Topic: General News.
The AP reports an e-mail from the US Attorney’s Office warned federal employees in Washington DC that extremists might be posing as “vagrants” in order to conduct surveillance on buildings and mass transit stations to plot attacks. “The e-mail stresses that there is no threat of an attack and that it is intended to be ‘informative, not alarming.’”
Well, if the homeless in DC are possible terrorists, federal employees should be alarmed. If you’ve ever been to Union Station you might have noticed there’s about 2 “vagrants” to every pinstripe suit. Most of them, by the way, are veterans. Up until now there hasn’t been any recognition that they were even there, but there’s a “threat,” all of a sudden, so we’d better keep an eye on them! Don’t help them; just watch them!
Pat Robertson strikes again:
If this guy was a Muslim “holy man” in a Virginia mosque, I think he’d be rotting away at Guantanamo, right now. But since he’s one of W.’s friends, he just gets to keep shooting his mouth off. Last time he was in the news it was the comments about the federal judiciary. We all remember; Ruth Bader Ginsberg is a communist; bearded jihads flying planes into the WTC weren’t as dangerous as the Supreme Court, etc.
Then there was his outrage over the “good Christian” Charles Taylor being chased out of Liberia and before that it was his great idea to put a nuke in the State Dept.
Now, he thinks the US should assassinate Hugo Chavez. He’s “a terrific danger.” He’s making Venezuela a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism.” That’s quite a combo! I didn’t know the two ideologies were compatible, but I’m not the foreign policy expert he is.
When is W. going to come out and disavow this guy? Never is the answer. Not that Howard Dean was right or anything, but AP writes, "About nine of 10 white evangelicals voted for Bush in the 2004 election — about as high as his support from any group of voters, according to exit polls." So, it seems the man who stands tall against Muslim extremism, turns into "cringer" when it comes to christian extremists.
The entire government does. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said, "This is not the policy of the United States government, we do not share his views."
Wow! What a slap down!
Even Rummy is running scared. "He's a private citizen. Private citizens say all kinds of things all the time." They sure do Rummy, crazy things like you're a war criminal and you ought to be fired. But none of them have a world wide broadcasting empire.
And when are the right wing bloggers, especially the ones who hate Castro and Chavez so much, going to get a clue? You just know there are hundreds of blogs out there called, “I hate the beast” or “Castro’s a pimp” just frothing at the mouth, over this. If Adolph Hitler were here today and said Castro was a bad guy, all these anti-Castro types would be frantically cutting and pasting “Mein Kampf” on to their blogs, bumping Ann Coulter right out of the way. Losers!
“Able Danger” in danger of becoming old news:
Curt Weldon’s Navy officer, Capt. Scott Phillpott, has now come out publicly to say, “My story is consistent…Atta was identified by Able Danger by January-February of 2000.” Pentagon Spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said, however, the military was unable to validate the story of Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer about the identification of Atta. Even though Di Rita said the two men making these claims were respected officers, “thus far we have not be able to uncover what these people said they saw---memory is a complicated thing.”
I kind of thought this might be the pentagon’s response. Able Danger was “mining” information and this is a very sore subject in the pentagon after the public beating they took over the revelation of the existence of John Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” office. Weldon and Shaffer are very much into pushing congress to put more money into personal data mining, but the public isn’t quite so sure. Shaffer actually said, before he revealed his identify, that he wanted to remain anonymous so as not to jeopardize the future funding for more data mining.
I think the idea behind this whole thing is to prove that if the pentagon lawyers hadn’t been so damn concerned about American’s privacy rights and the damned law, we could have caught Mohamed Att and the rest before they attacked on 9/11. All we need to do now is get other Able Danger type data mining operations going, to mine all kinds of information to prevent the next attack. Of course, that might involve the military spying on Americans, but we have to be secure from those vagrants!
Posted by bushmeister0
at 2:02 PM EDT
Updated: Wednesday, 24 August 2005 2:04 PM EDT