Bush Shoots for "Jaws," Delivers "Jaws 2"
By Keith Olbermann
MSNBC "Countdown"
Tuesday 30 January 2007
President claimed to stop four terror plots,
but where is the evidence?
West Yorkshire in England has a new chief police constable.
Upon his appointment, Sir Norman Bettison made one of the strangest comments
of the year:
"The threat of terrorism," he says, "is lurking out there like
'Jaws 2.'"
Sir Norman did not exactly mine the richest ore for his analogy of warning.
A critic once said of the flopping sequel to the classic film: "You're
gonna need a better screenplay."
But this obscure British police official has reminded us that terrorism is
still being sold to the public in that country - and in this - as if it were
a thrilling horror movie and we were the naughty teenagers about to be its victims.
And it underscores the fact that President Bush took this tack, exactly a week
ago tonight, in his terror-related passage in the State of the Union.
A passage that was almost lost amid all the talk about Iraq and health care
and bipartisanship and the fellow who saved the stranger from an oncoming subway
train in New York City.
But a passage ludicrous and deceitful. Frightening in its hollow conviction.
Frightening, in that the president who spoke it tried for "Jaws"
but got "Jaws 2."
I am indebted to David Swanson, press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004
presidential campaign, who has blogged about the dubious 96 words in Mr. Bush's
address this year and who has concluded that of the four counterterror claims
the president made, he went 0-for-4.
"We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies
have prevented," Mr. Bush noted, "but here is some of what we do know:
We stopped an al-Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building
on the West Coast."
This would of course, sir, be the purported plot to knock down the 73-story
building in Los Angeles, the one once known as the Library Tower - the one you
personally revealed so breathlessly a year ago next month.
It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the structure as
the "Liberty Tower."
But within hours it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had
no idea you were going to make any of the details - whether serious or fanciful
- public.
Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?
A year ago next month, the Los Angeles Times quoted a source - identified only
by the labyrinthine description "a US official familiar with the operational
aspects of the war on terrorism" - who insisted that the purported "Library
Tower plot" was one of many al-Qaeda operations that had not gotten very
far past the conceptual stage.
The former staff director of counterterrorism for the National Security Council,
Roger Cressey - now a news analyst for NBC News and MSNBC - puts it a little
more bluntly.
In our conversation, he put the "Library Tower story" into a category
he called the "What-Ifs" - as in the old "Saturday Night Live"
sketches that tested the range of comic absurdity:
What if ... Superman had worked for the Nazis?
What if ... Spartacus had had a Piper Cub during the battle against the Romans
in 70 BC.?
More ominously, the LA Times source who debunked the Library Tower story said
that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme "feared
political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan
than that of the president."
But Mr. Bush, you're the decider.
And you decided that the Library Tower story should be scored as one for you.
And you continued with a second dubious claim of counterterror success. "We
broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside
the United States," you said.
Well, sir, you've apparently stumped the intelligence community completely
with this one.
In his article, Mr. Swanson suggests that in the last week, there has been
no reporting even hinting at what exactly you were talking about.
He hypothesizes that either you were claiming credit for a ring broken up in
1995 or that this was just the Library Tower story "by another name."
Another CIA source suggests to NBC News that since the Southeast Asian cell
dreamed of a series of attacks on the same day, you declared the Library Tower
one threat thwarted, and all their other ideas, a second threat thwarted.
Our colleague Mr. Cressey sums it up:
This "Southeast Asian cell" was indeed the tale of the Library Tower,
simply repeated.
Repeated, Mr. Bush, in consecutive sentences in the State of the Union - in
your constitutionally mandated status report on the condition and safety of
the nation.
You showed us the same baby twice and claimed it was twins.
And then you said that was two for you.
Your third claim, sir, read thusly: "We uncovered an al-Qaeda cell developing
anthrax to be used in attacks against America."
Again, the professionals in counterintelligence were startled to hear about
this.
Last fall, two Washington Post articles cited sources in the FBI and other
governmental agencies who said that hopes by foreign terrorists to use anthrax
in this country were fanciful at best, farcical at worst.
And every effort to link the 2001 anthrax mailings in this country to foreign
sources has also struck out. The entire investigation is barely still active.
Mr. Cressey goes a little further. Anything that might even resemble an al-Qaeda
cell "developing anthrax," he says, was in the "dreaming"
stages.
He used as a parallel those pathetic arrests outside Miami last year in which
a few men wound up getting charged as terrorists because they couldn't tell
the difference between an al-Qaeda operative and an FBI informant.
Their "ringleader" seemed to be much more interested in getting his
"terrorist masters" to buy him a new car than in actually terrorizing
anybody.
That's three for you, Mr. Bush.
"And just last August," you concluded, "British authorities
uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic
Ocean."
In a series of dramatic raids, 24 men were arrested.
Turned out, sir, a few of them actually had gone on the Internets to check
out some flight schedules.
Turned out, sir, only a few of them actually had the passports needed to even
get on the planes.
The plot to which President Bush referred was a plot without bombs.
It was a plot without any indication that the essence of the operation - the
in-flight mixing of volatile chemicals carried on board in sports drink bottles
- was even doable by amateurs or professional chemists.
It was a plot even without sufficient probable cause.
A third of the 24 arrested that day - exactly 90 days before the American midterm
elections - have since been released.
The British had been watching those men for a year.
Before the week was out, their first statement, that the plot was "ready
to go, in days," had been rendered inoperative.
British officials told NBC News of the lack of passports and plans; told us
that they had wanted to keep the suspects under surveillance for at least another
week.
Even an American official confirmed to NBC's investigative unit that there
was "disagreement over the timing."
The British then went further. Sources inside their government told the English
newspaper The Guardian that the raids had occurred only because the Pakistanis
had arrested a man named Rasheed Raouf.
That Raouf had been arrested by Pakistan only because we had threatened to
do it for them.
That the British had acted only because our government was willing - to quote
that newspaper, The Guardian - to "ride roughshod" over the plans
of British intelligence.
Oh, by the way, Mr. Bush, an anti-terrorism court in Pakistan reduced the charges
against Mr. Raouf to possession of bomb-making materials and being there without
proper documents.
Still, sir - evidently, that's close enough.
Score four for you!
Your totally black-and-white conclusions in the State of the Union were based
on one gray area, and on three palettes on which the experts can't even see
smudge, let alone gray.
It would all be laughable, Mr. Bush, were you not the president of the United
States.
It would all be political hyperbole, Mr. Bush, if you had not, on this kind
of "intelligence," taken us to war, now sought to escalate that war,
and threatened new war in Iran and maybe even elsewhere.
What you gave us a week ago tonight, sir, was not intelligence, but rather
a walk-through of how speculation and innuendo, guesswork and paranoia, daydreaming
and fearmongering, combine in your mind and the minds of your government into
proof of your derring-do and your success against the terrorists.
The ones who didn't have anthrax.
The ones who didn't have plane tickets or passports.
The ones who didn't have any clue, let alone any plots.
But they go now into our history books as the four terror schemes you've interrupted
since 9/11.
They go into the collective consciousness as firm evidence of your diligence,
of the necessity of your ham-handed treatment of our liberties, of the unavoidability
of the 3,075 Americans dead in Iraq.
Congratulations, sir.
You are the hero of "Jaws 2."
You have kept the Piper Cub out of the hands of Spartacus.
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