Painfully aware are we that President Bill Clinton serves as the blame-game catch-all from the vast swath of 'personal responsibility' Republicans. And on no issue is that more accurately the case than the fight against terrorism.

So it was particularly amusing that Vice President Cheney would promote a line of thought that would vindicate the entire Clinton Administration from any and all accusations put forth by the current Neoclown cabal regarding said fight.

Cheney said:

"'sound policy decisions' by the Bush administration were the reason the United States had not been attacked by terrorists" since 2001. Cheney's "claim of credit for the absence of attacks, a frequent theme in his recent speeches, contrasts sharply with criticism by Democrats and others who charge the administration has left the U.S. more vulnerable to terrorism by focusing on the war in Iraq."

(Let's pretend that his logic is not flawed and proceed...)

Using 'Cheney logic', Republicans should be lavishing Bill Clinton with praise since 'sound policy decisions' by the Clinton administration were clearly the reason the United States had not been attacked by terrorists since 1993 on through the rest of his two-terms in office - a LONGER period free of international terrorist attacks on US soil than that currently overseen by Bush.

So, on behalf of Bill Clinton, I thank you for defending the last duly elected leader of the free world from your lesser minions.

Perhaps there is some sense in that big fat head of yours.

AFP/File/Nicholas Asfouri

A crime of immense proportions that will now see more blowback. That is, unless people of conscience stand up to this terrorism on all sides, and soon.

Doctors Without Borders In Southern Lebanon

July 25, 2006

Christopher Stokes, MSF Director of Operations:

Relief materials needed in south Lebanon, but supplying is almost impossible

Listen to full report [mp3 - Running time 3:06]

Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Director of Operations, Christopher Stokes, describes over the phone from Beirut what he has seen traveling to the south of Lebanon and back.

The diary below was originally posted earlier today on my blog the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

In July 1947, George F. Kennan published an article in the quarterly edition of Foreign Affairs entitled "Sources of Soviet Conduct." Kennan originally drafted the article as a paper for Defense Secretary James Forrestal. When he submitted it to Foreign Affairs, Kennan used the moniker "Mr. X." The piece was known as "containment" and is credited with guiding American foreign policy under presidents of both parties during the cold war.

The strangest thing happened while I was on BART (the San Francisco commuter train) on Friday. The girl standing next to me, who had been complaining loudly about the over-crowded train, spit at the people standing on the platform right before the door closed. Her friends immediately started doing a victory dance, singing "Boo-boo-be-doo - we spit on you!"

The fact that all these kids immediately knew how to celebrate the spitting on random commuters made me wonder if this is part of an evolving subculture. It's probably not that far a leap from spitting to the pyrotechnic subculture. Random violence seems to be bubbling up from the ground. Yet because it's happening in a familiar setting, we're striving for labels other than "terrorism". Our children aren't terrorists. They're just confused by hormones. Only "other people" are terrorists.

Yesterday, while I was standing in line in the post office, people who had never previously met were arguing passionately about the slaughter in Lebanon. It reminded me of 9/11, except the conversation had flipped over somehow. On 9/11, the Muslim family that owns the corner grocery was practicing community diplomacy, handing out free sodas and assuring nervous neighbors that terrorism wasn't part of their culture. Yesterday, non-Muslims were promising their Muslim neighbors that the U.S. doesn't support the murder of civilians.    

Not too long ago, I discussed the fall of Mogadishu as another sign that Islamic extremists are winning and that the United States under Bush has failed to successfully combat al-Qaeda and it's related groups. One such diary on Political Cortex got attention from BBC Radio, which had me on one of their live call-in shows.

Some responses to my fears that Bush's failures are enabling a new, extremist Caliphate in the Muslim world criticized me for being too quick to judge Islam harshly. I take such criticism to heart because my beef is with religious extremists of all kinds and those fools, like Bush, who aid and abet their oppressive, terrorist agendas. I have no beef with any religion in particular or religion in general. It is extremism and terrorism that I object to.

Now that Gen. Hayden has been confirmed as the next CIA director, let's take a look into our future.

