Remember the “Scooter” Libby case back when Bush was still President? The one where the White House essentially used its office to defame a very vocal voice against the war in Iraq and then outed his wife (Valerie Plame) as a undercover CIA officer? Yeah – when that federal investigation was ongoing, numerous emails were subpeonaed from the White House in order to determine if anyone in the White House was using their office or status to break the law by defaming a public official and outing a CIA officer.

At the time, we were told that all of the messages that the investigation was looking for were “missing,” and otherwise unaccounted for. A couple of years go by, and what we learn is that the emails weren’t missing at all – the Bush Administration simply never went looking for them:

Between late 2005 and January 2006, the Bush administration tried to recover “lost” emails from staffers who worked in the Office of the Vice President (OVP), an effort centered on a critical week – October 1 through October 6, 2003. That same week the Justice Department announced it was investigating the unauthorized leak of Valerie Plame Wilson’s covert CIA status.

But one name was missing from the list of 70 individuals whose email accounts White House technicians searched in an attempt to recover and restore missing emails: I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby.

According to documents obtained by government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), it appears that technicians in the Office of Administration did not attempt to recover from Libby’s account emails he either sent or received during the week of October 1 to October 6, 2003. That was a week when emails from the Office of the Vice President were missing for entire days in some instances and were unusually low in others.

It was also during this time that Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel, enjoined all White House staff members to turn over emails or other documents pertaining to Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had angered the White House by criticizing Bush’s case for invading Iraq. The directive came 12 hours after senior Bush White House officials had been told of the pending Justice Department investigation.

Now I’m more than a little familiar with enterprise IT, and the fact that one person’s e-mails were conveniently “missing” is just as suspicious as it sounds. Any off the shelf archiving product that can be run on any mail server would have caught these messages and backed them up either to archive, tape, or some other disk just like everyone else’s mail. But that’s the point – there’s a far more malicious reason why Libby’s mail went “missing,” they just never looked for it:

The search of individual email accounts was conducted after an internal investigation by officials in the Office of Administration concluded that emails from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney between September 30, 2003 and October 6, 2003 were lost and unrecoverable.

The absence of Libby’s name on the list of individuals whose emails technicians were trying to recover from the Office of the Vice President raises questions as to whether the Bush administration fully cooperated with the criminal investigation into the leak probe, lead by Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who had subpoenaed White House emails in January 2004.

In an interview, Anne Weismann, chief counsel of CREW, said she believes the documents show that “for unexplained reasons Scooter Libby’s mailbox was not searched while the mailboxes of 70 OVP employees were searched.”

“It is simply incomprehensible that Scooter Libby’s mailbox was not searched, yet that is what the documents suggest,” she said.

The rest of the story goes into some more technical detail around how it could possibly be that this one user’s mailbox wasn’t archived (as in, it’s not really possible) and how suspicious this must have been to the investigators but they could possibly have been running up against delays and lack of cooperation from the White House’s staff at the time. It’s a worthwhile read, especially if you have any interest or background in IT.

[ Documents Suggest Bush White House Failed to Search for Libby's "Missing" Emails Subpoenaed in CIA Leak Probe ]
Source: TruthOut

Oh, I have to let this article speak for itself. The title is strong on its own, but it’s true – it is ideology that’s holding back a green revolution in this country – there are more technologies and cottage industries and new products and businesses to count, but something is holding them back – something is keeping this entire market from breaking the surface. Let’s take a look at what it is:

American competitiveness is severely hobbled by our “free market” and anti-government attitudes. One way our competitors hold us back is by encouraging this outdated ideology. Result: other countries have national economic/industrial strategies and we don’t. So we lose.

Remember how “chips” was a major driver of the economy in the 80s and 90s? Then the Internet drove the economy late 90′s and early 2000s? The world understands that “green energy” is the next big industry that will drive the world economy. Actually, the rest of the world has understood this for some time and has been investing and inventing and innovating and building. Meanwhile over here America’s big oil and coal companies bought themselves a Presidency and an anti-government ideology and a climate-change-denial industry that has cost us 8 years and counting.

