08/21/06 "EB" - Pakistanis find no evidence against 'terror mastermind'

From the Daily Mail: Rashid Rauf, whose detention in Pakistan was the trigger for the arrest of 23 suspects in Britain, has been accused of taking orders from Al Qaeda's 'No3' in Afghanistan and sending money back to the UK to allow the alleged bombers to buy plane tickets. But after two weeks of interrogation, an inch-by-inch search of his house and analysis of his home computer, officials are now saying that his extradition is 'a way down the track' if it happens at all.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear -- kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." -- General Douglas MacArthur, 1957.

Soon a government agent provocateur appears, infiltrates the group, and then actually encourages the individuals to think and talk further about terrorist acts, to develop real plans instead of youthful fantasizing, and even provides the individuals with some of the actual means for carrying out these terrorist acts, like explosive material and technical know-how, money and transportation, whatever is needed to advance the plot. It's known as "entrapment", and it's supposed to be illegal, it's supposed to be a powerful defense for the accused, but the authorities get away with it all the time; and the accused get put away for very long stretches. And because of the role played by the agent provocateur, we may never know whether any of the accused, on their own, would have gone much further, if at all, like actually making a bomb, or, in the present case, even making transatlantic flight reservations since many of the accused reportedly did not even have passports. Government infiltrating and monitoring is one thing; encouragement, pushing the plot forward, and scaring the public to make political capital from it is quite something else.

How fortuitous, especially for the neocons and Bush's Ministry of Homeland Security, busily working to trounce the Constitution and turn America into a snoop and police state.

"Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called on state legislators Thursday to embrace new federal driver's license requirements to strengthen security," reports the Associated Press. "Starting three years from now, if you live or work in the United States, you'll need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments, or take advantage of nearly any government service. Practically speaking, your driver's license likely will have to be reissued to meet federal standards," explained CNet News in March. In addition to name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, and address, "Homeland Security is permitted to add additional requirements-such as a fingerprint or retinal scan-on top of those." In short, without this new card, slotted to go online by 2008, you will be unable to function in society.

Officially, the Bush administration's strategy is: Clear, hold and build. But with limited American forces to do any clearing, the war in western Iraq looks much more like hang on and hand over. Hang on against an insurgency that seems to be laying roadside bombs as quickly as they are discovered, and hand over to an Iraqi military that is still a work in progress.

The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, American generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control a country the size of California. They counted heavily on the cooperation of anti-Hussein Iraqi troops to carry out the task. The plan to enlist the support of Iraqi troops to control the country was approved in March 2003 by President Bush himself.

But the Iraqi Army went AWOL when faced with the rapid American push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior American military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the top American general in Iraq at the time, and the C.I.A. station chief in Baghdad began to work toward this end by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals. Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer III, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Secretary of State Colin Powell was informed in advance.

Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a new and very methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a nation that was in chaos. (The new force was to be called the New Iraqi Corps, until American officials learned that N.I.C. sounded like a vulgar profanity in Arabic.) Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought that Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and police was pursued with a new urgency. Today, an American-run organization - the Multinational Security Transition Command - is led by Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card.

'1. An exaggerated sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).'

' 2. Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love.

' All men dream: but not equally, Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did. I meant to make a new nation, to restore a lost influence, to give twenty millions of Semites the foundations on which to build an inspired dream-palace of their national thoughts. So high an aim called out the inherent nobility of their minds, and made them play a generous part in events: but when we won, it was charged against me that the British petrol royalties in Mesopotamia were become dubious, and French Colonial policy ruined in the Levant.

3. Believes he is "special" and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions)

4. Requires excessive admiration

5. Has a sense of entitlement.

'

6. Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his own ends.

7. Lacks empathy'

8. Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him

9. Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. '

"Beware the leader who bangs the drum of war,
In order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor,
for patriotism is indeed a double edged sword.
It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind.
And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch A
nd the blood boils with hate
And the mind has closed, the leader will have no need of seizing
the rights of the citizenry.
Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded by patriotism,
will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so.
How do I know?
For this is what I have done.
And I am Caesar."

Julius Caesar

But others see a future where politicians are more vapid and risk averse than ever. Matthew Dowd, a longtime strategist for President Bush who is now a partner in a social networking Internet venture, Hot Soup, looks at the YouTube-ization of politics, and sees the death of spontaneity.

"Politicians can't experiment with messages," Mr. Dowd said. "They can't get voter response. Seventy or 80 years ago, a politician could go give a speech in Des Moines and road-test some ideas and then refine it and then test it again in Milwaukee."

He sees a future where candidates must be camera-ready before they hit the road, rather than be a work in progress. "What's happened is that politicians now have to be perfect from Day 1," he said. "It's taken some richness out of the political discourse."

Howard Wolfson, a senior adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is not known for her spontaneity, agrees.

"It is a continuation of a trend in which politicians have to assume they are on live TV all the time," Mr. Wolfson said. "You can't get away with making an offensive or dumb remark and assume it won't get out."