Well-Timed Terrorism?

The foiled terror plot of August 10th has had considerable effect on the news of the past week. It’s turned the airline industry upside-down in a scramble to prevent such innocuous items as bottled water from finding their way on board a jet, where they would be combined with some ill-defined collection of other liquids in an effort to create an explosive. Admittedly, this threat appears largely illusory, but it makes for very exciting news. Less well publicized is the enormous effect it has had on the British political landscape, and that’s what I hope to examine here.

British Home Secretary John Reid got his political start in the 1970’s as a member of the British Communist Party. Since then he has become one of Tony Blair’s closest allies, and a staunch defender of New Labour. Though his often controversial attacks on his enemies have long kept him in the public limelight (recall on March 18, when then Defence Secretary Reid accused tens of thousands of London antiwar protesters of supporting terrorism), he had never been more than a second-tier player in British politics. This past week, that has changed, and Reid is suddenly now considered a legitimate contender in the race to succeed Tony Blair as Prime Minister. The frontrunner remains Blair’s longtime rival, Chancellor Gordon Brown, but Reid is now being discussed as a credible rival for him.

To understand why we need to go back to the day before the plot was foiled, August 9th. Reid was delivering a talk to British think tank Demos, a third way advocacy organization very friendly with New Labour which was founded by the former editor of the British Communist Party’s journal “Marxism Today”. Dr. Reid is extremely adept at getting into the headlines, and this talk was no different. In it, he condemned the Court of Appeal’s insistence that terror detentions conform to human rights laws and declared that, in the name of winning the fight against terror, the British would have to modify (read: eliminate) certain long cherished freedoms. This declaration was enough to get him into the headlines of most British news outlets, along with more than a little grumbling from civil libertarians about the threat his policies would pose to personal freedom.

Then, the very next day, a major terror plot is foiled. In light of this “breaking news”, Dr. Reid’s speech seems almost prescient. Almost, at least, until you consider that he knew about the upcoming foiling well in advance of the speech. How do we know this? That requires us to look at the American response. On the day of the arrests, CNBC was reporting that Bush’s apparently impromptu speech on the topic was in fact written the day before. When asked about when they were informed about it, Tony Snow was evasive, as usual, but he did confirm that the White House had known about it for some time, as it was a topic of discussion during their Sunday briefing (August 6). Ultimately, since the British had informed the White House that they were scheduling the plot foiling three days before Dr. Reid’s speech to Demos, it is reasonable to assume that his speech was written with an eye towards the events of the following day.

Also interesting is the way he’s sort of “spontaneously” taken over the response to the incident in Tony Blair’s absence, much to the chagrin of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who Blair had initially left in charge before going on vacation. The view of Dr. Reid as the sort of person who doesn’t lose his head and can take charge in a crisis has dramatically increased his popularity, but when one considers that this “crisis” had several days of lead time to it, it is doubtful that it was all that spontaneous.

But the underlying question, and it’s one that we unfortunately can’t answer at this time, is exactly when the British government scheduled this canned “crisis”. Since they’d told the Americans at least as early as August 6, that’s the latest they knew about it. But Tony Blair went on his scheduled vacation on August 4, only two days earlier, leaving Prescott in charge. If he knew about the upcoming arrests before he left, a response that already appears to be a planned PR move may well have been a carefully orchestrated King-making event designed for the specific reason of making Blair’s ally John Reid a legitimate candidate to succeed him as Prime Minister. If any real threat existed, surely Tony Blair would not have abandoned his country and gone on vacation.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s relative inexperience and tendency towards public speaking gaffes rule him out as a reasonable candidate for Prime Minister when Blair steps down. John Reid, on the other hand, had the experience and the name-awareness to be the “Stop Brown” candidate that the Blairites have so desperately sought since their respective controversies ruined the chances of both David Blunkett and Charles Clarke, the previous two Home Secretaries. All he really needed was a crisis to handle to endear himself to the public, and he appears to have gotten that. A question that the British public ought to be asking is, how real was this crisis, and how well planned was his handling of it?

Justice Department Appeals Ruling on “No Hereditary Kings”

Federal judge Anna Diggs Taylor declared in a ruling today: “We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no power not created by the Constitution. So all ‘inherent power’ must derive from that Constitution.”

The Justice Department is outraged by the ruling and is racing to appeal it.

I have not yet seen any briefs or other notices that the Justice Department has filed on the decision.   I would expect that they would not make a big deal out of the ‘hereditary king’ aspect of the ruling.  Instead, they will challenge the judge’s decision that Bush’s illegal warrantless NSA wiretaps are illegal and unconstitutional.

The judge noted: “The Government appears to argue here that …. because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself.”

I presume that conservative activists are busy at this moment seeking evidence that this judge has received kickbacks from suspect Muslim charities.  Why else would a judge issue such a reactionary ruling?  [[Comments & denunciations on this topic are welcome at http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/08/17/justice-dept-appeals-ruling-on-no-heridatary-kings/

Antiwar.com Server Problems

We are back up, partially.

