By David Edwards on 2/10/2006, 7:33am PT  

Guest blogged by David Edwards

Crooks and Liars first posted a MSNBC Countdown clip last night which exposed Bush's LA terror speech as a load of bullshit.

MSNBC Security Expert Gerald Posner made some important points that are worth highlighting:

OLBERMANN: Was this a real plot?

POSNER: ...it wasn't a plot that all of the sudden, like in [the Fox TV Series] "24", that they stopped on the eve of the execution taking place. It just happened to unravel and the people were eventually arrested.

...
OLBERMANN: ...why did this speech occur? What was accomplished by it?

POSNER: ...they're really trying to get [support] built up for The Patriot Act. They are trying to pass The Patriot Act. At the same time, I think they are looking at getting this scandal off of them - which is the NSA hearing scandal - something they are having trouble with.

...
OLBERMANN: The White House is also saying that it was able to disclose these plot details today because they no longer had intelligence value. Do you concur with that assessment?

POSNER: Boy, not at all. As a matter of fact, I'll tell you I've seen this game played by Democratic and Republican administrations. The Bush Administration plays hardball with it all the time and when they decide something doesn't have intelligence value they release it for political purposes as they did today. They want to get The Patriot Act through and they want to make sure they quell all this furor taking place over the NSA Domestic Spying routine.

So I'll tell you, they say it has no value at all but everything else... they are still holding on to information from World War II. We can't get documents released on the Kennedy assassination yet here's the President disclosing details on what happened on 911 just a few years ago.

OLBERMANN: We have talked before with deep sadness about the politicizing of counter-terror measures here. You have just put this into a political context. My stomach is queasy as I ask this. In the context of this today and what you have seen, are we far enough removed from that component of the [Orwell] novel "1984" - the part where the government turns a kind of terror faucet on and off to scare the public in to acquiescing to whatever [the government] wants to do?

POSNER: I'm afraid that we are unfortunately at that point. ...the government is also very effective, the Bush Administration, at using terror as a political weapon an making sure it can turn on the "fear spigot" when it wants to and turn it off at other times.


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