Tag Archives: 9/11

International news, military news, national news, political news

Why all this fuss over Gitmo?

February 23, 2016 kanelis2012

I’ll admit that I’m very late in this discussion, but here goes anyway.

Guantanamo Bay — aka Gitmo — has been the subject of a lot of political discussion since it began housing terror suspects after the 9/11 attacks.

I’ve listened to the back-and-forth on all these years and am left to ponder: Why has this effort been so contentious?

President Obama said today he’s going to “change course” and move to close the detention center on the U.S. Navy base in Cuba before he leaves office. He wants to relocate the detainees to the United States.

It’s not that I fear bringing them here. They are being kept under serious lockdown at Gitmo. It’s safe to presume that whatever federal lockup gets them that they will be treated with the same seriousness.

Again, why the consternation over their detention at the military site?

The 9/11 attacks provoked a ferocious initial response from the U.S. military. It embarked on a mission to kill and/or capture as many terrorists as it could. Those who were captured were brought to Gitmo, which existed long before the terrorist attacks on D.C. and New York City.

There reportedly were abuses of prisoners at Gitmo. However, does the location of the alleged abuses matter? What if they had occurred at, say, Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where the military operates another hard-time lockup for military prisoners?

The suggestions by some foes of closing Gitmo that bringing them to the United States somehow puts Americans at increased risk doesn’t wash.

Still, the suggestions that we must close Gitmo because it somehow doesn’t comport with “American values” is equally nonsensical.

The individuals housed at Gitmo are seriously dangerous criminals who’ve been accused of committing acts of war against the United States of America. Whether they’re locked up at the island detention center or somewhere on U.S. soil doesn’t seem to matter one little bit.

Our Navy base is as secure as any of our installations.

Therefore, now that I’m awakened — finally — to this critical issue, someone will have to explain to me why it became so critical in the first place.

national news, political news

So very wrong about Campaign ’16 . . . so far

January 17, 2016 kanelis2012

I’ve said it more times than I can remember, which is that I’m wrong far more frequently than I am right.

My political prognostication skill has been exposed for what it is: shaky . . . at best.

Thus, I am prepared to acknowledge how wrong I’ve been about the current campaign for the presidency. My wrongness tracks along both parties’ trails.

First, the Republicans.

Donald J. Trump’s candidacy has withstood the candidate’s own serious shortcomings as a presidential aspirant, let alone his actual ability to govern.

Never in a zillion years did I think he’d still be in this campaign — let alone leading the GOP gaggle of candidates — after the countless insults he has hurled along the way.

Sen. John McCain’s valor during the Vietnam War doesn’t make him a hero? The ridiculous back/forth with broadcast journalist Megyn Kelly during the first presidential debate? His assertion that he’ll build a wall along our southern border and force Mexico to pay for it? His revealing Sen. Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number? His proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the United States? His assertion that he witnessed “thousands of Muslims cheering” the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11?

OK, I’ve left some of ’em out.

Despite all that, this guy continues to lead the pack.

Anger among GOP voters? That’s what is moving this man forward? If that is the case, then the Republican Party “base” is lost its sanity.

During President Obama’s State of the Union speech, I tried to imagine Donald Trump standing at that lectern offering high-minded, soaring rhetoric designed to lay the groundwork for how he intends to govern. Imagine him as well standing on the steps of the U.S. Capitol next January offering his inaugural speech to the nation as its 45th president.

All I hear coming from this guy are blustering, blistering insults.

Is that really what we want in the next president of the United States? Our head of state? Our commander in chief?

Now for the Democrats.

I once thought Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nomination was a shoo-in. She had it locked up. Nothing, or no one, would derail the Hillary Express on its way to the nomination and to the White House.

Then came Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist with a campaign theme that has resonated with his party’s base. Break up the big banks, de-fang the Wall Street power brokers, spread the wealth around, lift up everyone’s wages and reduce the income gap between the very rich and the rest of the country.

Republicans have made a lot of hay over Benghazi, which has become a form of political shorthand that means: Clinton lied about what she knew about the attack on the U.S. consulate in that Libyan city. There’s a congressional select committee that’s still looking for something to torpedo Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Meanwhile, Sanders — the independent U.S. senator from Vermont — is drawing huge, enthusiastic crowds. He’s ahead by a good bit in New Hampshire, the site of the nation’s first primary vote and is now virtually tied with Clinton in Iowa, which is about to kick off the voting with its caucuses.

Do I believe Hillary Clinton will be denied the nomination? No. But it sure ain’t the coronation I thought it would be when this campaign began.

Let me add, too, that I do not believe Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee. I have some faith — although it’s been hammered — that the Republican Party brass comprises reasonable, intelligent and sane men and women who understand the consequences of nominating someone whose main skill lies in his ability to insult anyone who disagrees with him.

I don’t like acknowledging how wrong I have been.

Still, I feel better now for saying so out loud.