Now we’re playing catch-up, and the rest of the world is determined to keep us from taking the lead.

It’s true. I heard the CEO of a coal company in West Virginia in an interview with NPR say, when asked if climate change was real, outright say it’s fake – claiming that it, just like other so-called “scares” in the past, passed over and nothing was made of them (of course, the ones he chose are actually real – like the hole in the ozone layer, which is very much real even today, but the multinational push to stop using CFCs and other ozone depleting chemicals managed to keep it from spreading to the point where it’s a serious problem – but even so, remember that your grandparents could go out without sunscreen in the summer. We can’t.) and that if government did manage to pass climate regulations, that we all may as well “teach our children to speak Chinese.”

That’s infuriating, especially since it’s the actions of people like him that may force us to do that anyway, if you think that’s such a horrible thing (personally I think American children could do with a little multi-lingual teaching, but that’s just me – only Americans are truly monolingual.) – the Chinese, the Germans, the Japanese, and just about every other industrialized nation in the world is making a push towards clean energy and green technologies, and while they’re in no horrific hurry to turn off their carbon producing industries (although some of them are farther on the forefront than we are) they’re still developing and rolling out technologies and large-scale tests while we at home are still debating the evidence in front of us as if adding up all of the coins in the piggy bank a different way will lead to a different result.

Dave Johnson, writing for the Campaign for America’s Future, specifically points at the great lengths that the Chinese are going to in order to power and employ their massive lower and burgeoning middle classes with renewable energy, and while it’s not slowing their emissions rate, it could very easily begin to do so quickly, or wind up powering more people at an America-style rate while using a fraction of the fossil fuels we do.

If the United States doesn’t take its rightful place back at the front of the pack in science and technology, especially in the area of energy, we’ll wind up behind the curve, and in another position where we’ll have to buy tech or energy from someone who knows how to do it better than we do, and I don’t think anyone really wants that, from a security or a self-determination perspective. Instead of writing massive checks to OPEC nations, we’ll wind up writing them to the Chinese and the Germans to buy their expertise and their energy technologies.

[ Green Revolution - Ideology Holding America Back ]
Source: The Campaign for America’s Future

Remember just a year or so ago, when people were dancing in the streets because George W Bush wouldn’t be their president anymore? When people were so thrilled that the Republicans were out of office that they couldn’t help but celebrate the future?

Sure, some of that euphoria has worn off, and the honeymoon is definitely over with President Obama, but if you ask anyone if they’d rather go back to the civil-liberties-stealing, war-funding, fear-mongering, terrorists-blaming days of a government run and managed by the Republicans, most Americans would visibly shudder in fear. Why? Because even though things aren’t perfect today and there are serious hardships at hand, people still feel like today is a better day than yesterday.

But what if the Republicans were still in control? Let’s take a look at what kinds of “change” we probably would have to deal with if they were still in power. Here are some of my favorites from a roundup at Alternet:

3) Stubbornly deny the existence of ominous climate change while blithely pumping more pollutants into the environment from lucrative, dirty industries and practices. Although reputable scientists say 350 carbon parts per atmospheric million is the safe limit for sustained life on Earth, Republicans dismiss the frightening fact that we’re already at a carbon level of roughly 390 ppm.

4) Remove “restrictive” regulations on everything from investment banks and credit card companies to a broad array of “profit-eroding” consumer protections, leaving the American masses exposed to a host of resulting abuses and dangers.

5) Continue to criticize and insufficiently fund public education, advocating private schooling instead, thus entirely ignoring that progressive public systems are used in every country that has education outcomes superior to our own.

6) Outlaw abortion, under a fraudulently moral guise, compelling the US to bloodily join those benighted, backward nations where thousands of already-born, living, breathing, socially functioning females perish because of sexist denials of their basic reproductive rights.

7) Continue to recite a Pledge of Allegiance whose last six words are “with liberty and justice for all,” while remaining numbly oblivious to the harsh hypocrisy of preventing our homosexual citizens from marrying.

