Bird Flu Follies, Terror Prisons, Escaping Al Qaeda Operatives, And Continuing Violence

by Steve

Several terror-related notes to comment on this morning.

First, the Washington Post breaks the story we have all suspected for awhile: the CIA has been operating terror prisons in Eastern European countries for as long as four years, out of the reach of U. S. laws or our media. Ostensibly, the CIA has been operating these torture-friendly facilities to interrogate Al Qaeda, Taliban, and terrorist-of-the-day detainees, torture them, and extract useful information from them. Given the fact that this administration was unable to effectively show which ten terror attacks they have allegedly prevented, given the fact that these terror prisons didn’t prevent actual attacks in Europe, and given the fact that these terror prisons haven’t done anything to impede the increasing attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan by an Al Qaeda that has been running free since we occupied those countries, one can question what benefit we have obtained from these facilities, especially when our forces are so lax about those they are holding that Al Qaeda operatives escape from a military prison, conveniently in advance of the expected testimony by a leading Al Qaeda detainee against a U. S. soldier on trial for abuse.

Second, four years after 9/11 and after this administration began scaring people about terrorism, and specifically the threat of terrorists using chemical and biological weapons against American cities, the Bush Administration rolls out its next “all terror, all the time, ‘hey, look over there!’” campaign with the avian flu program. The New York Times notes this morning that the Senate has already pushed through more money for this need than the Administration asked for yesterday, and Bush has yet to explain where this money is coming from when he is still handing out large tax cuts to millionaires. And even though public health officials in the country have been saying for years that this administration had been behind the curve in getting an infrastructure and vaccine delivery system in place to deal with threats like these, whether man-made or not, Bush is just now finding a way to spend over $7 billion when he flushes that money down the toilet in just two weeks in Iraq. What’s next? A war on birds?

And how are those alleged anti-terror efforts going in Iraq? Well, after a very deadly month for our troops in Iraq, four more were killed in two separate incidents yesterday and today. Twenty-three people were killed and over forty injured in another car bombing outside a mosque today in Iraq. And any anti-terror program in Iraq will not get very far if the United States still has no idea or plan to rebuild the country, more than two years after the occupation started.