Time Magazine reveals Cheney's secret hiding place!

What war? The war on drugs?
The War on Iraq is "accomplished," right?
The War on the Constitution?
The War on the laws prohibiting torture?
The War on Our Moral Standing in the World?

Please specify.

If you mean "The War on Terror," and if you really consider that wartime, then you must realize that we will be at "war" for the rest of our lives and as long as our beloved country exists. There will be terrorism on our planet as long as there are humans. Period. Fight it, yes. Make surgical strikes and wage an intense intelligence campaign, but don't tell the citizens that they are forever "at war." That kind of fear-mongering worked for the architects of fascism, but I want something better for my beloved country. I want honesty and competance, and I'm getting neither one.

 

Anybody want detailed satellite photos of Anne Frank's attic, I mean Site R?

http://gallery.colofinder.net/eyeball-site-r

 

can I get one of these for site R?

 

I don't really know what that means, but it was damn funny.

 

I think I should quit -- I mean completely cold turkey -- my political posting.

I also believe that you would enjoy the Spectreman series.

 

If that is what it takes to keep the American way of life then so be it. The people we are fighting in this "war" do not care about money, power, land, or anything than the utter and complete destruction of the western civilization. They do not care to negotiate and talk about why they hate us. We cannot appease and be nice with these fanatics.

I understand your frustration and can see your point but if there is another way then by all means let me know because just sitting back and complaining about our current leadership and offering no solutions then are most likely becoming a problem and not a solution.

It would not matter whether Bush, Gore, Clinton, Reagan, Carter, Ford , Nixon, etc were president. The time to stand up for our way of life and to say enough is enough is now.


If you are against war that is your right but to the people we are fighting a peaceful resolution is NOT an option.

 

Dennis2112,
I really like that post of yours. Thank you.

I have been advocating the following (as constructive criticism goes):
(1) Surgical special operations strikes. (These may well be underway, and the public probably cannot have knowledge of these). It just makes sense that you fight an underground group with underground tactics.
(2) Revamp our intelligence community with fresh blood and new ways of thinking. Go out with some money and hire a whole new round of smart people to think outside the box.
(3) Think very carefully about terrorist recruiting and what can be done to fight their recruiting. I know this is difficult, but I don't believe this is being done effectively at all. Evidence seems to say it is being ignored currently.
(4) Avoid throwing water (or gasoline even) on a grease fire. Many of us are all for fighting terrorism, but we believe the elective Iraq conflict has a better chance of worsening our situation.
(5) Integrate with as many world-wide intelligence and counter-terrorism efforts as possible. Again, this is bridge strengthening. See point #4 for why some of us believe the Iraq business may have hurt this point as well.
(6) Maintain the moral integrity of our operations at all times. Do not stoop to their level, no matter the inconvenience. (See torture issues).

So I hope it's clear that I agree with you on your assessment of the terrorists. We have to fight it, but I don't want the terminology and emotional baggage of "war" to be used to excuse slipshod and hasty management that circumvents time-honored rules of governance and international behavior. Above all, I want our leadership to be blunt and honest with me and the rest of America at all times. Some people believe our leadership is doing that. Based on all the evidence, I do not believe this to be true. In any case, I truly wish both political "sides" would avoid using the issue of terrorism for political gain, but that's the monster we're stuck with.

Again, thanks for your post. It's clear you don't want the standard pissing match, which I easily could have started. Cheers.

(and so much for cold turkey).

 

Excellent choice. I agree but there may be a time that we have to more force than finese but that should be decided on a case by case basis

Again nice idea. But over the past decade ( this is not meant to be a shot against the Clinton administration but it did happen) has had walls put up in reference to sharing information and using mulitple agencies ( FBI, CIA, NSA, Local law, etc) to monitor and caught criminals. These walls have to be taken down so the new smart people can do their job. That doesn't happen overnight and may take several administrations to get it right.

Education is the key here. We need to get the message out that there is a better way. Most terrorists organizations use fear and hate to get there message out and the leaders never seem to be the ones in harms way.

I disagree to a certain extent. Look Iraq amounts to nothing more than an away game. Would you rather be fighting the terrorists here or over there. Right now every terrorist or Al Qeda operitive in killing themselves to get to Iraq and fight the Americans. I would much rather fight them over there then to worry about my childrens playground to become a warzone. Now I will admit that it is not much fun for the Iraqis but they were going through much worse before we got there.