8 ) Speak often and loftily of freedom, but engage in secret wiretapping, repression of domestic dissent, neo-McCarthyite witch hunts, Red-baiting name calling, and a panoply of Patriot Act transgressions against the Constitution of the United States…all under the misused rubric of “national security.”

Those are some good ones, but here are some shiners:

14) Give full vent to the intensely bigoted hatred that has crazed extremists dreaming of literally tearing Barack Obama to pieces and gassing all liberals…if only they could.

15) Place the livelihoods and lives of over 300 million Americans in the hands of incompetent ideological “purists” such as Sarah Palin.

Yeah, that sums it up nicely.

[ 15 Awful Things Republicans Would Do If They Had the Chance ]
Source: Alternet

The title isn’t hyperbole, and it’s not false. It’s absolutely true. 30 senators, mostly White, Republican, men, voted to protect corporations “rights” and financial interests rather than women from being gang raped. The measure passed regardless, and as much as the senators who voted this way can whine about how it was an amendment attached to a defense authorization bill (which frankly, I think it absolutely should have been because it dealt specifically with defense contractors and their legal accountability – if you’re going to authorize the money to pay for them, you should be able to make the rules that police them) but we all know that these men wouldn’t have voted for the bill even if it were stand-alone and made it through hours upon hours of committee and floor debate.

So then, here’s the scoop, lifted from MyDD.com:

It is stunning that 30 Republican members of the United States Senate would vote to protect a corporation, in this case Halliburton/KBR, over a woman who was gang raped. The details from Think Progress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. She was detained in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” (Jones was not an isolated case.) Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration.

Offering Ms. Jones legal relief was Senator Al Franken of Minnesota who offered an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR “if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court.”

Seems simple enough. And yet, to GOP Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions of Alabama allowing victims of sexual assault a day in court is tantamount to a “political attack” at Halliburton. That 29 others, all men, chose to join him in opposing the Franken amendment is simply mind-boggling.

…

In the debate, Senator Sessions maintained that Franken’s amendment overreached into the private sector and suggested that it violated the due process clause of the Constitution.

To which, Senator Franken fired back quoting the Constitution. “Article 1 Section 8 of our Constitution gives Congress the right to spend money for the welfare of our citizens. Because of this, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote, ‘Congress may attach conditions on the receipt of federal funds and has repeatedly employed that power to further broad policy objectives,’” Franken said. “That is why Congress could pass laws cutting off highway funds to states that didn’t raise their drinking age to 21. That’s why this whole bill [the Defense Appropriations bill] is full of limitations on contractors — what bonuses they can give and what kind of health care they can offer. The spending power is a broad power and my amendment is well within it.”

God I love it when Senator Franken quotes the Constitution. Not every Republican was so clueless. Ten voted for the Franken amendment including the GOP’s female contingent of Senators (Snowe, Collins, Hutchinson and Murkowski).

“We need to put assurances into the law that those kind of instances [the Jamie Leigh Jones case] are not capable of being repeated,” said Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted in favor of Franken’s amendment. “I want to make sure that a woman, any individual who is a victim of a terrible act, knows that they have got protections.”

Murkowski said that she considered the arguments that Sessions made about the amendment being too expansive before she decided to vote for the legislation.

“I looked at it,” said Murkowski. “And, I tell you, you look at some of the things we do and you have to say, ‘OK, you have a specific instance we’re trying to address and does this go above and beyond?’ But when you have to err on the side of protecting an individual, I erred on the side of greater generosity, I guess.”

Republican Sen. George LeMieux of Florida echoed some of Murkowski’s sentiments.

“I can’t see in any circumstance that a woman who was a victim of sexual assault shouldn’t have her right to go to court,” LeMieux said. “So, that is why I voted for it.”

Although Franken chatted up LeMieux on the Senate floor before the vote, LeMieux said that he had already made his decision. But, LeMieux added, Franken’s talk didn’t hurt.

“I had decided to vote for it before I came here, but I was happy to hear his argument for it,” LeMieux said. “He did what a senator should do, which was he was working it. He was working for his amendment.” I’ll add, Al Franken is everything a United States Senator should be.

