It's Recess-time Somewhere

Proud Member of the Reality-Based Sandbox

July 07, 2005

Stuff You Should Read Today

Blogwood links to this in the Palm Beach Post about domestic terrorism here in Florida. Abortion clinics continue to be terrorized and the FBI refuses to classify such attacks as terrorism.

“Imagine if 23 percent of banks were being robbed,” Spillar said. “We would declare a state of emergency.”

But, she said, because the attacks are aimed at clinics that provide health care for women the ongoing violence isn’t taken seriously.

For years, she said, her organization has pushed for the FBI to classify the attacks as domestic terrorism.

“Too often law enforcement wants to portray it as an isolated incident,” Spillar said. “But this is terrorism. It’s targeted and it’s meant to terrorize. If you don’t go after the network that is recruiting, training and funding these extremists, you’ll never get to the bottom of it.”


And, via The Left Coaster, I found Juan Cole's post from August, 2004 that tells how George Bush outed a double agent who provided extremely valuable information about a terrorist cell in Britain.

The announcement of Khan's name forced the British to arrest 12 members
of an al-Qaeda cell prematurely, before they had finished gathering the
necessary evidence against them via Khan. Apparently they feared that the
cell members would scatter as soon as they saw that Khan had been
compromised. (They would have known he was a double agent, since they
got emails from him Sunday and Monday!) One of the twelve has already
had to be released for lack of evidence, a further fall-out of the Bush
SNAFU. It would be interesting to know if other cell members managed to
flee.

Why in the world would Bush administration officials out a double agent
working for Pakistan and the US against al-Qaeda? In a way, the motivation
does not matter. If the Reuters story is true, this slip is a major screw-up
that casts the gravest doubts on the competency of the administration to
fight a war on terror. Either the motive was political calculation, or it
was sheer stupidity. They don't deserve to be in power either way.


Fox 'News' thinks the attacks in London are a good thing, because they take the environment and AIDS off the front page and put terrorism back on the front page. Isn't that precious?