened to have
just found it. That’s like finding an old letter in your attic that
has been there for twenty years and then calling it “fresh” and
new and treating it like a letter that was just delivered by the
mailman to you today.
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- At this point I’m thinking maybe we should step back a little
further in our thinking and make a first strike nuclear attack against
the former Soviet Union with all our land based nuclear based missiles
launched from South Dakota.
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- I don’t know. I must be missing a piece of the puzzle. I don’t
like how this whole terrorist threat is being handled. We don’t even
know who, what, when, where, or how we are under threat. What kind of
“intelligence” is that?
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- Even though I am a lifelong Republican I think I will vote Democrat.
I don’t like any of this.
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- James Boyne
- dboyne@aol.com
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- Other Articles By James Boyne on www.opednews.com:
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Banned By Federal Court. Another Bush Victory?
- 12 New
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