Last night we had a massive server failure. At this point, we do not know the cause. Our efforts at this point are going into restoring the site, then we will figure out what caused it.

We expect to be updating the page shortly with the latest stories, please bear with us.

Thank you for your understanding.

~ The Antiwar.com Team

Vaseline and Matches and al-Qaeda, Oh My! Oh Wait, Nah.

Within half an hour, we were told of a woman who went berserk on a flight and was found to be carrying matches, vaseline, a screwdriver, and not one but TWO letters mentioning al-Qaeda — one in English and the other in Arabic. And then slowly these items disappeared and the story became one of a 60-year-old woman who became claustrophobic, causing the diversion of her London-DC flight to Boston. I can understand the confusion about whether or not a terrorist was on board this flight or if any of this was cause for concern.

But where the f*ck did all that other crap come from? Someone clearly made all this up. Vaseline? Letters about al-Qaeda!? Someone wants you to be scared.

Bush: Betrayed by Iraqi Ingrates

Today’s New York Times reveals that George W. Bush is deeply disappointed that the Iraqi people have “not shown greater support for the American mission.”

One person who attended a meeting of Bush’s “war cabinet” on Monday commented on Bush’s reaction: “I sensed a frustration with the lack of progress on the bigger picture of Iraq generally — that we continue to lose a lot of lives, it continues to sap our budget. The president wants the people in Iraq to get more on board to bring success.”

I recall those halcyon days of early 2001, when neoconservative whiz kid David Brooks gurgled about how wonderful it would be to have a president who had a Masters of Business Administration – and from Harvard, no less.  Bush’s reaction to Iraq is vintage MBA: If only these people would get “on board”…

One professor who attended (and who is getting money from the U.S. State Department) said that Bush expressed the view that “the Shia-led government needs to clearly and publicly express the same appreciation for United States efforts and sacrifices as they do in private.”

Perhaps Bush believes that America’s problems in Iraq would be solved if there more Iraqi government officials were assassinated.

Bush was apparently especially upset that a recent rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad drew 10,000 people.  One person at the meeting commented that Bush “was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States.”

Maybe Bush was confounded that Iraqis are too stupid to recognize that America’s ally, Israel, was using U.S. bombs to kill Lebanese civilians solely in the cause of Bush’s “forward strategy of freedom.”

In unrelated news elsewhere in today’s NY Times, the civilian death toll in Iraq in July  set a record and experts fear that “the country is already embroiled in a civil war.”

[Comments & denunciations of this post are welcome at http://jimbovard.com/blog/2006/08/16/bush-betrayed-by-iraqi-ingrates/ 

Bush Out-Drivels Himself

So Bush made the supreme sacrifice, returning from his vacation in Texas to Washington to inform Americans of his latest victories in the Middle East.

His comments at the State Department yesterday came close to breaking his previous personal best in both the delusions and drivel categories.

Bush began by declaring that Hezbollah was fully liable for every bomb that the IDF dropped, regardless of many farm workers were killed and how far the victims were from any military-related target: “America recognizes that civilians in Lebanon and Israel have suffered from the current violence. And we recognize that responsibility for this suffering lies with Hezbollah. It was an unprovoked attack by Hezbollah on Israel that started this conflict.”

According to Bush’s logic, if Israel had exterminated every living thing in Lebanon, it would still be faultless.

For Bush, the latest Mideast conflict is another example of how America is bringing freedom to the world. Bush declared: “America’s actions have never been guided by territorial ambition.”

This would be news to the Mexicans, some of whom have not forgotten 1846. Or to the Filipinos, or the Puerto Ricans, or the Cubans (who lived under America’s thumb prior to 1959, after which they lived under Castro’s fist). By Bush’s standards, Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon was spurred by a desire for spiffing up his botany collection.

But Bush’s declaration is as credible as when Stalin proclaimed that the Soviet Union wanted only peace. Yet, people in Washington – people at editorial pages – swallow this crap as if being the president of the United States automatically turned a man’s mouth into the Temple of Delphi.

Now, some people may look at the title of this blog and assume that I have been too harsh on America’s Commander-in-Chief. I rest my case with the following excerpt from Bush’s comments on the Israel-Hezbollah clash:

The world got to see what it means to confront terrorism. I mean, it’s a –it’s the challenge of the 21st century, the fight against terror.  A group of ideologues, by the way, who use terror to achieve an objective — this is the challenge.

And that’s why in my remarks I spoke about the need for those of us who understand the blessings of liberty to help liberty prevail in the Middle East. And the fundamental question is: Can it? And my answer is: Absolutely, it can. I believe that freedom is a universal value. And by that, I mean I believe people want to be free. One way to put it is, I believe mothers around the world want to raise their children in a peaceful world. That’s what I believe. And I believe that people want to be free to express themselves and free to worship the way they want to. And if you believe that, then you’ve got to have hope that ultimately freedom will prevail.

But it’s incredibly hard work, because there are terrorists who kill innocent people to stop the advance of liberty. And that’s the challenge of the 21st century.

[Comments / Denunciations welcome at my blog]