MORE T+G John Birch Garbage

Worcester Telegram and Gazette
Urgency on Security 4Jan 10
President must move toward action

After three days of silence following the attempted bombing of Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day, President Obama last week found plenty to say on aviation security, calling for a thorough investigation into the “systemic failure” and vowing better coordination of intelligence and detection of individuals who may pose a threat. 

We believe the president is sounding the right notes, but Americans should be concerned by the lack of urgency on aviation safety his administration had exhibited until this incident, as well as the rising political infighting on this front. 

Mr. Obama did not nominate former FBI special agent Errol Southers as head of the Transportation Security Administration until September, some 243 days after taking office. Democrats complain that nomination is being held up by Republicans concerned Mr. Southers might permit unionization of TSA workers. 

Well, TSA workers play a vital role in keeping our skies safe, and should not have the right to strike, for example. In exchange for a pledge from the president and his nominee that TSA workers will not be given such a right, Republicans should allow a hearing for Mr. Southers. 

Better screening equipment is also needed. Republicans have opposed bills calling for spending on such equipment, but Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut moved $4.5 million from airport security funding to provide assistant grants to firefighters. The politicking must stop. 

Finally, the two sides continue to wrangle over the profiling of airline passengers. Civil libertarians worry about discrimination, yet all evidence suggests the threat is almost entirely one posed by Middle Eastern or African men professing radical Islamic beliefs. 

The reality is that America’s enemies will not desist from their agenda of terror while political points are scored and professors and pundits explore the niceties of political correctness. America needs bright, proactive people in charge of its security apparatus, the best equipment money can buy, and a willingness to engage in the kind of profiling most likely to identify, isolate and stop the people and organizations who mean us harm. 

Mr. Obama should use his rhetorical powers and political muscle to move Congress beyond words to action, now




The editorial board is out there
Systemic Failure
They open by saying there was “Systemic Failure”, I have to agree totally with that assessment of the Bush Administration and Republican fear mongering in the handling of 9/11 and it’s aftermath. The “Underwear Bomber” was a young and impressionable twelve year old at the time of 9/11 Since that time we have been bombarded with right wing claims of impending doom at the hands of approximately 1000 terrorist, who have date have cost us well over a trillion dollars and more lives than and suffering than occurred on 9/11. One of our costliest failures was the use of torture which the Telegram & Gazette editorial board and their Fox ringmasters along with useful idiot like Scott Brown approve of torture. We Americans who don’t agree must be labeled one of them. Systemic Failure” of Obama and the Democratic Party no matter what the cost to the American people is all these people care about..

Lack of urgency
“We believe the president is sounding the right notes, but Americans should be concerned by the lack of urgency.” When the Shoe Bomber was arrested bush had no sense of urgency and there was no outcry because the media was afraid of appearing unpatriotic. Now one gets a sense that no matter what Obama does the Telegram and Gazette and other right wing nut jobs are going to be all over him. They don’t explain why he has to hurry just that it was some sort of emergency. I think they want to come out from under their beds. It’s not the American people who are giving in to fear, rather it is editorial boards at news outlets like the Telegram and Gazette and Fox News who sell it to us every chance they get. They do it for the perceived political gain of the Republican party but more so for the cause of the extreme right. The Telegram and Gazette’s leadership was part of the original John Birch Society founder Robert W. Stoddard, who loaded his editorial board with John Birchers and the legacy continues. The tried tactics of the past lives on in their use old John Birch fear tactics which included fear monger and red baiting.

Better screening equipment is also needed.
Well that makes sense when you realize people like former Homeland Security Department “Tsar” Micheal Chertoff represents the company that makes it.

Republicans have opposed bills calling for spending on such equipment, but Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut moved $4.5 million from airport security funding to provide assistant grants to firefighters.
With the Telegram and Gazette it’s not what they report so much as what they leave out in their creation of half truths. This of course is one of their tried and true John Birch Society ploys. What Senator Dodd moved for the firefighters was 1/10th of 1% of the total Homeland security budget. Sure $4.5 Million sounds like a lot of money but not when it’s compared to $ 42 Billion
The politicking must stop.
So they say, but look what pops in the same day


GOP Senate candidate defends waterboarding Brown attacks Coakley over civilian criminal terrorist trials
 —  State Sen. Scott P. Brown, GOP candidate in the special U.S. Senate election, yesterday defended the controversial and now banned use of waterboarding for terrorist suspects, and said he wants the suspect in the attempted Christmas bombing on a Detroit-bound airliner turned over to the military for interrogation. 

President Barack Obama banned the use of waterboarding of terrorist suspects by the military a year ago, and in April said he has decided the technique that simulates drowning is a form of torture. 

Mr. Brown, R-Wrentham, insisted Mr. Obama was wrong not to hand the Christmas bombing suspect over to the military. “I think he made a mistake by not turning him over and treating him as an enemy combatant,” Mr. Brown said. 

“Waterboarding is an enhanced interrogating technique. We need to interrogate by all legal means,” Mr. Brown said. 

“We are at war. When somebody comes over and tries to kill American citizens and says he is a member of al-Qaida, he is not a criminal. He is an enemy combatant,” Mr. Brown said. “We have to draw that line and make sure we make that distinction.” 

His comments came as Mr. Brown criticized Attorney General Martha Coakley, his Democratic opponent in the Senate race, saying she has supported providing terrorist suspects with criminal trials in civilian courts. 

Ms. Coakley said, however, that she has not urged that the Christmas bombing suspect, 23-year old Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, be tried in civilian courts or be prosecuted in a military tribunal. She said that decision is up to the U.S. Attorney General. 

