'War president' Bush has always been soft on terror

[Octafish]

Here's the Truth from Craig (House of Saud, House of Bush) Unger. We should use our time to spread this rather than knock Kerry...



'War president' Bush has always been soft on terror

His campaign says vote Republican or die - but he lets al-Qaida off the hook

Craig Unger
Saturday September 11, 2004
The Guardian

Where's George Orwell when we need him? Because we Americans need him. We desperately need him. Consider: in August 2001, immediately after reading a memo entitled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US", President George Bush went bass fishing - and never called a meeting to discuss the issue.

A month later, on September 11, when he was told that the terrorists had attacked, Bush spent the next seven minutes reading a children's book, The Pet Goat, with a group of schoolchildren.

And when it comes to his own military service, recent revelations show that Bush got out of fighting in Vietnam thanks to his dad's political clout. Even then, Bush didn't fulfil his obligations to the National Guard.

Yet somehow the Bush-Cheney ticket is convincing Americans that only a Republican administration can handle national security. If John Kerry wins, Dick Cheney warned: "The danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating." The choice is simple: Vote Republican, or die. And voters are buying it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/salon/0,14779,1302307,00.html

[stray cat]

1. Bush did not retaliate for Cole Attack.

Although the Cole attack occurred when Clinton was in office, the investigation only implicated Al Queda after Bush had taken office. Bush was asked to take action against Al Queda for the attacked but refused (9-11 commission report).

[Octafish]

2. That's correct. Dick Clarke added...

... Clinton felt it would be unfair to start a war with just a few days left in his administration. So, Clinton personally warned Bush that Al Qaeda was the biggest threat to the United States.

What did Bush do? Bush did nothing, just like the zero he is.

[Poiuyt]

6. When Clinton warned Bush that al Quada was the biggest threat to the US

Bush disagreed and said the highest priority would be to build a "Star Wars" missle defence system. Remember, Condi Rice was supposed to give a speech on Star Wars systems on 9/11/01

[Octafish]

8. Star Wars has been a cash-cow for MI-Complex shareholders...

... the politcally-connected folk in the top 10-percent of the top 1-percent of American households. These are the "Have-mores" Bush calls his base whose companies they largely own have slurped up the hundreds of billions (guesstimate) of government "National Missile Defense" expenditures since Pruneface Reagan's time.

Post-9-11, Bush probably had no idea his chums could make so much money off counter-terror. OTOH, Richard Perle recognized an opportunity right away and started "Trireme Partners," a Carlyle Group knock-off specializing in counter-terror businesses. He even asked Adnan Khashoggi for $200 Mil to get in on the ground floor.

LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN

by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?

Issue of 2003-03-17
Posted 2003-03-10

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact

[blm]

7. Bush also called off the drones tracking Bin Laden when

the Pentagon had just come up with the technology to ARM the craft.

Clinton left it up to the next president and the next president turned down the opportunity to have armed trackers on Bin Laden.

[Octafish]

3. Bush is an IMBECILE!

C'mon, DU! Spread the Truth. Here's some ammo.



SINK the BFEE!

Why do half of all Americans embrace our most incompetent
and most reckless president, our most hated president overseas?

By Gerald Rellick

If we were truly in the age of reason, if the Enlightenment spawned by the likes of Galileo, Shakespeare, and Newton had really made the impact we like to believe, and if there were justice, then George W. Bush would already have been impeached, tried, and found guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors against the people of the United States. He would have been shipped in chains to The Hague to stand trial before the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, found guilty, and summarily hanged by the neck until dead. And the evil and vile Dick Cheney would just suddenly disappear--like Jimmy Hoffa.

OK, so this is a little unrealistic. How about Bush’s approval ratings hovering near 2 percent with rioting in the streets? Is that too much to ask as an appropriate reaction to this president?

For those of us who have tried to capture in words the grim reality of George Bush, the man’s “unrelenting and unremitting awfulness,” to use the words of political cartoonist Joe Sacco, I dare say the mood has to be one of frustration when we see the race between Kerry and Bush to be about even at this point. How is it, we ask, that the most incompetent, most reckless president of the modern era, probably the worst president in the history of the Republic, may actually win a second term? Doesn’t everyone realize by now that everything George Bush touches turns rotten? This was true when he was a young man, and it’s true now.

The question is, of course, rhetorical because we know the answer: fear. George Bush’s entire reelection campaign hinges on this one human emotion--and Bush, Karl Rove, and the entire GOP know it. The Republican national convention was all about what Bush & company want Americans to get in the habit of calling the “war on terror.” In his acceptance speech, Bush read through a list of domestic issues like it was a boring grocery list. From then on it was all about terror, terror, terror, and how he is the man to deal with this terror.

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http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=872

[DeepModem Mom]

4. kick

[Octafish]

5. Thanks, DeepModem Mom! Hey, these guys know the REAL w.

Behold! In print:

His Military Record
Cocaine, Booze and Abortions
A Caring Christian, A Compassionate Conservative?
Dodgy Deals and Insider Trading Allegations

Ha!

Unmasked: The George W Bush the President Doesn't Want the World To See

With less than 50 days to the US polls and a 10-point lead over John Kerry, George W Bush’s re-election as President looks a breeze. Despite his dodgy past, he has successfully sold himself as a ‘hero’ War President and defender of traditional US values. How did he do it? Bush’s people have run riot over Kerry’s record, so what about the President’s?

By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor
 
Is President George W Bush, who weaves a narrative about himself as a man of God, actually a charlatan? Is he really a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is his faith a sham? Is he more bad boy than born again? More playboy than penitent?

This past month has seen John Kerry, Bush’s Democratic rival for the White House, take one almighty pasting from the Republican right wing over accusations that he exaggerated his military record in Vietnam. Kerry, a many times decorated navy Vietnam veteran, said the smear campaign was orchestrated by a Bush team desperate to divert attention from the woeful state of the US economy and the running sore of Iraq.

But this week it’s Bush’s turn to line up for a beating. But where Kerry has a single questionable question mark hanging over his past, Bush’s charge sheet for alleged wrongdoing has got it all – sex, drugs, cowardice, cruelty; his alleged failings and foibles are imperial in stature.

These are the issues being debated as a result of further revelations into the shrouded past of the President.

CONTINUED...

http://www.sundayherald.com/44773