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Home Front: WoT
What We Got Right in the War on Terror
2011-08-12
By Abe Greenwald
A taste, about the response to the killing of Osama bin Laden:
It is telling that much of the discussion concerned the nation's feelings. To be sure, the emotional response to 9/11 has helped define the past decade--thousands dead who were loved by tens or hundreds of thousands in turn, a sense of national vulnerability to foreign attack entirely new for Americans to grapple with, and the immortal bravery of the passengers and crew of United flight 93. Perhaps we could have done without the psychobabble, but the fact that we discussed the killing of Bin Laden as a means of providing a national catharsis is evidence of a notable American achievement. We could afford to concentrate on the state of our psyches--rather than the fear of instant reprisal--because American policies and actions had kept the homeland safe from attack for a decade.

Over the course of the 10 years, American authorities foiled more than two dozen al-Qaeda plots.
That we know about, anyway...
Those averted tragedies were not foremost on the minds of revelers who gathered to celebrate Bin Laden's demise on May 1 at Ground Zero, Times Square, and in front of the White House. But if a mere few of the plots had materialized, those spaces might not even have been open to public assembly.
Thank you to all those who worked quietly to ensure we reached this stage: the end, perhaps, of the beginning. Those who know more say there is no guarantee how it will end, but I have faith in them, and in us, that we will reach the tipping point, and it will tip in the right direction.
Posted by:

#6  "Sorry about that previous post. It was not meant for here."

Maybe not, 'moose, but it's still very interesting. I don't think I'm read that anywhere before, particularly the CIA part.

Be interesting if some enterprising reporter would ask Bambi about his mother's/grandmothers CIA collaboration connections.
Posted by: Barbara   2011-08-12 19:15  

#5  Taking the combat to Iraq meant the bad guys died there instead of here and ended up shitting in their own back yard. Had we not done so, they might have overwhelmed the resources of those protecting us. We wedre more lucky than good as far as I can tell. And it is more likely we would have had first stringers attacking us instead of the jv. We made mistakes, to be sure, but we got some things right, not just dronezapping. That is Greenwald's point.
Posted by: Nimble Spemble   2011-08-12 17:43  

#4  "American policies and actions had kept the homeland safe from attack for a decade."

...except for the Beltway Sniper Attacks and the Ft Hood Massacre. The Underwear Bomber and the Times Square Bomber failed to kill anyone because their bombs were defective.

The good guys have to succeed every time, the islamofascists just once. Time and the laws of probability are not on our side. Playing defense while not strongly disincentivizing state sponsorship of terror is ultimately a losing strategy,
Posted by: Photer White8442   2011-08-12 17:32  

#3  What We Got Right in the War on Terror?

Dronezapping and not much else.
Posted by: phil_b   2011-08-12 17:20  

#2  Sorry about that previous post. It was not meant for here.
Posted by: Anonymoose   2011-08-12 10:48  

#1  I've noted in past that Obama's mother's history demonstrates that she was a wholly owned property of the CIA, in that almost every activity, from her education to employment, as seen on her Wiki bio, was either funded by, purposed by, or affiliated with CIA fronts and subcontractors.

However, now it comes to light that his maternal grandparents also had serious CIA connections.

"Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts.

"In that capacity, she must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money through that bank to its "gray" and "black" activities throughout Asia.

"Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company, Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong, some of whose officers were serving CIA officers.

"The CIA intervened to halt an audit of questionable transfers from BBRD&W in 1983."

"Obama's grandfather is typically characterized as an ordinary furniture salesman, but a photo taken of him in the early 1950s, shows him standing next to Obama's at the time young mother, wearing the insignia of Beirut's elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour.

"Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers.

"The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham's daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA."
Posted by: Anonymoose   2011-08-12 10:46  

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