She pointed to the prosecution of attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, as an example of a successful prosecution of a terrorist bomber in nonmilitary courts. 

Mr. Reid, an al-Qaida terrorist, tried to blow up an international flight to Miami in 2002 with explosives hidden in his shoes. He was later convicted in federal court in Boston and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He is serving his sentence in a super maximum security prison in Colorado. 

“We are very familiar here in Massachusetts with the shoe bomber Richard Reid. He was treated under the Bush administration as a civilian. He was tried very effectively. That was a very effective use of all of the authority we have to hold somebody accountable,” Ms. Coakley said. 

In the case of the attempted Christmas bombing, she said, “This case is still unfolding. There are lots we don’t know about it yet, but we certainly have a precedent for doing that type of prosecution and doing it very well right here in Massachusetts,” she said. 

Mr. Brown, a lieutenant colonel in the Army National Guard and a lawyer, insisted Ms. Coakley has supported civilian trials for some terrorist suspects in the past. 

“She is in favor and has been very public about providing constitutional rights to enemy combatants, treating them almost like ordinary criminals, allowing them to go through our court systems at the taxpayer’s expense and with taxpayer attorneys,” Mr. Brown said. 

“They should get attorneys, but military attorneys, and they should go to facilities like Guantanamo Bay and be interrogated,” Mr. Brown said, to find out if there are more terrorist plots. He added that he does not support torture and that, “The U.S. doesn’t torture.” 

Mr. Brown also said that Mr. Obama had conducted a review of interrogation techniques used by the military “and found them to be proper.” Mr. Obama, however, has banned waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques authorized by the Bush administration after 9-11. He said in April he believed waterboarding is torture. 

Mr. Brown said while the Christmas bombing suspect was not turned over to the military immediately upon arrest, he believes he should be now. “Right now he’s lawyered up. I’d still turn him over and treat him as an enemy combatant,” Mr. Brown said. 

Ms. Coakley said as far as the Christmas bombing suspect goes, the Department of Justice will make a decision on complicated issues over how to prosecute and that neither she nor Mr. Brown “have all the facts.” 

On waterboarding, Ms. Coakley, who spoke at a press conference where she received an endorsement from the Veterans & Military Families for Progress, did not offer a definitive answer on whether waterboarding constitutes torture or should be used on terrorist suspects. “I’m not getting into a discussion of waterboarding today,” Ms. Coakley said. 

“My question is, ‘Is waterboarding effective and is waterboarding something that works to get information and to make people safe and there is no evidence that it is,’ ” she said. 







GOP Senate candidate defends waterboarding Brown attacks Coakley over civilian criminal terrorist trials

One would get the impression from headline the Telegram and Gazette are neutral on this issue. That would be a mistake. Just two months ago the Telegram and Gazette gave a rosewood pen award to a letter writer who approved of out and out torture.
These are the same people who have cheered the Bush administration policies. They too like the citizens of Nazi Germany have blood on their hands. If for no other reason than because their active recruitment of people like the Underwear Bomber . Scott Brown is their man on the inside. he can be linked to the John Birch Society and other like minded groups. Brown keeps his involvement with the right wing nuts semi- private. To those various “Right wing nut” people at the Telegram and Gazette he is of course now according to them and their “bully pulpit” the man who will save the nation as the telegram and Gazette writes:

Scott P. Brown says: if he wins the Republican primary next week and prevails in the special U.S. Senate election in January, the state will have a powerful new kind of representation in Washington, and he would provide a key vote in the Senate to derail some of the Democrats’ biggest legislative plans.

In today’s piece Brown naturally played to the Cheney‘s dictates, and the people of this state should question whether or not they want a Dick Cheney Stooge as their next Senator. Brown wants the Underwear Bomber waterboarded for what I don’t know. How much information do they suppose the POW from Idaho can give to the Taliban? Don’t they realize the inverse is also true? Brown himself a colonel knows nothing that could be useful to our enemies.
Brown a lawyer by profession claims waterboarding is an enhanced technique and not torture.
All I can say is we have lost the moral high ground, and the war because of it. Brown again repeated the Darth Cheney claim that we are at war. He’s right we are busy at two of Cheney’s wars we shouldn’t be fighting. We could have saved most of the trillion dollars we’ve wasted so far by continuing the Clinton police policy along with covert operations to get to the source of our troubles instead of recruiting more people willing to die in an anti American terror campaign. Had the Underwear Bomber succeeded the blood of his victims would have fallen squarely on the shoulders of people like Scott Brown and others who supported torture and these two stupid wars.
Just last Sunday Kit Bond stated interrogation photo’s shouldn’t be released to the public because they would serve to be recruiting posters for al Qaeda. Isn’t that nice I don’t know if they’re afraid of the World Court, because the Muslim community already knows we are no better than the Nazi’s we once despised.

Brown flaunts his National Guard credentials as if he is a veteran. I detest people who have never been in combat but who pretend they are veterans who should be accorded the same status of combat veterans. In reality he is a double dipping glorified welfare recipient with a law degree,who gets money from both the National Guard and from the State for his practically no record job. His only claim to fame in state government is he got an award for helping to write the oft criticized sex offender laws that Martha Coakley is mandated to uphold. The right of course attacks Martha Coakley for defending the law she is mandated to uphold but nothing is said about the writer of the law.
This divisiveness is the end result of Karl Rove’s divide and conquer strategy to get Bush elected. It seems to be taking us as a nation down the ‘Highway to Hell.”