International news, national news

Let’s slam door on immigrants? Uh … let’s not

December 14, 2015 kanelis2012

Larry Kudlow used to believe in immigration reform.

Then he swilled the Kool-Aid being served up by the likes of Donald Trump.

Kudlow, in a National Review column, has posited a profoundly preposterous notion. He wants a nation built by immigrants to slam the door shut — temporarily, he says — on all future immigrants. Anyone coming here in search of a better life need to look elsewhere, he says.

Kudlow believes the nation needs to enact what he called a “wartime lockdown” while we fight the Islamic State and other terrorists.

The term “un-American” only begins to define, in my view, the outrageousness of such a proposal.

“There may be some unfairness to this. But I don’t care,” wrote Kudlow. “Wars breed unfairness, just as they breed collateral damage. We may set back tourism. We may anger Saudi princes whose kids are in American schools. But so be it. We need a wartime footing if we are going to protect the American homeland.”

Saudi princes aren’t the only folks we’d offend. How about offshore business tycoons who want to send their young executives here to set up shop, to do business with American clients? How about folks from all corners of the planet seeking to come here because they read somewhere that America is “the land of opportunity”?

While we’re at it, Mr. Kudlow, let’s be sure to sandblast the inscription off the Statue of Liberty, the one that welcomes the “tired and the poor” to our shores. Hey, if not sandblast it — given that he says his idea is just temporary — we can hang a black shroud over it.

Kudlow has changed his mind on immigration reform because we’re now at war. I agree that we are at war. We’ve been at war since 9/11. Truth be told, we likely should have declared war on terrorists even before that. We’ve known for decades about the existence of terrorists willing to commit unspeakable acts.

The 9/11 attacks acted as the proverbial two-by-four between our eyes. The bad guys got our attention.

Do we shut down our borders, though, to become a nation none of us recognizes while we fight this international scourge? No.

If we are going to continue to be the world’s exceptional nation, then we keep our border open, welcome those who want to come here — while remaining hyper-vigilant in our quest to prevent terrorists from infiltrating us — and we keep taking the fight to the enemy.

International news, military news

Now you tell us, general …

December 4, 2015 kanelis2012

Michael Flynn didn’t disclose much that many Americans already didn’t believe or even know.

The retired Army lieutenant general — who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency — told a German newspaper that the Iraq War was a big mistake and that the Bush administration started it on “sketchy evidence” that Iraq had a hand in the 9/11 attacks.

Who knew?

History, Gen. Flynn said, won’t be kind as the Iraq War legacy is written over time.

Gosh. Do you think?

I guess my question for the general might be: Why didn’t you tell us before now?

Flynn told Der Spiegel, “When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, ‘Where did those bastards come from? Let’s go kill them. Let’s go get them.'”

I don’t think the emotional part of the response should be criticized. We were angry as hell at what happened. that day.

But to assign complicity for the 9/11 attack almost immediately to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein after going after the Taliban and al-Qaeda strongholds in Afghanistan is where the policy came apart rapidly.

Flynn believes that eliminating Saddam Hussein helped strengthen and embolden the Islamic State, the Sunni terrorist organization that has risen to become a fearsome force in the Middle East. He lays responsibility for that squarely on the Bush administration.

Flynn, though, doesn’t spare Barack Obama from blame in this conflict. According to the Huffington Post: “In a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan on Al Jazeera’s ‘Head to Head,’ Flynn took aim at Obama’s publicly stated goals to ‘degrade and ultimately destroy’ the Islamic State, saying that while the administration is effectively degrading the organization, the group cannot be ‘destroyed,'”

He added: “We may cause it to change its name, but we are never going to destroy this organization,” Flynn said. “Destroy means to completely eliminate — he should not have used those words, those were incorrect words to use and he should have been more precise.”

So … the debate goes on.

International news, Uncategorized

Lapel pins, anyone?

November 25, 2015 kanelis2012

Let’s talk for a moment about lapel pins.

They’ve become something of a political statement for politicians. Have been since 9/11. Why bring it up today?

Well, a friend of mine posted something earlier today on Facebook that spoke to a ban on lapel pins by ABC News. The friend of mine who shared the post, I presume, was aghast at the decision.

I think it was an old post. I had heard years ago about broadcast and cable news networks banning the display. The new executives’ view is that journalists shouldn’t advertise their bias in favor of any cause — even if it speaks to their own country. It’s not a big deal. I get what the news execs mean.

But back to the point.

Lapel pins have become part of politicians’ uniform of the day. We see them wearing these little pins depicting U.S. flags. They’re intended to demonstrate the pols’ love of country. They began showing up on politicians’ clothing days after the terrorist attacks.

Journalists aren’t politicians, quite obviously. So, when an employer mandates that journalists — whether they’re print or broadcast journalists — shouldn’t wear the patriotic symbols, they’re trying to walk the straight-and-narrow line right down the middle.