We can assume the NSA's version of TIA will find a new home at the CIA.  For the sake of argument, let's assume everyone involved in this program is committed to the rule of law and seriously interested in protecting America from threats.

Even if that is all true, we still have a problem.  How do you demonstrate the program's value to the people who pay for it without sharing classified information?  It turns out, Ronald Reagan had a solution to that sort of problem; he called it "trust but verify."   We can apply that approach to solve this impasse while meeting the legitimate needs of all the stakeholders.  Here's the proposed test:

Not long ago I wrote about the Bush Administration's renaming the War on Terrorism as the "Long War"...or, as I prefer to dub it, the "Forever War" after Joseph Haldeman's science fiction classic. The fact is that Bush has done practically NOTHING to actually fight al-Qaeda since he abandoned the fight in Tora Bora so he could invade Iraq. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda regroups worldwide, reasserting itself in Pakistan and Afghanistan, spreading to Iraq, and further establishing itself in Somalia.

In winning the debate over Iran, there is only one talking point you need to remember: Iran is not building any nukes. All of the scientific evidence points to this fact. Iran does not have the capacity to make centrifuges for its own reactor, let alone make weapons-grade uranium.

Donald Rumsfeld talked about the role of the Bush administration in history in his op-ed yesterday. But given the fact that Iraq had no WMD's, given the fact that there is no crisis in Social Security, and given the fact that Iran is not building any nukes, the Bush administration will go down in history as the administration that cried wolf.

The UN has been trying, in vain to arrive at a definition for terrorism that would be acceptable to its members.  Different definitions vary the number of victims of terror over the past 50 years from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, and while I would think neither number is close to correct, it raises the very pertinent issue of "what is terrorism?"  But while debating whether to make the definition so narrow as to rule out any resistance against occupation or to make the definition so wide as to include all killings of civilians, we lose site of the fact that terrorism itself has changed, that it has now become a psychological weapon.  And since this fact changes how you have to fight terrorism, this needs to be focused on by the UN.

The Bush administration is continuing their sick and pathetic policy of torturing people in Iraq when they think that all the lights and cameras are off. This is the subject of a new report out of Iraq from Amnesty International. The Bush administration would like you to think that the Abu Girhab photos were just a matter of a few frat boys gotten out of control. But this new report shows that the Bush administration's torture plans are far broader than that. In their twisted logic, they thought that as soon as all the lights and cameras were off, they could go right back to doing whatever they wanted to.

Rummy, Rummy.  I can't blame you. Really. You tried to resign....twice.

Although he labeled the Islamic republic of Iran as the main sponsor of terrorism, Rumsfeld said Islamic terrorists had made Iraq the "central front in their war against the civilized world."

Rumsfeld said they were using Iraq as a training and recruiting ground, in the same way as they operated in Afghanistan when the Taliban were in charge.

But he vehemently rejected any suggestion that Iraq had been a catalyst for a global wave of terrorist acts.

"Any argument that Iraq might have been a trigger is inconsistent with the facts," he said, listing a number of terrorist acts that took place even before September 11, 2001.

"Inconsistent with the facts." Like this fact!  After our invasion of Iraq in 2003, terrorism increased exponentially, prompting the government to stop publishing its survey of terrorist attacks:

WASHINGTON - The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

For more info on the increase of terrorism since our invasion of Iraq, click here.  Maybe Rummy should try resigning again, third time's a charm and all.

So, Osama made another speech and stated the obvious: He's still alive and still a threat because Bush got us all involved with this distraction in Iraq which has done more for Al Qaeda than it's done for us. And the GOP reaction, of course, is to show how serious they are about terrorism by attacking Michael Moore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean and other Democrats or liberals.

A common talking point pushed by the GOP (and a few in our own party, cough...Hillary...cough) is that if we leave Iraq, the terrorists will win.

Here's Dick Cheney, earlier today:

On this both Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree: The only way the terrorists could win is if we lose our nerve and abandon our mission...I realize some have advocated a sudden withdrawal of our forces. This would be unwise in the extreme -- a victory for terrorists, bad for the Iraqi people and bad for the United States...

Is there any evidence to prove that if we left Iraq, the terrorists would take over?