The attached sets forth with far greater cogency (and authority,…) than I have displayed on the topic.
BOTT0M LINE:The Crawford Cabal is so wrongheaded, venal, corrupt and incompetent that far from cornering 'sama, they are his dream team for four more years.
Hence, 'sama will do what he can to ensure Bush victory, and we all know what that means.
(Please note:I am excluding from consideration ;my usual fears of a government staged provocateur event. Here I am referencing the genuine article.)
query:Is the analysis of anonymous correct? If so, what the fuck can be done to prevent the attack (which is in 'sama’s discretion) f rom producing the predicted electoral catastrophe.?
Al-Qaida may ‘reward’ American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office, senior intelligence man says
So, let me get this straight…if there is NOT an attack, it’s Osama telling us not to vote for Bush, instead of the result of assiduous efforts by untold thousands of soldiers and law enforcement officials in this country and aboard (or just sheer luck?) The Administration deserves no credit at all for possibly preventing any terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11? Seems they should at least be given a little credit for that.
We’ve been over this ground before. A terrorist attack may OR may not help Bush at the polls. Mind you, I’m a Democrat myself, but the Guardian’s rep isn’t pristine here either.
I don’t think that the period of quiet you reference has resulted from vigorous defense. It should be clear from events in Iraq and Palestine that soft targets inevitably outnumber defenders and their zeal. Our infrastructure, while more hardened perhaps than that of lesser developed countries is still riddled with opportunities.
Consider whether 'sama has not been inhibited by a desire to avoid stepping on his own lines–ie, how does he follow wtc with something suitably spectacular; he may have been a victim of his unexpectedly outsized result.
frankly none of the purported countermeasures (at least as far as they have been manifested plainly or alluded to in general discourse) do more than close the door whence the horses long ago departed. Even there, the money transfer systems that apparently evolved to cope with a prohibition on the collection of interest have continued to stymie crackdown efforts.
Your remarks about the provenance of the article, viz. the guardian, are, I think, inapposite to the more central question:how did anonymous get permission from the cia to publish this?
It implies some collosal chasms opening up in the inner sancta.
"A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America’s counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an “avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked” war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden’s hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month"
Oh gee…another Liberal book on Bush and the War on Terror[sup]TM[/sup] filled with outrageous exagerations and doomsday scenarios. So let me get this straight. Some guy with no name who claims he works for some intelligence agency he won’t name is going to publish a scathing expose’ on Bush and Osama?
“query:Is the analysis of anonymous correct? If so, what the fuck can be done to prevent the attack (which is in 'sama’s discretion) f rom producing the predicted electoral catastrophe.?”
Stop buying books from every jerkoff trying to make a buck off the war.
Your knee jerked a bit too hard. Not all criticism of Bush comes from the left.
The guy (probably quite rightly) criticises Bush’s complete and utter incompetence and failure to achieve any meaningful goals, but he’s no liberal. He’s firmly in the “nuke everything” camp.
now that I look again, I see that the cia is mentioned only relative to canistraro, who commonets on anaon.
My understanding (very limited) ios taht the cia getws a contract going in that commits all employees to a prior approval, and whether or not the agency os named is not germane.
I’
m pretty sure the other intel agencies operate at lea\st with at\s much control
I take it from the responses that the basic analysis as described in the guardian article is unchallenged, and we must therefore hold our breath to see if
sama will mercifully spare us from more crawford clodhopper continuity or “pull the trigger” (as they say)
I wish I could sucessfully challenge the cw re:US attack, viz bush landslide…
But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA counter-terrorism centre, said he had been vindicated by events. "He is very well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject.
if by “interesting” you intend to manifrest endorsement, why not say so?
The “critique” is bullshit. Pious categoricals, interweaved with unsupported speculation, and crowned by a pusillanimous substitution of
“elsewhere” for “iraq”
also, the premise is that the favor Bush does 'Sama is as recruiter. I am unable to discern any “interesting” refutation of this chilling phenomenon which has made it’s protentous impact felt even upon Dr. Demento, our Sec. of D.
the best analyses that I’ve seen (I think by kos, or atrios, or maybe kevin drum) show that there’s a quick bump, then a drop as people dimly begin to understand how theyve been fucked.
Kind of like the way the 9/11 fuckups are only now coming to serious critique.
I fear an attack in the last week of October, or, wose still the weekend or even day before the election.
