You saw this, of course:
Former Gov. Tom Ridge says in a new book that he was pressured by some in the Bush administration to raise the nation’s terror alert on the eve of the 2004 elections.
Ridge, the first secretary of Homeland Security, makes the statement in his memoir, “The Test of Our Times: America Under […]

[Read more →]

On the Glenn Beck program. Natch.

But catch the tail end of this - Osama must come save America with a bomb that blows lots and lots of us up, because only that will teach America that we need to go kill more Muslims. Then Beck follows with: Which is why, if I were [bin Laden], […]

[Read more →]

Jesse Ventura is my new favorite superhero:
Americans have changed “in that we have a paranoia that there’s a crazy Arab around every tree,” Ventura told Marcus Baram. “We’re walking on eggshells now, when in reality you have as much chance of running into a terrorist as winning the Powerball.”
He ripped into conservative talkers, such as […]

[Read more →]

This is actually a really good call - if you’ve been following the debate over closing Guantanamo, the big right-wing argument (co-opted, unfortunately, to too many spineless Democrats) is that the terrorist suspects housed there are simply too dangerous to be transferred to American prisons - as if American prisons don’t already incarcerate the likes of […]

[Read more →]

Back and forth yesterday with a reader who complained that right-wingers do NOT want another terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and to suggest otherwise is unconscionable.
Oh really?
National Review’s Jim Geraghaty spent all day yesterday fantasizing about all the scary things that could happen if we have Al-Qaeda Terrorists in our communities (near nuclear facilities and airports!).  […]

[Read more →]

Via Sullivan, Nir Rosen puts the Gaza fighting - and the word “terrorism” itself - in perspective:
Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or […]

[Read more →]

Been getting this one from my winger correspondents all morning: See! Al Qaeda is taunting Obama!
Yes, I think we safely say that if we had elected an old white guy president, Al Qaeda would not be calling him a “house negro.”
The insinuation here being - if we had elected a BIG STRONG MANLY REPUBLICAN, Teh […]

[Read more →]

Responding to this (U.K.) piece:
This is the fear that, if he wins, US defences will be emasculated at a time of unprecedented international peril and the enemies of America and the free world will seize their opportunity to destroy the west.
Larison writes:
International peril is not at unprecedented levels.  There have been any number of times […]

[Read more →]

John Cole delivers the complete smackdown. Suffice to note that when McCain seized upon Hamas’ “support” of Obama, the right-wing chorus immediately swooned.
So how do they react to this?
“Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming election,” said a commentary posted Monday on the extremist Web site al-Hesbah, which is closely linked to the […]

[Read more →]

Well, we knew it was coming. And here it is.

[Read more →]

Prosecutors are now preparing to close the anthrax investigation case.
You do realize we’re about to attribute all this to a lone gunman.
Just sayin’.

[Read more →]

The letters were sent a week after 9/11, and as Glenn Greenwald notes here, played a crucial role in helping to convince a country already terrified and numb that Something Must Be Done:
The letter sent to Leahy contained this message:
We have anthrax.You die now.
Are you afraid?
Death to America.
Death to Israel.
Allah is great.
By design, those attacks […]

[Read more →]

In a fascinating piece, Christpher Hitchens lets himself be waterboarded and comes to the conclusion:
if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
But as part of his piece, he provides a very good summation of the argument for waterboarding; or at least the view of those who would dismiss the […]

[Read more →]

Gotta love wingnuts. Or not.
Today on his radio show, CNN host Glenn Beck expressed his disdain of the recent Supreme Court ruling granting terror suspects the right to challenge their detention in civilian courts, exclaiming that if he were President, he would do away with detaining and prosecuting terrorism suspects altogether. Instead, a President Beck […]

[Read more →]

Hm, but I thought you had to be swarthy and brown to be Teh Terrorist. Apparently not:
A fourth person is under arrest in what KDKA has learned was an undercover investigation into a ring of domestic terrorists.
Bradley Kahle, of Troutville, Clearfield County, is charged with firearms violations and possession of illegal explosives.
Kahle joins Marvin Hall […]

[Read more →]

Tempted to pile on re: McCain advisor Charlie Black’s comments that a terror attack before November would be “Certainly it would be a big advantage” for McCain; it indeed comes perilously close to actively pining for a terrorist attack, but I doubt that’s what Black really thinks. Rather, I think he has the usual knee-jerk assumption […]

[Read more →]

More like this, please:
A defiant Barack Obama said Tuesday he would take no lectures from Republicans on which candidate would keep the U.S. safer, a sharp rebuke to John McCain’s aides who said the Democrat had a naive, Sept. 10 mind-set toward terrorism.
“These are the same guys who helped to engineer the distraction of the […]

[Read more →]

Glenn Greenwald notes the debate going on now in Great Britain, where a plan to expand the government’s authority to detain terrorist suspects for 42 days without bothering to charge them with any crime had run into stiff opposition - from conservatives:
The official position of the British Conservative Party is to oppose the legislation, and […]

[Read more →]

See, you gotta love this:
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday he fears that al Qaeda or another extremist group might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraq to try to tilt the U.S. election against him.
So any “spectacular attacks” are because the Teh Terrorists don’t want McCain to win, meaning Americans should vote for him; but the […]

[Read more →]

First, of course, it was about WMDs. That didn’t pan out, so it was all about Saddam playing footsie with Osama bin Laden.
That doesn’t pan out, either:
An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links […]

[Read more →]