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| ON THE OTHER HAND |
| Osama and Jesus By Antonio C. Abaya August 05, 2004 Stung to the quick by the massive intelligence failure that led to their trauma that was 9/11, the Americans have been going overboard since, crying �Wolf!� every now and then, as if to remind themselves that they are still at war even if the battlefield is half a world away in Iraq and Afghanistan. Better to have publicly sounded the alarm and erred when nothing happens, US intel agencies seem to be saying, than to be spectacularly silent when terrorists blow up a night club in Bali or demolish trains in Madrid, than to be famously ignored by their politician-bosses before terrorists reduced the World Trade Center in Manhattan to rubble, and then made to look bad for it.. Few would claim that 9/11 could have been prevented, but many point out, as I did in my article �FBI Missed Moussaoui� (April 21, 2004), that the American intelligence services failed to connect the dots, some of which were staring them in their faces. This time around, the dots are being drawn in bold face and highlighted with flashing sunbursts to make sure no one misses them. The US Department of Homeland Security has raised to orange (�high�) the level of alert in Manhattan, New Jersey and Washington in response to what Sec. Tom Ridge has claimed to be target-specific electronic chatter that their spooks have picked up, indicating that an al-Qaida attack is imminent. Is this for real now? We do not know. But the Republican Convention (which will formally declare the re-election bid of George W. Bush) is less than four weeks away and it will be held in Manhattan. The third anniversary of 9/11 is less than five weeks away. The presidential elections on Nov 2 are less than three months away. If al-Qaida are planning to make a statement more spectacular than kidnapping and beheading foreign truck drivers in Iraq, or if they plan to leave an indelible mark on the US presidential elections as they did on the parliamentary elections in Spain last March, they will have to make their moves between now and Nov. 2. So the electronic chatter that Sec Ridge is using to justify raising the alert level to orange may be real. But it could also be a decoy, meant to mislead the Americans into expecting a car or truck bomb attack in Manhattan, New Jersey or Washington, while the terrorists strike somewhere else where no one is looking, using a totally unexpected mode of attack. If the al-Qaida are anything, they are unpredictable. Or the alert could be a sham, a wayang shadow play that will be made to run all the way to Nov. 2, a political ploy to enhance the re-election bid of President Bush. The New York Times and the Washington Post have revealed that the intelligence inputs that Homeland Security based its alarms on were up to four years old, including apparent detailed surveillance reports, recorded in computer diskettes seized in Pakistan, of such specific targets as the New York Stock Exchange, the World Bank, the IMF Building, and the Citicorp corporate headquarters. This new alarm must be viewed in context. A public opinion poll last June showed that American voters are about evenly divided between Bush and Democratic challenger John F. Kerry on matters dealing with health care, jobs, taxes and other mundane domestic issues. But when voters were asked who they thought was the better leader to deal with terrorism, Bush was the clear winner, with a lead of nine points over Kerry, a significant lead in US politics. So for Bush, raising the terrorism bogey and keeping it on the front page and in the nightly TV news all the way to Election Day is his best possible political strategy. It is a win-win game plan. If terrorists strike, Bush can crow �I warned you so.!�, aside from patriotically rallying the American public to him as their leader. If the terrorists do not strike, Bush can also crow �I foiled their evil designs!� How can Kerry possibly top that? Terrorists Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zwahiri and Abu Musad al-Zarqawi are Bush�s most effective political allies. He should send them gold-embossed invitations to his second inauguration in January 2005. Despite the damaging testimonies of several resigned top-level officials of his own government and the opinion of the chief of the UN weapons inspection team in Iraq, as well as statements of FBI and CIA experts � that there are no weapons of mass destruction in the country and that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 (the obverse of which had been the justification for the invasion of Iraq) � George W. Bush remains unshakeable as the probable presidential winner in November, barring some unforeseen major developments. Even the �Fahrenheit 9/11� polemic of Michael Moore � humorous, petulant, angry, irrepressible, opinionated � the most widely viewed documentary in the history of film, seems to have been preaching largely to the converted, aside from some wavering liberals. The hard-rock conservative constituency of Bush remains unmoved. Why so? Are the Americans that dumb? Or