You could be right here but again these people we are fighting don't think the way we do. They want us dead. Does it really matter what we do? they are still going to hate us. All they understand is "might makes right", "crush your enemies", etc. But I see your point

Well I have to disgaree here a little. If you have someone with innocent American blood on their hands, I really don't care what ahppens to them. If one of my daughters were hurt or killed well lets just say I would not be very merciful.

I am glad that you choose to have the mature response and not the typical knee-jerk explosion. I see we have much in common on our beliefs and I'll bet that you have liberal tendencies as I have conservative tendencies.

 

Weird.

Cheney's hideout is literally 20 miles from my brother's house.

 

Finally, we appease our critics!

But we do it for art's sake, not the adulation and the chicks.

 

Afghanistan was a case for war since they were sponsoring and harboring the terrorist organization that attacked us.

Iraq was an elective war against a country that has NO ability to threaten the US or our strategic interests.

Yes, it will take time. It will just take longer while we have an administration that, when it decides it doesn't like the intelligence they are receiving, creates an "intelligence" service whose sole job is to rubber stamp anything that supports their case for war.

Right, this is why we need to have intelligence services directing covert operations designed to strike the heads of these organizations rather than the hands. In addition, we will never "get the message out" while our troops are engaged in an unjustified war and are torturing Arabs.

Afghanistan should have been the "away game" you mentioned. Instead, we diverted our troops from the war on terror to preemptively attack a nation that wasn't a threat based on "intelligence" that has been shown to be false AND may have been disinformation provided by Iran to manipulate us into war.

It DOES matter what we do. If we are to convince these people that we ARE better, we have to BE better. We cannot just SAY that we are better, we have to SHOW it.

That is the point. Many of the people who have been tortured HAVE NO BLOOD WHATSOEVER ON THEIR HANDS. However, you can bet that they will WANT some blood now that we have shown ourselves to be on the same playing field as the tyrant we overthrew.

 

Speak for own self, Pointyhead! Women of Earth. They see me and scream "Tom Petty!" That must be human talk for sexyness. I am sexed. Very much! Ha ha ha ha!

 

i don't recall W or anyone in the administration saying we were "forever" at war. we have however been at war, with terror, afghanistan, OBL, islamo-fascism, and the arab nationalist fascism of saddam's bath party, in one way or another for the past 30-odd months. when i look back at other "wars" the US has been involved in this does not strike me as "forever." that kind of hyperbole worked for the architects of MoveOn.org and the Pelosi-wing of the democratic party, but i want something better for my beloved country. I want realism and a recognition of the threat we face and the "war" necessitated by the atrocities of 9/11, and the democrats are offering none of it.

 

You know, whenever I see the good Doctor's face I don't think Tom Petty but instead like an inverse Michael Jackson. He's even got the glove!

BTW, once today's paypal deposit is credited....all 64 episodes will soon be mine!, including such classics as "The Terrifying Atttack Of Salamandar", "Kill The Vicious Monster Salamandar"
"Terror Comes Ashore: Monster Tag Match!!" "Operation: Break Into The Monster Zone" " Alien Pal Forever! ", and "Bobby, Don't Become A Monster!

 

War WAS necessitated by the 9/11 attacks and we even came close to winning that war until we pulled our troops out for the unjustified action in Iraq. We could be just about finished mopping up Al Qaeda and instead, we are mired in Iraq.

 

thought abut starting a new thread w/ this, but i think it speaks to some of the issues on intelligence that have been raised in this thread. it could be that W's real pre-9/11 mistake was deciding to retain Tenent.

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108717826079636023,00.html

--
Intelligence Tenets

By HERBERT E. MEYER
June 14, 2004

The most dangerous spot in Washington is the intersection of politics and intelligence; stand there long enough and -- as George Tenet recently discovered -- you get run over. No one understood this better than one of Mr. Tenet's more illustrious predecessors, William J. Casey -- the brilliant, street-smart OSS veteran and Wall Street lawyer who managed President Reagan's 1980 campaign and then served as director of Central Intelligence. Indeed, one of the special pleasures of working for Bill Casey was sitting with him at day's end while he wound down by musing aloud about how politics and intelligence came together. Among the priceless insights: "When you get elected president, you must move fast to put your own people at Justice and CIA. In different ways, these are the two bureaucracies that can destroy a presidency."

