no, Saddam was not involved in 9/11, and no one can cite a single example of the Bush administration saying so.

Perhaps JayIDTea will argue Cheney isn’t part of the admin. Cheney, 14 Sep 2003:

“With respect to 9/11, of course, we ve had the story that s been public out there. The Czechs alleged that Mohamed Atta, the lead attacker, met in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence official five months before the attack, but we ve never been able to develop anymore of that yet either in terms of confirming it or discrediting it. We just don t know. “

Problem is, they did know. The Czech Govt. told this admin. a year earlier this supposed meeting never took place.

We also have Paul Wolfowitz making the same claim: “We also know there are things that haven t been explained … like the meeting of Mohammed Atta with Iraqi officials in Prague .”

And of course there’s Richard Perle: “Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September 11. We have proof of that, and we are sure he wasn’t just there for a holiday. The meeting is one of the motives of an American attack on Iraq.”

Of course, there are other instances where this admin linked Saddam to 9/11.

1) Nobody died from those abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Not according to a GOP Senator:

Last year a Republican senator conceded that they contained scenes of “rape and murder” and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said they included acts that were “blatantly sadistic.”

Wait–JayIDTea says I’m not dead, yet

2) Abu Ghraib was an aberration, a violation of the norms, and those responsible were reviled and punished

JayIDTea might wish to do a search of ‘Bagram+prisoner+torture’

3) The first reports from Abu Ghraib were based on publicly-released Army statements on the incident.

Not quite. It actually came to light when a CBS news story broke it.

Hate to break it to you, but your great revelation is hardly news to anyone here, and is irrelevant to the discussion. Al qaeda attacked the world trade center because they want to impose their version of Islamic law on Saudi Arabia. Does that mean that it wasn’t an attack against the west?

Allow me to answer that one. Radical islamists want to impose Islamic law in Indonesia, as they do in parts of the Phillipines. They attacked the tourist area to strike againts that which they find unnacceptable. Namely, the non-believers actually having the audacity to try to have fun. Its been the MO of terrorists all over the world. You see here kids, some things are much bigger than this little Dems vs. Reps game you all play. You guys work so hard to find evil in the “Cons” when its staring all of us in the face. These people would just as soon kill you as they would me. The fact that you may not have voted for Bush doesn’t matter in the slightest. To them we are all the enemy.

Japan and Korea may be in “the east”, but I’m sure your average islamic terrorists considers Japanese and Korean tourists part of “our” world rather than their own.

I suppose you mean they are military targets rather than civilian targets.

No…Iraq and Afghanistan are war zones, while the other examples are not. Most people expect attacks in a war zone. I didn’t include Clinton’s debacle in Somalia for just that reason.

JayTea;

According to the response you just gave (smelling like a redacted White House document) Bush and fellow Visionaries couldn’t have done a better job

End of discussion. So why should anyone answer the absurdly unnecessarry question above?

Now you see the point I was making when I “cherry-picked” the link to your piece, you indescribeably disingenuous candidate for Bush White House Press Secretary.

I suppose you mean they are military targets rather than civilian targets. That sound you hear is Khobar and Cole going down the toilet as your trump cards. Also, since Bush has done a good job of privatizing the war and recovery effort the line is not so easy to draw, is it?

You say what Bush has done has made it MORE dangerous for Americans. So, what SHOULD he have done? what magic wand could he have waved to suddenly make the terrorists get all warm and fuzzy and stop trying to kill us?

I can tell you’re not serious when you set up false dichotomies like this: if I can’t come up with a “magic wand” that immediately eliminates all terrorism then I have no right to criticise Bush’s bumbling. Horsefeathers.

A lot of what Bush should have done he did do and is still doing:stepped-up security, surveillance, international cooperation; and I’m one lefty who thought the invasion of Afghanistan was necessary. What he didn’t do was keep his focus on those efforts. Instead he barged on into a quagmire in Iraq, sapping our attention and resources, allowing Bin Ladin off the hook (and sorry, you have no idea where Bin Ladin is, what he’s doing and how much operational involvement he has in ongoing al qaeda activities), alienating our current and potential allies and making more people hate America more virulently than ever before. He also didn’t take his job seriously enough to avoid using sensitive posts in homeland security and disaster preparedness for political payoff to cronies and hacks.