dumber? The answer may lie in the fact that Born Again Bush�s biggest single source of grass-root political support is the Christian fundamentalists led by TV Evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, who claim an adult following of 70 million, about half the US voting population. These are the insular-minded local yokels of Middle America who, on the rare occasions that they wonder about the rest of the planet, tune in to Fox News and its parochial worldview. They are the reason why, as late as last May, 61% of adult Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein was the mastermind of 9/11. As I explained in my article �Understanding Bush� (Oct. 15, 2003), Christian fundamentalists believe that the state of Israel was a creation of God and unquestioningly support US efforts to protect it from the likes of Saddam. They also believe in the Biblical prediction of a final battle between Good and Evil (which may have already begun) and that in this Armageddon (from �Magiddo�, an actual place in Judea) two thirds of the population of Israel will be wiped out. But the surviving one third will convert to Christianity, and this will be the signal for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Osama and Jesus are unwitting partners for the re-election of George W. Bush. ***** DID GEORGE W. go to Yale University or to the Yale Locksmith Vocational High School? I ask because I received the following tidbit email: �NEWSWEEK (of unspecified date) reports that President Bush, appearing before a right-to-life rally in Tampa, Florida on June 17, stated: �We must always remember that all human beings begin life as a feces. A feces is a living being in the eyes of God, who has endowed that feces with all the rights and God-given blessings of any other human being..� �The audience listened in disbelief as the President repeated his error at least a dozen times, before realizing that he had used the word �feces� when he meant to say �fetus.�� I also ask because I (together with millions of other CNN viewers on Aug. 6) saw and heard George W., speaking in a political rally somewhere, make the following rhetorical flourish: �Our enemies will never tire of thinking of new ways to harm our people. (Pause). Neither will we�..� It must be the vocational high school. But did he graduate? ***** The bulk of this article appears in the August 14, 2004 issue of the Philippines Free Press magazine. OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO Reactions to �Osama and Jesus� Dear Tony, Let me go to the Bush "feces" story, supposedly by Newsweek, emailed to you. It has the same ring as the Bush IQ hoax. Let me quote Alex Boese's entry on this in his book, The Museum of Hoaxes: "In July 2001 an email began to circulate around the Internet claiming that the Lovenstein Institute, a think tank based in Scranton, Pennsylvania, had conducted research into the IQ of all the presidents of the past fifty years and concluded that George W. Bush ranked at the bottom, with an IQ of only 19, and on August 26 Garry Trudeau featured the report in his Doonesbury comic strip. "But both Trudeau and the Gaurdian had been taken in by a hoax. The e-mail had originated as a joke on a Web site called Linkydinky.com. In its original version the joke was obvious. For instance, Linkydinky.com cited the Pennsylvania Court Observer as its source for the news, while crediting the paper with a circulation of only five readers. Furthermore, Dr. Lovenstein was described as 'living in a mobile home in Scranton, Pennsylvania.' As the joke began to make its way through people's e-mail, these textual clues were removed, making it appear that the Lowenstein Institute was an actual research organization. Once they learned of their mistakes, both Trudeau and the Guardian published retractions." The clue to your e-mail's being a probable hoax is the fact it's undated and unpaged which prevents you from looking up the article and issue of Newsweek, which is instinctive to you. It's the paradox of the Internet which has allowed the whole world as it were to check the veracity of a story but it also makes it possible for a hoax to travel around the world in the wink of an eye and deceive millions before we're able to check, verify and expose it as a fraud. Vic de Jesus, [email protected] August 09, 2004 MY REPLY. I am aware of the Lowenstein hoax, Vic, and you are right, the undated and unpaged Newsweek article could well be another one. But George W. does have a limited vocabulary, which you can see when he speaks ex-tempore, and limited vocabulary is one indication of a low IQ. He has recently admitted as much when he quipped that, like his host Albert Schwarzenegger, he had trouble with the English language. wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Not everyone who goes to Yale is intelligent or even sane. Had he gone to Yale Locksmith though I think Bush would have a little common sense. You cannot sell a lock that does not work to anyone--not even to Falwell and his cohorts. Ross Tipon, [email protected] August 09, 2004 OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO |