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OLBERMANN: Finally tonight, as promised, a special comment on presidents and terrorism,
and on the seemingly trivial fact that West Yorkshire in England has a new chief police
constable. Upon his appointment Sir Norman Bettison (ph) made one of the strangest comments
of the year: the threat of terrorism, he says, is lurking out there like Jaws II. Sir Norman
did not exactly mine the richest ore for his analogy of warning. A critic once said of
that flopping sequel to the classic film, you are going to need a better screen play.
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 of the talk about
Iraq and health care and bipartisanship and the fellow who saved the stranger from oncoming
subway train in New York City.
But a passages, ludicrous and deceitful, frightening in its hollow conviction, frightening in that
the president who spoke it tried for Jaws, but got Jaws II. I am indebted to David Swanson,
press secretary for Dennis Kucinich's 2004 campaign, who has blogged about the dubious
96 words in Mr. Bush's address this year, and who has concluded that of the four counter-terror
claims the president made, he went 0 for four.
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 this 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 "L.A. Times" quoted
a source, identified only by the labyrinthine description, a U.S. 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 counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, now NBC
and MSNBC counter-terrorism analysts Roger Cressey, puts it all a little more bluntly.
In our conversation he classified 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 a piper cub during
the battle against the Romans in 70 B.C?
More ominously, the "L.A. Times" source who debunked the Library Tower plot story said
that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme, quote, feared political
retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the president. But
Mr. Bush, you are the decider and you decided that the Library story should be scored as
one for you.
And you continued with a second dubious claim of counter-terror success, we broke up a south
east 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,
quote, by another name.
Another CIA source suggests to NBC News that since the south east Asian cell dreamed of
a series of attacks on the same day, you declared the Library Tower one threat thwarted and
all of their other ideas a second threat for thwarted. Our colleague, Mr Cressey, sums
it up, this south east Asian cell was indeed the tail of the Library Towers simply repeated,
repeated Mr. Bush, in consecutive sentences of the State of the Union, in your constitutionally
mandated status report on the condition and safety of our 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 counter-intelligence were
startled to hear about this one. 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 and farcical at worst. And every effort
to link the 2001 anthrax attacks, the mailings in this country, to foreign sources has always
struck out. The entire investigation is barely still alive at this point.
Mr Cressey goes a little further, anything that might even resemble an al-Qaeda cell
developing anthrax, he says, was in the, quote, dreaming stages. Mr. Cressey used as a parallel
those pathetic arrests outside Miami last year, in which a few men wound up getting
charged as terrorists, because they could not tell the difference between an al-Qaeda
operative and an FBI informant. Their, quote, ring leader, unquote, seemed to be much more
interested in getting his terrorist masters to buy him a new car than in actually terrorizing
anybody.
That is 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 then, 23 men were arrested. It turned out, sir, a few of
them actually had gone on the Internets to check out some flight schedules. It 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 the 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. One-third of the 24 people arrested
that day, exactly 90 days before the American midterm elections, have since been released
by the British. 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 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 Rashid Raouf. That Raouf had only been arrested by Pakistan 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" again, to ride rough shod over the plans of British
intelligence.
Oh and 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 the 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 pallets
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 have not, on this kind of intelligence, taken us to war, now sought
to escalate that war and are threatening new war in Iran and maybe 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, day dreaming and fear mongering,
combine in your mind and the minds of those in your government into proof of your daring
do and your success against the terrorists, the ones that 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 you 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 II. You have kept the piper cub out of the
hands of Spartacus. Good night and good luck.