President Bush ignored half that advice. He moved fast to put his own people at Justice -- and at the Pentagon, the State Department, even the Agriculture Department. But he kept Mr. Tenet, a Clinton appointee, at CIA and, worse, took no steps to bring in the kinds of outside talent the agency sorely needed to shake things up in its collection division and sharpen the agency's analytic skills. The result has been a cascading series of intelligence failures and screw-ups that have hurt the country -- and damaged the president's personal credibility to the point where it may cost him re-election.

The 9/11 attacks were themselves the worst intelligence failure in our country's history, caused largely by the CIA's inability to penetrate al Qaeda, to track the 9/11 terrorists themselves as they traveled the world to plan their deadly mission, and then to share whatever information the agency did collect with the FBI. And whatever may turn out to be the truth about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- whether they were destroyed or moved to Syria or Iran before Saddam Hussein's overthrow -- it's obvious that the CIA failed to provide an accurate assessment of what U.S. forces would find in Iraq when they got there.

In addition, the CIA failed to project Saddam Hussein's war strategy -- to melt into the population and then launch guerilla attacks rather than fight our army head-on in the field -- failed to project the sorry state of Iraq's physical infrastructure including its oil pipelines and electric grids, and failed to accurately project the edgy, not-very-grateful attitude of Iraq's political factions. And whatever may be going on with Ahmed Chalabi, the CIA's clumsy efforts to discredit him through leaks to selected news organizations have made the president himself collateral damage.

One other intelligence failure, which has received less attention than these but which may turn out to be the most serious of all, has been the CIA's failure to draw an accurate picture of the prewar links between Iraq and al Qaeda. While the CIA claims that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden had no more than an arms-length relationship, journalists including Stephen Hayes and Laurie Mylroie have uncovered an overwhelming volume of information which, when you pull the pieces together into a pattern, make a persuasive case that Iraq and al Qaeda worked closely together in the months and years leading up to 9/11. And as the information confirming this linkage has piled up, the CIA has obstinately refused to reconsider its judgment, preferring instead to trash the journalists who have so obviously run circles around its own collectors and analysts.

(This is an eerie replay of what happened in the early 1980s, when the CIA bureaucracy insisted -- in the face of all experience and common sense -- that the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the attempted assassination of the Pope. When journalists including Claire Sterling and Paul Henze uncovered powerful evidence of Soviet involvement, the CIA tried to discredit the journalists rather than consider their information and its horrifying implication. It took a special ad hoc team of agency officials pulled together by Casey over the "intelligence professionals" objections -- a word that doesn't begin to describe the Operations Directorate's behavior; this was the nastiest, most vicious episode of CIA infighting I've ever seen -- to finally figure out what really happened.)

Mr. Tenet's departure -- whether he jumped or was pushed doesn't really matter -- gives the president a chance to correct his original mistake and get the CIA going in the right direction. After all, the CIA is to our government what radar is to the crew of a 747; it's the instrument they rely upon to spot trouble up ahead, before it's visible, and in plenty of time to deal with it. In other words, it's the CIA's job to project the future, clearly enough and soon enough, so that the president can change the future before it happens.

Push beyond all the bureaucratic gobbledygook, and you see that our country's intelligence service does just two things with its $40 billion budget: it collects information, then pulls that information together into patterns, which take the form of National Intelligence Estimates that are delivered to the president, his key advisers and members of Congress. More than 90% of the intelligence budget and personnel goes toward "collecting dots" and funneling them to the seventh floor of CIA headquarters -- keep in mind that the "C" in CIA stands for "central" -- where the top-echelon "dot connectors" work to see what patterns they form. When we have an intelligence failure, by definition it's because one of two things went wrong: We didn't collect the right dots, or we didn't connect them properly.

During the Clinton administration, both parts of the CIA were allowed to degrade. George Tenet has worked hard to improve the agency's collection capabilities; if our espionage service is in good shape a decade from now (it takes a long time to rebuild a spy service) he will deserve much of the credit.

