Who would want another massive terrorist attack on US soil? The Bush administration, that’s who.
They can’t wait for another one, because that means they could scare us into giving them everything their little black hearts desire. Don’t take my word for it. Take the word of former Department of Justice staffer Jack Goldsmith, whose book about his time at the DoJ exposes the control freak behind the head control freak in the Bush administration, Vice President President Cheney. It’s Cheney’s current Chief of Staff (and former counsel) David Addington, the head of the spear in Cheney’s unitary executive takeover of the government (via TPMMuckraker):
Goldsmith delves even further in establishing Addington as a relentless legal force for unbridled executive authority. Take the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Since 9/11, the court has rejected only four requests for surveillance in the U.S., about as many as it’s rejected in its entire 30-year existence. Yet for Addington, the court’s requirements for niceties like probable cause represented an unacceptable hindrance, putting the country at risk of devastation.
“We’re one bomb away from getting rid of that obnoxious [FISA] court,” Goldsmith recalls Addington telling him in February 2004.
From Goldsmith’s description, Addington can be reasonably said to consider the machinery of republican government to be a strategic asset of al-Qaeda. If the FISA Court was a meddlesome institution that needed scaling back, an impertinent bureaucrat like Goldsmith was vastly more irksome, representing as he did a mere executive appendage like the Justice Department. Addington would rebuke Goldsmith with stunning phrases like this one:
“The president has already decided that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections,” Addington replied angrily, according to Goldsmith. “You cannot question his decision.”
Addington comes across as a Himmler in waiting, does he not? And yes, I know I’m breaking Godwin’s law. Big whoop. Some people deserve being compared to the Nazis, considering they are responsible for illegal aggressive wars that have killed hundreds of thousands, made millions homeless, and have eliminated many of our cherished legal and constitutional protections by executive fiat. Just imagine a fanatic like Addington as Attorney General. He’d make Abu Gonzales look like a piker.
