Loose Change: really stupid

* scott:

"Boy, those guys that made Loose Change are really stupid. Really stupid.

The assholes from Popular Mechanics made fools of them today on Democracy Now!

Really stupid."

* dreyfuss:

"The problem is, almost everything that President Bush understands about his own war on terrorism is wrong. According to nearly a dozen former high-ranking officials who have been on the front lines of the administration's counterterrorism effort, the president is not only fighting the wrong war -- he is fighting it in a way that has actually made the threat worse. The war on terrorism, they say, has been mismanaged and misdirected almost from the start, in no small part because the president simply does not understand the nature of the enemy he is fighting.

"I hate the term 'global war on terrorism,' " says John O. Brennan, a CIA veteran who served as the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center, the primary organization set up by Bush to analyze all intelligence about terrorism and coordinate strategic operational planning. "I hate the tough talk, you know, the 'we're gonna kill these guys' stuff."
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According to Brian Jenkins, who has spent more than thirty years studying terrorism at the RAND Corporation, Al Qaeda now totals fewer than 500 members, including its leaders and foot soldiers. At the top -- "that is, bin Laden and the boys" -- the organization is much smaller. "There is a core of only tens to scores of individuals involved in managing this thing," Jenkins says.
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Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired Marine colonel who served as Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department, also ridicules the president's notion that the enemy is a global force made up of "Islamic fascists" who can be defeated as the Nazis were by military force. "I don't think there's a soul in the administration, except for Vice President Dick Cheney, who believes that crap about 'Islamofascism,' " he says."

* clemons:

"Cheney didn't think the unthinkable -- he did the predictable. He sorted out who he thought were the good guys and the bad guys -- lumped the bad guys together in ways they should not have been -- and focused American military power recklessly at the wrong targets connected to 9/11, thus puncturing America's mystique in the world and exposing before our allies and our foes both our military and financial limits.

Sensing American weakness, our allies are counting on America less and our foes are advancing their agendas. That is what Cheney's predictable behavior and lack of strategy has done to undermine American interests and our basic security.

The "Unthinkable" (and the smarter strategy) would have been Cheney crafting a grand bargain with Iran after the Iranians had helped the U.S. temporarily stabilize post-Taliban Afghanistan.
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If only Cheney had spent more time on the "unthinkable" -- and putting his zealotry behind thinking through every option, every possibility, every complex strategic cost and opportunity -- America would not be on the brink of a fundamental loss in international stature and military capacity.

Someone please get Cheney on the line. The Vice President definitely needs to take some courses on "thinking the unthinkable.""

* pincus:

"The CIA learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, according to a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Although President Bush and other senior administration officials were at that time regularly linking Hussein to al-Qaeda, the CIA's highly sensitive intelligence supporting the contrary view was apparently not passed on to the White House or senior Bush policymakers.
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According to the three Republicans, the CIA said it did not disseminate the intelligence about the lack of a Hussein-bin Laden connection because "it did not provide anything new.""