As for Jamie Leigh Jones, she was nothing but elated and thankful. “It means the world to me,” Jones said of the amendment’s passage. “It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it.”

And for the GOP, it is a new low.

Way to lay the constitutional smackdown, Franken. I mean wow – that’s amazing.

And because I didn’t want to let the list go by and get buried in the text of the article, let’s lay it out for you right here.

These, ladies and gentlemen, are the 30 men who voted against this amendment, who would rather a woman be gang raped and not be able to face her accusers or the company that allowed it to happen and protected the people involved, than at least let her have her day in court:

Here are those who vote to protect a corporation over a victim of rape:

Alexander (R-TN)
Barrasso (R-WY)
Bond (R-MO)
Brownback (R-KS)
Bunning (R-KY)
Burr (R-NC)
Chambliss (R-GA)
Coburn (R-OK)
Cochran (R-MS)
Corker (R-TN)
Cornyn (R-TX)
Crapo (R-ID)
DeMint (R-SC)
Ensign (R-NV)
Enzi (R-WY)
Graham (R-SC)
Gregg (R-NH)
Inhofe (R-OK)
Isakson (R-GA)
Johanns (R-NE)
Kyl (R-AZ)
McCain (R-AZ)
McConnell (R-KY)
Risch (R-ID)
Roberts (R-KS)
Sessions (R-AL)
Shelby (R-AL)
Thune (R-SD)
Vitter (R-LA)
Wicker (R-MS)

Remember them when you head to the polls.

[ 30 GOP Senators Vote to Defend Gang Rape ]
Source: MyDD.com

The video is long gone now, taken down by the same terrorists who put it up, and likely in a sad attempt to cover their tracks against a federal investigation that I’m sure is now pending, but here’s what Joshua Holland, writing for AlterNet, had to say:

There is no universally agreed-upon definition of the word “terrorism.” As I’ve often said, the reason it’s next to impossible to define the term is that everyone wants it to mean: ‘violent acts in the pursuit of political goals with which I disagree.’

That aside, most agree that attempting to influence public officials through a threat of violence is an act of terrorism.

He goes on to post the video, which is now gone – and in an update lets the SPLC, a group that monitors and tracks hate groups and civil rights across the country, describe the contents of the video:

It advises President Obama and other prominent people (“Our Dear Leader and co.”) to “leave now and give us our country back” and to do so by next week.

“If you stay,” the silent video message continues, “ ‘We, The People’ will systematically dismantle you, destroy you and reclaim what is rightfully ours. …

“We are angry and we are ready to take back the rights of the people. We will fight and We will win. …

“Dead line [sic] for your national response: October 15, 2009

“Thank you to all patriots who support our cause. … Be prepared for when the fateful day of the declaration of war is nationally announced.”

So essentially, a threat against the President of the United States, complete with a due date. If this isn’t some 24 Jack Bauer bullsh*t, I don’t know what is. Seriously America – these folks are in our backyards, and if the justice system wasn’t designed to try and imprison them for terrorism or treason, I don’t know what is. Never would a progressive or a liberal have thought to make a substantive threat against President Bush during his Administration and expect to get away with it – not that they could have what with all of the domestic spying and surveillance going on anyway – but these are the people you would be afraid of, not the ones in Washington voting whether or not your taxes are going up or down.

As much as people like to point at Washington as some kind of cesspool, I think more attention should be turned to our own communities and rooting out weeds like these people, instead of trying to be armchair politicians.

[ Right-Wing American Terrorists Issue YouTube Threat ]
Source: AlterNet

On today, the day after September 11th, it’s worth pointing out how some people in power took advantage of a tragic moment that will live forever in the minds and hearts of Americans and in American history as an opportunity to seize power and inject the American people with a healthy dose of fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

The more frightened the American people were, the more they could keep us controlled, and slowly but surely we’re breaking out of that shell. Why? We’re coming to terms with the failures of the people who have propagated these lies, and we’re looking back in time and rethinking our frightened, knee-jerk reactions to the fear they’ve fostered. With that in mind, here’s a few myths about national security that have been repeated so often in the media that you’ve likely heard them all before.