So, if Bush thought Iraq was a possibly potential imminent threat (or whatever the final formulation he settled on was) he should have stuck with the painstaking, often frustrating, international effort to keep him contained. The money and people he has wasted in Iraq should have been applied to finishing the job in Afghanistan and securing our homeland.

And more terrorists have been killed under Bush than any other president in history.

And by all accounts more terrorists have been created under Bush than under any president in history. Not even cowboys can kill that fast.

There were people from Japan and Korea that were injured as well. Your title is absurd. Deal with it.

Western tourists in Bali is still the West.

That’s a reasonable point, which is why I personally didn’t criticize the title…but it’s worth mentioning that the majority of dead and injured are Indonesian.

More terrorists have killed Americans under George W. Bush than any president in our history.

And more terrorists have been killed under Bush than any other president in history.

“Oh, east is west and west is east and never the twain shall meet”

Dugger, with props to Kudyard Ripling

They’re going to try to kill us. That’s a given. The question is, which would you prefer they attack — US civilians, where they can sacrifice 19 for 3,000, or the military, where they lose hundreds to kill a handful?

I know the military, given their druthers, would rather they be the targets than us. Because they’re not sitting ducks like we are. They fight back, and often see the attack coming and hit first.

The terrorists like fighting civilians. They know that the worst that can happen there is they get locked up. The military will kill them, kill their allies, and then take what they get and learn from them to kill even more terrorists. There are those who say that Iraq is a classroom for the terrorists, but it’s also one for our military — who are learning at least just as much as the terrorists, but far more of them survive to pass on those lessons.

J.

if you guys get to count Khobar, Cole and the embassy bombings, I get to count all the al qaeda/zarqawi/insurgent attacks on US personnel and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan

Wow. If you don’t see the difference, then that explains a lot.

Here, lemme save you one particular talking point: no, Saddam was not involved in 9/11, and no one can cite a single example of the Bush administration saying so. But I’ve always believed that was a matter of operational security, and not because Al Qaeda was afraid he’d disapprove. He was a long-time supporter of terrorism in general and Al Qaeda in particular, and had repeatedly violated the terms of the cease-fire from the first Gulf War. That, plus certain strategic realities, made it opportune, legal, and right to remove him from power.

Bin Laden? No, we haven’t put his head on a spike in front of the White House. But we’ve driven him from the halls of power in Afghanistan, made him a fugitive with a huge price on his head, and haven’t heard from him in ages. I personally was of the belief he’d been reduced to a stain on the walls of Tora Bora, and despite evidence to the contrary since I’m still about 25% convinced he’s dead. Regardless, he might as well be — he’s been utterly irrelevant (one might say “impotent”) since then.

Abu Ghraib? You wanna compare that to their videotaped beheadings and blowing up children? (I recall one busful of children killed by a suicide bomber.) Fine.

1) Nobody died from those abuses at Abu Ghraib.
2) Abu Ghraib was an aberration, a violation of the norms, and those responsible were reviled and punished.
3) The first reports from Abu Ghraib were based on publicly-released Army statements on the incident.
4) I suspect more people died as a result of Newsweek’s “Koran in the toilet” lie than from the reports from Abu Ghraib.

The hurricane? Yeah, I forgot about that one. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again. Let’s give the president the power to set aside duly-elected mayors and governors when disaster threatens, because there’s a good chance they’ll prove incompetent in the crisis. Fuck the Constitution, to hell with “pussy comitatus,” , there are LIBERAL TALKING POINTS to be answered here!

