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Ms. Fran Townsend, the young woman with the portfolio for terrorism at the National Security Council seems ill suited to the job. She confessed to being frustrated at al-Qa’ida’s success in rebuilding its infrastructure and links to affiliates and the fact that Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants have found safe haven, as the estimate makes clear.And she was far from comfortable responding to journalists’ questions, as can be seen from her answer to this one:
Q. The president was warned before the war that this was actually going to help al-Qa’ida gain influence...Isn’t that something the president ignored?
A. But you’re assuming this is a zero-sum game, which is what I don’t understand. The fact is, we are harassing them in Afghanistan. We’re harassing them in Iraq. We’re harassing them in other ways non-militarily around the world. And the answer is, every time you poke the hornet’s nest, they are bound to come back and push back on you. That doesn’t suggest to me that we shouldn’t be doing it.
Is this what passes for a strategic plan to counter terrorists? If so, it certainly highlights the need for adult supervision in the White House....and for creating the capability to prepare honest, sophisticated estimates, which in turn can enable policies of some vision and imagination.
But all this matters little, if wooden-headedness continues to prevail with the president and Cheney. As long as they are permitted to preside over keystone-cops law enforcement operations, with an occasional military surge here and there, the men and women in our armed forces, and the rest of us, will be in greater danger.
In the end, though, wood is not difficult to drill through with the proper tools.
Thanks to the prescience and courage of those who crafted our Constitution, a wood-tool is available. It is a precision tool that, with some courage, can be employed almost immediately. It is called impeachment, the orderly political process the Founders left to us for use when the president and/or vice president or other high official needs to be removed to save the Republic.
Let the members of Congress, who enjoy calling one another “distinguished,” distinguish themselves by rising to the occasion. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded us at another such juncture, that there is such a thing as too late. Too-late has already come to more than 3,600 young men and women in our armed forces, as well as thousands now missing limbs and other once functional parts of their bodies and minds. Not to mention the carnage visited on hundreds of thousands more whose only sin is that they are Iraqis.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared/briefed the President’s Daily Brief. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
This article appeared originally on Consortiumnews.com.
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