Some of the highlights? The myth that Islamofaacism is our greatest national security threat, the myth that we have to give up some civil liberties in times of war to keep us safe, the myth that we’re “fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here,” one that makes me particularly sick, and the myth that our current strategy must be working because there hasn’t been another attack.

[ Ten Conservative Myths about National Security ]
Source: Campaign for America’s Future

When government lackeys and conservative think tanks reach blindly for rationale for keeping massive, imprersonal databases full of names and personally identifiable information in order to “protect the homeland,” even though there are no accountability measures and no way for innocent individuals to correct, challenge, or alter the information that’s in the database – especially when they’ve been mistakenly caught up in it – this is a good story to point out.

According to the Washington Post, businesses from mortgage lenders to rental car agencies are the Treasury Department’s publicly searchable and available to companies looking to ensure they don’t provide goods and services to terrorists or individuals linked to terrorist groups. This would be a good thing all around if there didn’t seem to be more innocent customers being flagged and denied service than there have been terrorists caught and reported. Everyday people looking to rent a car or get a loan for a car or a home. The list was originally designed to prevent drug dealers and foreign nationals that were considered unsavory individuals to be denied services as punishment for their involvement in terrorism or illegal activities. The problem stems from the fact that it seems to be nothing more than a fishing expedition that’s been catching more dolphins than fish, so to speak.

The Office of Foreign Asset Control’s list of “specially designated nationals” has long been used by banks and other financial institutions to block financial transactions of drug dealers and other criminals. But an executive order issued by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has expanded the list and its consequences in unforeseen ways. Businesses have used it to screen applicants for home and car loans, apartments and even exercise equipment, according to interviews and a report by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area to be issued today.

“The way in which the list is being used goes far beyond contexts in which it has a link to national security,” said Shirin Sinnar, the report’s author. “The government is effectively conscripting private businesses into the war on terrorism but doing so without making sure that businesses don’t trample on individual rights.”

The lawyers’ committee has documented at least a dozen cases in which U.S. customers have had transactions denied or delayed because their names were a partial match with a name on the list, which runs more than 250 pages and includes 3,300 groups and individuals. No more than a handful of people on the list, available online, are U.S. citizens.

Yet anyone who does business with a person or group on the list risks penalties of up to $10 million and 10 to 30 years in prison, a powerful incentive for businesses to comply. The law’s scope is so broad and guidance so limited that some businesses would rather deny a transaction than risk criminal penalties, the report finds.

“The law is ridiculous,” said Tom Hudson, a lawyer in Hanover, Md., who advises car dealers to use the list to avoid penalties. “It prohibits anyone from doing business with anyone who’s on the list. It does not have a minimum dollar amount. . . . The local deli, if it sells a sandwich to someone whose name appears on the list, has violated the law.”

Wow. Remind me to tell my favorite sandwich shop that they’d better stop serving that family with the diplomat tags on their car next door. They might be facing significant fines and penalties.

[ Ordinary Customers Flagged as Terrorists ]
Source: The Washington Post

Two closely related articles here. The first interesting point is that Karl Rove received and subsequently ignored an Iranian peace offer in 2003 that may have had the opportunity to stem a great deal of the blustering debate and threatening action by both sides made up to this point. He personally received it, and then ignored it outright. While I don’t specifically point the finger at Rove himself for this-I have no doubt in my mind that anyone else in the Bush White House would have done the exact same thing and subsequently covered it up, including President Bush himself. The chilling point is that it happened in 2003, as the Iraq war was beginning, and before Iranian nuclear capabilities made front page news as an imminent threat to American security.