The big failure -- and the real source of all the failures in these last few years -- lies in the agency's abysmal analytic skills. What's happened, very simply, is this: The dot-connectors got shoved aside and were replaced by bureaucrats, such as Mr. Tenet himself and his key deputies. Think for a moment of our country's great scientific research labs, such as the Salk Institute, Cold Springs Harbor Labs or Rockefeller University. Each one, and others like them, are headed by world-class scientists with proven track records of success (often with Nobel prizes to prove it) and who have now reached that stage in their careers when they can put aside their own research to manage teams of scientists who will make the next breakthroughs. Because these leaders have themselves succeeded so brilliantly, they have superb judgment on whom to hire, which projects to back and which to set aside -- that priceless, unquantifiable gut feel for where the big payoff lies -- what equipment to purchase and how to structure the organization itself.

It's the same with intelligence. You cannot have a first-class intelligence service unless you put at the very top of it men and women with proven records of success at spotting patterns, at seeing where the world is going and what the next threats are likely to be long before they become visible. Intelligence isn't org charts; it's people. Get the right ones in place and all the organizational problems somehow get resolved. Indeed, the one quality all our great CIA directors have shared -- Allen Dulles, John McCone, Bill Casey among others -- is this remarkable talent for spotting patterns and connecting the dots.

In light of today's terrorist threat, President Bush might want to take a page from President Reagan's playbook. When he named Bill Casey to head the CIA, his orders were to get control of the agency -- fast -- and to turn it from a lumbering bureaucracy whose judgments and predictions often were flawed into a razor-sharp operation that was playing offense.

Knowing how long that would take -- and knowing that the country needed a first-rate intelligence service right now -- Casey did something that to this day few people understand. While striving mightily to improve the CIA's collection and analytic divisions, he created virtually overnight within the CIA an OSS -- a small cadre of operators and analysts brought in from the outside, who knew their way around the world and could make things happen, quickly and without a fuss, and who could pull together information into patterns that eluded the CIA's career analysts.

While the CIA bureaucracy stumbled along as best it could -- and, in all fairness, some of the agency's people were first-rate -- this "OSS within the CIA" developed ideas for tripping up the Soviet Union no one else had thought of. And it produced analyses, for instance about the Soviet Union's looming economic implosion, that overrode the CIA's "official" (and dead wrong) judgment that the Soviet economy was growing. All this combined to give President Reagan the edge he needed.

The good news is that this country is filled with first-class pattern-spotters with the talent and experience to do this again. You can find them in politics, in business, on Wall Street, at leading think tanks, in the high-tech corridors of Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128, and in academia. Right now the president has an opportunity to reach out and find the kind of CIA director with the brains and horsepower to make the agency razor-sharp and playing offense. And he needs to move fast.

We are at war, and our radar is busted. Indeed, it's fair to say we are at war because our radar is busted. For the country's sake, we cannot continue to fly blind.

Mr. Meyer served during the Reagan administration as special assistant to the director of Central Intelligence and vice chairman of the CIA's National Intelligence Council. His new video is "The Siege of Western Civilization" (www.siegeofwesternciv.com).

 

Yeah, well realism is what you get with me, basso, 24-7. And I recognize the threat. And I know a grease fire when I see one.

So you can (obviously) ignore my sincere six-point post above, or you could respond thoughtfully as Dennis has done. (Thanks, by the way, Dennis, for the point-by-point replies. And thanks for not calling me an idiot, idealist, or an America-hater for expressing my concerns).

basso, I never said that Bush et al. used the term "forever." They are not dumb, and "forever" is clearly my term in this context. I believe "terror" will exist as long as there are humans. A "war" on said abstract noun would seem to require an indefinite timetable, since "terror" will exist as long as there are humans. You can play the semantics fear game of the administration if you like.

I don't need to reiterate my bottom line about honesty, of which there has been far too little.

And you are really misusing "fascism," I'm afraid. Il Duce defined it as "corporatism." It is not synonym for dictatorshops or all authoritarian regimes. Not at all. It has much more to do with the merger of government and industry.

 

proof?

 

you wouldn't define the Baath party as fascists, or neo-fascists? if not, what were they?

 

Saddam and his group were Totalitarians.
Dubya and his group are Fascists.