Bush Anti-terrorist aid quits as policies make us " less secure, not more secure,"

Sapling...using your "slice and dice" style of reply.....

 

Works for me I like being the underdog anyway...

 

I've already told you, that's "warmongering sapling" to you.

I'm sorry, I did not think that I needed to explain what the continental US was. The short explanation would be "US territory, not counting Hawaii and Alaska"... Still too difficult? Ask a geography professor.

Did I say that Al Qaeda was gone? That it was no longer a threat? No and No. What I did say was that Afghanistan was no longer a useful base of operations for them. Are you disputing that?

If and when they do they will either be dealing with the 82nd airborne, the 101st AA, or the 10th Mountain division - not wall street brokerage firms and charitable organizations.

Every nutcase who decides to defend Hekmatyar's fiefdom is one less nutcase who will fly a plane into a US office building. More power to them.

I would just throw back your own advise and say that you need to read your history books. It does not.

I am not going to play the fortune teller game with you. Just say "within 5 years". If you want to dispute that, well, speculate all you want. Pointless.

It's simple logic, idiot. Either we removed Saddam or we did not. You are arguing that removing Saddam made us less secure, so the flip to that is that you are arguing that we would have been more secure had we not removed him. What part of that is difficult to understand (aside from the ridiculous logic)?

Well, you said it yourself: Great for America. Yes, I care far more about our security than the well-being of the Afghan people. That is not to say that I don't care about them - I do feel for them - but I do *not* care enough to put our security at risk.

Call me a cold-blooded sicko, but as long as no one's flying planes into our office buildings, I'm happy. Everything else is just gravy on top.

And yet you post an article by a left-wing propaganda machine? I am probably the only one who sees the irony here...

 

Treeman, you can ignore this since its from a left wing propaganda machine. They're probably lying, spending on homeland security is probably going up.

June 17, 2003
Dereliction of Duty
By PAUL KRUGMAN


Last Thursday a House subcommittee met to finalize next year's homeland security appropriation. The ranking Democrat announced that he would introduce an amendment adding roughly $1 billion for areas like port security and border security that, according to just about every expert, have been severely neglected since Sept. 11. He proposed to pay for the additions by slightly scaling back tax cuts for people making more than $1 million per year.

The subcommittee's chairman promptly closed the meeting to the public, citing national security — though no classified material was under discussion. And the bill that emerged from the closed meeting did not contain the extra funding.

It was a perfect symbol of the reality of the Bush administration's "war on terror." Behind the rhetoric — and behind the veil of secrecy, invoked in the name of national security but actually used to prevent public scrutiny — lies a pattern of neglect, of refusal to take crucial actions to protect us from terrorists. Actual counterterrorism, it seems, doesn't fit the administration's agenda.

Yesterday The Washington Post printed an interview with Rand Beers, a top White House counterterrorism adviser who resigned in March. "They're making us less secure, not more secure," he said of the Bush administration. "As an insider, I saw the things that weren't being done." Among the problem areas he cited were homeland security, where he says the administration has "only a rhetorical policy"; failure to press Saudi Arabia (the home of most of the Sept. 11 terrorists) to take action; and, of course, the way we allowed Afghanistan to relapse into chaos.

Some of this pattern of neglect involves penny-pinching. Back in February, even George W. Bush in effect admitted that not enough money had been allocated to domestic security — though (to the fury of Republican legislators) he blamed Congress. Yet according to Fred Kaplan in Slate, the administration's latest budget proposal for homeland security actually contains less money than was spent last year. Meanwhile, urgent priorities remain unmet. For example, port security, identified as a top concern from the very beginning, has so far received only one-tenth as much money as the Coast Guard says is needed.

But it's not just a matter of money. For one thing, it's hard to claim now that the Bush administration is trying to hold down domestic spending to make room for tax cuts. With the budget deficit projected at more than $400 billion this year, a few billion more for homeland security wouldn't make much difference to the tax-cutting agenda. Moreover, Congress isn't pinching pennies across the board: last week the Senate voted to provide $15 billion in loan guarantees for the construction of nuclear power plants.

Furthermore, even on the military front the administration has been weirdly reluctant to come to grips with terrorism. It refused to provide Afghanistan's new government with an adequate security umbrella, with the predictable result that warlords are running rampant and the Taliban are making a comeback. The squandered victory in Afghanistan was one reason people like myself had a bad feeling about the invasion of Iraq — and sure enough, the administration was bizarrely lackadaisical about providing postwar security. Even nuclear waste dumps were left unguarded for weeks.

So what's the explanation? The answer, one suspects, is that key figures — above all, Donald Rumsfeld — just didn't feel like dealing with the real problem. Real counterterrorism mainly involves police work and precautionary measures; it doesn't look impressive on TV, and it doesn't provide many occasions for victory celebrations.