On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman speaks with Tita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), about what happened in 2003. It’s also worthy of note that Iran has repeatedly said, including to a massive American religious delegation that went there this month to meet with Iranian President Ahmadinejad [ Religious Delegation to Iran meets with President Ahmadinejad ] that they’re open to talks with the United States to work out our collective differences diplomatically without strings, conditions, or exchanging bribes or aid – that we simply need to drop our conditions and they’ll drop theirs. (our conditions are that Iran can talk with us, but for us to come to the table they have to stop their nuclear program) The message from both the delegation and Parsi is that Iran is ready to talk, but we won’t until we get what we want. Whether or not that’s a good idea, and whether or not we should waive our conditions are another debate, one that I personally don’t have an opinion on right now, but I wonder how much good holding out a demand in exchange for talks does.

[ Ex-Congressional Aide: Karl Rove Personally Received (And Ignored) Iranian Peace Offer in 2003 ]
Source: Democracy Now! (courtesy of TruthOut)

In an ironic twist, John Edwards is saying what most of us who aren’t blinded by old hate for Iran (even if that disgust is well-founded, no one should forget what happened in 1979, but harboring an old hatred over it may not be wise) is thinking, that a comprehensive peace accord with Iran and a commitment to work to resolve our differences is not just possible, but would be an incredible step towards restoring American credibility around the world, healing our rifts with our neighbors, and showing those nations displeased with us that we’re not a blind juggernaut who can’t be spoken with:

[ Edwards: Treaty With Iran Possible ]
Source: ABC News

I can only hope that whomever wins the White House, whether it’s Edwards or someone else, heeds his suggestions. The world would be a safer place if we engaged those who oppose us at the table of diplomacy first and hardest, rather than opting to go to the mat in blood first, even if some of those enemies would rather do the same.

Writing on both the hilariously silly matter of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “bomb scare” in Boston last week which was actually a long planned and approved marketing campaign that was simultaneously running in 12 other cities (12 other cities that didn’t complain) and also getting to something of the root of the matter by examining how on earth people managed to get so incredibly jumpy, William Rivers Pitt, writing for TruthOut.org, has some excellent points that I think should be out and up front:

It took an astonishingly stupid bomb scare in my town last week to really make me feel old for the first time.

“Old” isn’t the proper word, I guess, since I am only midway through my 30s. I live in Boston, temporary home to nearly one million students from September to June every year, and so I am surrounded by kids all the time. I used to teach high school English to roomfuls of teenagers. Neither of these things made me feel old. The now-infamous Lite-Brite Bomb Fiasco of 2007 that unspooled here last week didn’t make me feel old either, so much as it made me feel out of touch, for the first time, with those who are ten or fifteen years younger than me.

…

So, was my fear an over-reaction? It is easy to say so in hindsight. How can anyone think one of those Lite-Brite things was a bomb? Easy. You spend a few hours watching the TV news people natter about “wiring” and “electronics” and things strapped to bridges and hospitals, but you’re not shown the actual items by those same news people. It was hours before I saw what they were talking about, and in that simple fact, we find one of the central afflictions of our wretched estate.

That whole thing last week was of the media, by the media and for the media. An advertising agency pimps a television show, and the resulting nonsense becomes fodder for the TV news shows. Like Tinkers to Evans to Chance, this was the perfect example of the media serving itself at the expense of the people. If they had shown us one of those LED boards, no one would have thought twice. It served the news media better, however, to bluster about suspicious items for hours. Better ratings, you see.

The event also exposed a dissonance in our collective thinking, especially among the aforementioned younger set. For them, and to use their favorite word, the 21st century absolutely sucks. A twenty-one year old today was seventeen years old when we invaded Iraq, fifteen years old when September 11th happened, and fourteen years old when the Supreme Court decided to take over the duties and responsibilities of electing our public officials. Since then, they have been subjected to bogus terror scare after bogus terror scare, to lies without count about threats beyond measure, to a war seemingly without end that serves only itself.

