http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-slansky-/apocalypse-now_b_42118.html"These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States ... and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves." -- Michael Scheuer, former head of the C.I.A.'s bin Laden unit, to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, February 19, 2007
Remember how you watched Richard Clarke testifying before Congress in 2004 and wished his warnings had been taken seriously in 2001?
Well, it's déjà vu all over again. The people who know what's going on - the experts who have no hidden agendas beyond sounding alarms and getting the truth out - are frightened. And if they're frightened, so should we be.
George W. Bush (and Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld and all of their minions) should have been taken out and publicly flogged the day that their failure to act on the C.I.A.'s "Bin Laden Determined To Strike Inside U.S." memo was revealed. Not only did this not happen (though it's such a pleasant fantasy), but there was NO OUTRAGE on the part of anyone in a position to point out how unacceptable it was that 3,000 people died a month after those who might very well have been able to prevent their deaths chose instead to shrug off the warnings and continue their summer vacations.
We have been warned. Al Qaeda is still "determined to strike in U.S." Michael Scheuer is the new Richard Clarke, and he says they're going to set off a nuke here. And if we know it, Bush and Cheney know it, every congressman and senator knows it, and everyone in the media knows it. And yet it's not a big story. Hello? Government people? Media people? I live in L.A. and I'm terrified. You live in New York and Washington, the two likeliest targets. Why aren't you shrieking in the streets?
It's time for citizen action the likes of which this country has never seen. Don't just contact your congressman, contact every congressman, and every senator. Barrage the radio talk show hosts and the reporters and pundits who are failing to bring this subject to the center of the national debate. Demand that hearings be held at which Michael Scheuer and others like him are given a public forum to tell us what they know, what they fear, and what our "leaders" should be and aren't doing to protect us.
Anyone who's read anything I've written about George W. Bush knows that hate isn't a big enough word for my feelings towards him. It's not just that he's an arrogant squanderer with an otherworldly sense of entitlement and a nonexistent sense of responsibility, an ignorant bully whose sadism has been well-documented over the years, and an incompetent failure who has diminished every enterprise he's touched, though each of those is a valid reason in its own right. It's that this arrogance, ignorance and incompetence is destroying my country and threatens to literally destroy me and the people I love. We've already lost the World Trade Center and New Orleans on Bush's watch. In any other civilized nation, just one of those would have been enough to throw him out of office in utter disgrace, yet there he still is, and here we are waiting for the third strike.
If it comes and you aren't annihilated in it, here's who else to blame: Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and every other government official who supports or has supported the diverting of U.S. military efforts from our real enemy to Iraq, including cowards like Colin Powell who knew better from the start but still lied for Bush. Also, Tim Russert, Bob Woodward, David Broder, Judith Miller, and all the other so-called journalists whose craven failure to hold Bush accountable makes them his complicit enablers. Also, if you read this and do absolutely nothing, yourself.
Again, to recap, one of the nation's foremost experts on the subject of Osama bin Laden says that al Qaeda is "going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States." If that doesn't scare you, you are no longer scareable.