“Increased frequency and magnitude” of terrorist attacks? Both statements are laughable on their face. “Magnitude?” Show me the terrorist attack anywhere near the scale of 9/11. And “frequency?” Part of that’s a redefinition of terrorism in the last couple of years, and that counts a LOT of terrorist attacks that have nothing to do with Iraq. For example, Mindanao and Beslan really didn’t have a hell of a lot to do with our war on terror.

Now, lemme turn it back around on you. You say what Bush has done has made it MORE dangerous for Americans. So, what SHOULD he have done? what magic wand could he have waved to suddenly make the terrorists get all warm and fuzzy and stop trying to kill us?

The answer: nothing. ANYTHING we did — short of selling out the only democracy in the Middle East, abandoning a good chunk of the world to Muslim extremism, and doing absolutely nothing to hinder the restoration of the Caliphate — would have reduced the animosity towards the US. And that would have only postponed the inevitable confrontation until, once again, it would have been on their terms, at a time and place of their choosing.

This fight was inevitable. Just when it became inevitable is a matter for debate — I put it on the Iran hostage crisis, when the United States demonsrated that it could be cowed into acquiescence to large-scale acts of war without retaliation — but IT WAS COMING. Carter started it. Reagan allowed it to grow. Bush 41 took a few decent steps, but not enough. And Clinton allowed it to thrive and prosper. Bush 43 wasn’t doing a hell of a lot, either, until 9/11.

So, prove me wrong: give your grand ideas. Show what visionary steps Bush 43 could have taken, what opportunities he missed, to prevent further terrorism. It’ll be a refreshing change for me, to be the one who gets to sit back and watch you do all the heavy lifting and thinking, while I relax and nit-pick and criticize.

J.

Um, guys, let me spell it out for you. The first WTC attack occurred in early 1993.
The terrorists were rounded up and thrown in jail without benefit of invading Iraq, and In the eight years remaining in Clinton’s presidency there were no further attacks in the US.

GWB has been in office 4 years since 9/11. If we make it through the next 4 years without another attack then I’ll admit that GWB has something to brag about. But he’ll have something to brag about in spite of his invasion of Iraq rather than because of it.

As for overseas attacks on US interests/personnel/property: if you guys get to count Khobar, Cole and the embassy bombings, I get to count all the al qaeda/zarqawi/insurgent attacks on US personnel and equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan, and your boy’s in an even bigger hole. Go ahead and keep splitting hairs and I’m sure you’ll find a way to get him out of it.

You’re the fool, Jay C. You apparently believe we should measure the US using the same standards as we would measure a Saddam or OBL or Zarqawi.

I don’t.

The fact is Abu Ghraib and Gitmo–among others–will be a long -lasting stain on this country. You can argue that other regimes and despots are worse but it’s a silly defense.

Michael Scheuer

MSNBC

Face facts, Jay–your Prez has helped OBL succeed beyond his wildest imagination.

Moving the goalposts again? Just a few posts ago, you were telling us about how Dear Leader deserved adoration for keeping the violence from our shores. Yet, it can’t be denied that since George Jounior has embarked on his Excellent Adventure–terrorism has increased in both frequency and magnitude. By most accounts (excluding Uncle Dick Cheney’s) Al Qaeda and its offshoots have increased in numbers.

It s a war, and I ve thought it over carefully. I ve decided that the side that kidnaps people and shouts  God Is Great while beheading them on videotape, the side that goes out of its way to kill and maim innocent civilians, the side that once ran a regime that brutally oppressed and maimed women and summarily executed homosexuals, that turned a sports stadium into a public execution ground, is the one I d like to see lose.

No, you haven’t thought at all. If you had, you might not be conflating Al Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. And you certainly wouldn’t be claiming we had some moral high ground after Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

Magnitude? They’ve gone from bombing embassies, warships and financial centers to suicide bombings. Exactly how has the magnitude increased? Name one terrorist attack against the US or US installations abroad since 9/11.

And you certainly wouldn t be claiming we had some moral high ground after Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

Oh please. Only a fool would compare the brutal campaign of terrorists to what happened at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo.

And you Flanagan, are a fool.