Agreed. I don’t discount the people of Boston for being careful, in fact I salute them for being exceptionally aware and concious, but I admonish them for being so afraid that litebrites could even remotely, in any possible case, be considered a bomb. But Pitt has a point – if you’re not shown the devices and the media and authorities don’t bother to speak to experts or any swath of people wide enough that might actually do anything other than fan the flames of fear, then of course you’re going to be scared, and of course you’re going to be defensive when the rest of the ocuntry calls you out on it. I can’t totally blame them, but I can’t totally let Boston off the hook either. It, like most things, are complicated and the truth lies between the two ends of the chain. If nothing else though, I appreciate Boston showing us that while terrorism can strike anywhere at any time, fear begins and rests here at home.

Still, I wonder what this generation is going to think as they get older. I can’t say I’m “old,” in fact I’m closer to the people he mentions than I am to Pitt himself in age, but if there’s anything I’m afraid of, it’s a future that continues down this perilous path of war, retribution, pre-emptive strike, and diplomacy through muscle-flexing and force. Not to say that diplomacy through rolling over and showing one’s belly gets you very far either, but again, somewhere between both ends of the chain is the answer, and moderation is the key. Sadly, with as divided as America is and the trend towards extremism on one respect or the other, I worry that no one will ever be able to meet in the middle, not so much politically middle, but the pragmatic and practical middle.

[ The 21st Century Sucks ]
Source: TruthOut

Alternet has revived a story that I find incredibly timely and was originally published in Newsday; a story about the real “homegrown terrorists” in America, the terrorists that don’t make it to the top of the FBI most wanted list, and that don’t wind up on the evening news. They’re anti-choice “activists” who, in the name of their own sense of twisted morality, threaten those who disagree with injury, bombings, even the murder of themselves or their family and friends. It seems that anti-choice thugs would be more than happy to kill doctors, nurses, and anyone else who might happen to get in their way in order to oppress entire communities and force their own theocratic morality on everyone-those who agree and those who don’t. It’s not a significant step from controlling bodies and minds and bringing their own sense of right and wrong into the consultation rooms of women and their doctors to total authoritarian control over people, so it’s not hard to see how these extremists and fundamentalists think.

Regardless, it’s still so difficult to watch this terrorist tragedy unfold here at home, especially when it gets so little public and media attention. For example, referring to the “holy war” that these Christian fundamentalists believe they’re fighting:

Since 1977, casualties from this war include seven murders, 17 attempted murders, three kidnappings, 152 assaults, 305 completed or attempted bombings and arsons, 375 invasions, 482 stalking incidents, 380 death threats, 618 bomb threats, 100 acid attacks, and 1,254 acts of vandalism, according to the National Abortion Federation.

Abortion providers and activists received 77 letters threatening anthrax attacks before 9/11, yet the media never considered anthrax threats as terrorism until after 9/11, when such letters were delivered to journalists and members of Congress.

After 9/11, Planned Parenthood and other abortion rights groups received 554 envelopes containing white powder and messages like: “You have been exposed to anthrax. … We are going to kill all of you.” They were signed by the Army of God, a group that hosts Scripture-filled web pages for “Anti-Abortion Heroes of the Faith,” including minister Paul Hill, Michael Griffin and James Kopp, all convicted of murdering abortion providers, and a convicted clinic bomber, the Rev. Michael Bray. Another of their “martyrs,” Clayton Waagner, mailed anthrax letters while a fugitive on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list for anti-abortion related crimes.

“I am a terrorist,” Waagner declared on the Army of God’s web site. Boasting that God “freed me to make war on his enemy,” he claimed he knew where 42 Planned Parenthood workers lived. “It doesn’t matter to me if you’re a nurse, receptionist, bookkeeper, or janitor, if you work for the murderous abortionist, I’m going to kill you.”

That’s textbook terrorism, defined by the USA Patriot Act as dangerous criminal acts that “appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or “to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.”

There’s a real terrorist threat out there that deserves our focus, and its not from some far away place where the people look differently and speak a different language-the threat is from here at home, people who proudly state their hatred from both the halls of government and from out front of medical clinics, and hide their hate behind the shield of their misinterpretation and perversion of Christianity. It’s about time that terrorist threat garnered some attention and resources.

[ The Terrorists Who Aren't in the News ]
Source: Newsday (courtesy of Alternet)