So, who is this mass murderer? And what prosecutor, what police force, is shirking their public duties and preventing justice from being served?
Is this a modern-day Willie Horton situation?
Is this a drug dealer cutting deals with crooked cops and lawyers?
Is this a case of prosecutorial incompetence that couldn’t convict an obviously guilty man?
This is the mass murderer allowed to walk free…
Remember this guy? “Wanted dead or alive”? Cutting off the head and the tail will follow?
Okay, so it wasn’t long after that that Bush said that he “doesn’t spend that much time” thinking about bin Laden. Well, okay, the President had a lot on his mind — and not much can fit in such a small space.
But now, according to Fred Barnes at The Weekly SubStandard:
WE NOW KNOW WHY the Bush administration hasn’t made the capture of Osama bin Laden a paramount goal of the war on terror. Emphasis on bin Laden doesn’t fit with the administration’s strategy for combating terrorism. Here’s how President Bush explained this Tuesday: “This thing about . . . let’s put 100,000 of our special forces stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.”
Rather, Bush says there’s a better way to stay on offense against terrorists. “The way you win the war on terror,” Bush said, “is to find people [who are terrorists] and get them to give you information about what their buddies are fixing to do.” In a speech last week, the president explained how this had worked–starting with the arrest and interrogation of 9/11 planner Khalid Sheik Muhammad–to break up a terrorist operation that was planning post-9/11 attacks on America.
“It’s really important at this stage . . . to be thinking about how to institutionalize courses of action that will enable future presidents to gain the information necessary to prevent attack,” he said. This, presumably, would include the use of secret prisons, tough but legal interrogation techniques, a ban on lawsuits against interrogators, electronic eavesdropping, and monitoring of bank transfers, among other measures.
It’s no longer about bin Laden…it’s about how to institutionalize tyranny in the name of “keeping us safe.” Bin Laden and “terrorists” are just a handy scapegoat for this regime to solidify their grasp on power. And you know that when he talks about “future Presidents”, he means future Republican presidents…if a Democrat, say Hillary Clinton, tried to use these powers the Right would scream bloody murder.
If a Democratic prosecutor said that pursuing a known drug kingpin was not the best use of resources to combat drug use, the Right Wing would be up in arms, talking about “coddling criminals” and planning recall movements. If a Democratic police chief said that pursuing child pornographers was not the right way to prevent children from being molested, the Right would be calling for his/her head. Yet this man who boasts about the actions that killed nearly 3000 people 5 years ago this week is still out there…and no one in the White House cares.
When the World Trade Center was bombed in the 1990s, the attackers were found, brought to justice under law, and are still in prison to this very day. When good fine Americans blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City, they were tried, convicted, and punished for their crimes (one imprisonment, one execution). And these were under a Democratic presidency. Yet today, those who want to use our own justice system to prosecute those accused of terrorism, those who want them treated humanely under law, are accused of being “soft”, of “coddling” terrorists.
I ask you, who’s really being soft on terror? (And bonus question for the conspiracy theorists…why?)