Monday November 1 givbes you max “rally” impac;;t, and virtually no time to deconstruct the events. The punditocracy on Monday night will be coming all over their microphones about how we “can’t let the terrorists win…”
what a yuk.
BTW, since we have come so perilously close to the event horizon, and I have, despite my best intetions, fallen into the hole
[foil on]
Don’t you think Karl Rove is at least DAYDREAMING about staging an attack, just kicking it around when he’s high?
[foil off]
(Note to mods:the aforementioned misdirection of bodily fluids does not fall under previously \expressed sanctions against referencing such excresences of any Dopers here present. Should any such dopers also be, in mufti as it were, punidts, I explicitly exempt from the image any such doper/pundits)
I think not. Not because I can’t see ObL having a preference for one President over another, but because I don’t see ObL restraining himself under any circumstances: if he could fuck with us, he already would have. Its probably more a matter of impotence than calculation.
Al Queda is not a cunning international cabal like SPECTRE. They are, for the most part, amatuers whose education is based largely on Islamic scripture. The plot of 9/11 wasn’t a brilliant ploy worthy of John LeCarre, but a Keystone Kops boondoggle that Tom Clancy would sneer at. They got lucky, we got unlucky.
Look at the stupid! Stuffing explosives in some clowns shoes that he ends up trying to set off with matches! Handing over $10,000 to some Chicago gangbanger on the assurance that he’s going to build a “dirty bomb”. (I still wonder if Padilla’s only crime might have been pulling a fast one on ObL)
This ain’t Dr. Moriarty, or Ernst Stavro Blofeld. These guys aren’t that good. They aren’t holding thier fire, waiting for an advantageous moment. If they could hit and hurt, they would. If the don’t, its probably because they can’t.
As for Mr. Anon’s thesis about overwhelming military force: as chilling an amoral realpolitick as the bastard love child of Curtis LeMay and Hank Kissinger. But on practical terms, I don’t think its feasible. We might very well be able to militarily subdue the whole ME, at enormous cost. But then what? We sure as hell can’t occupy it.
Ab zubaidah is an MD I think 'sama is a civil engineer, as was Atta. I don’t think we can rely on their stupidity, and I think they know which end of a computer is the ass end and which end is not.
they are not all Richard Reids–off topic, why didn’t he go into the bathroom–thats where I always used to go if I wanted to light somethin up that wasn’t necessarily approved for transcontintal consumption)
Didn’t say they weren’t educated. Said they weren’t very smart. I offer the following inconclusive but suggestive evidence.
Flight training - became necessary because they could not recruit sufficient trained pilots eager to die for Osama. Well, duh, you might well say. So they sought to get men trained just adequately for the task at hand - flying the plane into a building.
Which of course is the plan they proceeded on. They actually sent guys to flight training schools who asked for instructions just on flying the plane! Not on takeoffs and landings! Jeebus Og Almighty! This is the not the master plot of the cunning criminal genius.
And correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t some of these guys hanging around for months! By what factor of ten does that multiply the opportunity to get caught?
Now this is not to underestimate the incompetence and cupidity on our own part. But over and above our lack of preparation and sheer flat-footed dumb, they got lucky on top of that. Even a lame plan works for the lucky.
At any rate, my point is to denigrate any such idea as ObL trying to affect American presidential politics by some “strategic” attack. If they could, they would have served us a 9/11 every week since. They can’t.
But if he could pick, he would probably pick GeeDubya, only because he has been reliably stubborn, ham-fisted, and oblivious to any strategy but a direct and reckless assault.
Left/right whoever. That’s not the point. It just seems to me like another talking head trying to drum up interest in his book by using scare-tactics and catering to his target audience.
I agree with alaricthegoth. This critique is the nightsoil of a large and well-fed ox. For me the damning evidence is the author’s mistreatment of Annonymous’ comparison of John Brown to Osama.
I myself have agonized over the morality of John Brown’s act of rebellion and thus was surprised to see the question dismissed out of hand. Annonymous didn’t say that the ends justify the means. Instead he tried to explain to his son that in this complex world we live in both the ends and the means need to be weighed. The author seems inhabit a much simpler world where everything is black or white. The judgement of people with such a crude understanding of the world around them is not to be trusted.
He goes on to quote Annonymous as saying that Osama is by far a better man than Brown. The author twists this quote to accuse Annonymous of saying that Osama is a decent person. This author is a joke. Are there any critiques that aren’t a waste of time?