A conventional war, on the other hand, is a lot more fun: you get stirring pictures of tanks rolling across the desert, and you get to do a victory landing on an aircraft carrier. And more and more it seems that that was what the war was all about. After all, the supposed reasons for fighting that war have turned out to be false — there were no links to Al Qaeda, there wasn't a big arsenal of W.M.D.'s.

But never mind — we won, didn't we? Maybe not. About half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now tied down in Iraq, facing what looks increasingly like a guerrilla war — and like a perfect recruiting device for Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, the real war on terror has been neglected, and we've antagonized the allies we need to fight that war. One of these days we'll end up paying the price.



Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

 

I would like to buy Mr Beers a beer.

I think the main thing that I dislike about this administration (God knows, I rant enough) is that I honestly believe they take smidgen ingredients (re: intelligence), put them in a pot and bring it all to a big boil.

Right after 9/11, I was saying, Do you notice how we no longer are demonizing China?

From what I've read about the administration and its movers-and-shakers, President Wolfowitz and Donald Ready-to-Rumblesfeld, (and you have to search; mainstream media all kowtows to the corporate minders), we seem to be on some sort of collision course with making China the Next Great Enemy. Military procurements, sky-high. Lined pockets.

First we grab the oil/natural gas wealth of the Middle East and Central Asia. We make sure that no one is ever in a position to challenge the U.S.'s hegemony (not that I think it would ever happen, except that we're running our deficit beyond nightmare proportions; but never mind---if the Dems ever come back into power, they'll have to raise taxes, so we'll just blame them for trying to fix the problem created).

We use the "war on terrorism" as a pretext to take on nations. Knock em down like dominoes, with China looming at the end.

And now we get to enjoy some CIA-fomented anti-clerical mobs in Iran.

 

You seriously overestimate the capacity of the CIA. Remember these are the same guys who couldn't predict the fall of the Soviet Union and who had one of their top men in Moscow turn out to be a russian agent, and who dredged up all that great evidence about the Niger-uranium deal.

 

Oh, and Tex:

Don't you dare lecture me on how little I care for those outside our borders. Had anyone listened to you those hundreds of children, not to mention thousands of adults, who we rescued from Saddam's prisons would be either dead or near death by now. Not to mention the approximately 50,000 people (based on past hyistory, that is the yearly average) Saddam likely would have murdered every year until old age got him - and then Qusay and Uday could have taken over...

Don't you dare lecture me on that subject, you hypocritical piece of horse dung. I probably care more than you do, ya bleeding-heart wannabe.

 

One cool success story about the CIA was when they got Howard Hughes' Glomar Explorer to bring up part of that Soviet submarine from 15000 feet. But SamFisher's right, they're hit and miss since we don't put very many people on the ground any more - Westerners with straightened, whitened teeth stick out like a sore thumb every where except the movies...

 

I've heard it all. I can die happy now.

PS: Don't even try to put words into my mouth, Sapling. Anyone, such as yourself, who is a combination of blind faith and pure stupidity needs to concentrate on himself for a while.

 

A few random questions...



1) Why is that the people who say America is a better country because if we don't like what someone does with that power, we can just vote him out are the same people who keep telling us to wait for, oh, another 5 years ( ahem, past next election) before we decide that the Freedom To Iraq justification is down the toilet with the rest of them?

2) Tree...I'm not saying there is, God knows I don't know what's going on over there, but how, exactly, do you know that there are no terrorist/Al Queda bases now in Afghanistan....Part of me wants to let you walk into the wall here, but the more humane part suggests you don't answer 'intel'.


3) So let me get this straight...this guy served under Reagan...served under Bush Sr....and now, suddenly, he's a political agitator? How do you dismiss the now uncountable number of experst...including intel guys, diplomats, and military men, who have quit their jobs over this, all of them to a man citing the same unprecedented reckless, politically motivated and beligerent manner in which this war/terrorism thing has been justified, waged, and covered? We're talking guys who have served for longer than you or I have been alive, tree...and they've all given it up in some sort of massive Democratic puddle jump? And first they all got together and agreed to make their resoning for giving up their careers sound the same? Including the ones who are Republicans, and those who will never work for us again? Or Bush Sr.? Or Stromin Noram? etc...etc...


40 And lastly...re the whole "we're safer, one less potential threat, therefore it's a good move' thinking...You do realize that every other country in the world represents a potential threat to the United States, and that that thinking would therefore justify action against all of them, right? Do people who agree with invading Iraq because Hussein might at some point in the future represent a threat to the US, or our interests in that area then agree with Japan's ratonale for the Pearl Haror strike?