The Coward's Boast

Two years ago this week, President George Bush stood surrounded by the highest levels of technical and human security and challenged Al Qaeda and Iraq's growing insurgency to "bring them on."

Today, once again terrorists, left at large by Bush's failure to effectively mount the appropriate response to the challenge of Islamist terrorism and by Bush's decisions to leave Afganistan to its own devices while turning Iraq into Al Queda's dream training grounds, the terrorists brought it on once again. In London, dozens are dead and hundreds wounded by terrorists who have little fear of the man who so brazenly challenged them in 2003.

Just weeks after the 9/11 attacks President Bush told the world,

"…it may take a year or two" to track down Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network in Afghanistan, but asserted that after a five-day aerial bombardment, "we've got them on the run."

At a prime-time news conference at the White House, Bush said he did not know whether bin Laden was dead or alive. "I want him brought to justice."

Well, after attacks in Bali, Madrid and London, Al Queda still has the power to kill innocent people and spread chaos and terror.

President Bush and his crew have had a different agenda since bin Laden and his killers handed Bush the opportunity to pretend to be a "war president" on 9/11. Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer gives us his take on how Bush and Company have siezed that opportunity,

From the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Bush has systematically sought to parlay the public's shock over a singular, if devastating, terrorist assault by a small coterie of extremists into what amounted to a call for World War III against a supposed "axis of evil..."

In the process, Bush has justified an enormous military buildup, spent tens of billions of dollars in Iraq, reorganized the federal government, driven the nation's budget far into the red and assaulted the civil liberties of Americans and people around the world, all without bothering to seriously examine the origins of the 9/11 attacks or compose a coherent strategy to prevent similar ones in the future. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden remains at large, as do his financial and political backers in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

2004 was a year that saw "Terror incidents 'skyrocket'" according to Reuters,

NCTC (National Counterterrorism Center) interim director John Brennan said the agency had broadened its definition of terrorism after concluding the narrower criteria did not accurately depict the scope of what he called a growing and devastating world problem (emphasis added).

Today, amid the carnage he has done nothing to stop and much to enable, President Bush again resorted to hollow words,

“It is the resolve of all the leaders in the room that we will not yield to the killers. We will find them and bring them to justice.”

Rightttttt.............