Politicians, though, wear them because they seem to suggest that wearing a lapel pin makes them look more patriotic than those who don’t.

Frankly, the flag symbols on a politician’s jacket doesn’t mean diddly-squat in terms of their patriotism.

When the terrorists flew the airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, politicians all across the land rose up to declare their love of country by wearing the flags on their jacket. Republicans do it. So do Democrats. I like wearing them, too, but not because I have a statement to make. I think they look nice on a jacket.

Let us not get all worked up, though, when we see these social media posts about media policies regarding how journalists should present themselves to the public. The absence of a patriotic lapel pin should not be construed as a lack of love of country.

International news, Uncategorized

G.W. Bush would be laughed at … by GOP base

November 22, 2015 kanelis2012

President George W. Bush sounded like the voice of reason in the days immediately after 9/11.

We aren’t fighting Islam, the president said. We are fighting those who have perverted a great religion, he added. “Islam means ‘peace,'” he cautioned.

The response today among some of the individuals seeking the Republican nomination for president? Let’s keep eyes on all Muslims. Kids. Moms and dads. Old folks. All of ’em!

Let’s mount an aggressive “surveillance” campaign against them, says Donald Trump.

OK, so let’s all live in abject fear, shall we?

To do that we’ll need to stay away from schools, churches, movie theaters, shopping malls … places where violence has erupted in this country already. As near as I can tell, none of those incidents involved foreign terrorists. They all were done by home-grown, corn-fed good old American terrorists, who sought to exact revenge on innocent people.

Would those who comprise today’s Republican base believe the rational views — about the identity of the enemy we are fighting — expressed by the president who took us to war in the first place?

My gut tells me “no.”

International news, national news, political news

What would ‘W’ do?

November 21, 2015 kanelis2012

Mark Shields comprises one-half of a talk show tandem that appears Friday nights on public television.

He and the other half, David Brooks, were spot on in their analysis of the political talk arising from the Paris terrorist attacks one week ago.

Shields, a noted liberal columnist, noted how President Bush responded immediately after al-Qaeda monsters hijacked those four jetliners and inflicted the terrible carnage on U.S. soil on 9/11.

“He went to a mosque,” Shields noted, and said “we are not at war with Islam.”

Shields and Brooks — the more conservative member of the “PBS NewsHour” duo — then both described the white-hot rhetoric we’re hearing today from politicians of both parties as being un-American and unpatriotic.

President Barack Obama has sought to make the same case that his immediate predecessor made. Yet the Republicans who 14 years ago saluted President Bush’s stance contend that the current incumbent, a Democrat, is “soft,” that he isn’t serious about this war against radical Islamic terrorists.

George W. Bush was the first leading politician to declare that the current war against terror must not be seen as a war against a religion. Barack H. Obama is the latest one to say the same thing.

Yet we hear other leading politicians talking about shadowing people of a certain religious faith. One of them, Republican candidate Donald Trump, hasn’t yet told us whether he would intend to track U.S. citizens who also happen to be Muslim, which if that is the case is categorically in defiance of the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of religious liberty.

This is what this current discussion has revealed.

George W. Bush had it exactly right. His political descendants have it exactly wrong.

International news

Rooting out potential danger remains most challenging

November 19, 2015 kanelis2012

Surely you remember this guy, but if not, here’s the answer.

His name was Mohammad Atta. He hailed from Egypt. But in the spring or early summer of 2001 he made his way to the United States. He then received lessons from instructors who taught him how to fly a commercial jetliner.

Atta didn’t receive any instruction on takeoff or landing; just how to control a massive airplane in mid-flight.

Then on Sept. 11, 2001, he and about 18 other men hijacked four jetliners. Atta seized control of one of them and flew it into one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Another jet crashed into the second tower, the third jet crashed into a Pennsylvania field while passengers fought with hijackers. The fourth jetliner crashed into the Pentagon.

You know what happened after that.

What’s the point?

We’ve grown anxious about how we can find terrorists before they commit terrible deeds. Mohammad Atta and his gang of merciless thugs managed 14 years ago to slip undetected through U.S. security systems. Atta received and several of his fellow monsters received flying lessons of the nature I described here — without causing anyone to raise a red flag of alarm!

Making sure we detect evil among us is difficult and tedious work. Do we overreact and ban everyone who seeks to flee repression and bloodshed, which many thousands of them are doing at this moment in Syria?

Yes, we’ve long needed to secure ourselves against those committed to evil deeds. This need pre-dates by a very long time the events of just the past few days, weeks or months.

Indeed, the threat has existed all along.

Still, we have welcomed refugees who seek deliverance from misery. Check out this blog post from Texas Monthly. It speaks to a long-standing Texas tradition.

Why haven’t we panicked long ago?

Mohammad Atta gave us ample reason, didn’t he?

International news

Blair apologizes for Iraq War … more or less

October 27, 2015 kanelis2012

Tony Blair had me going there for a little while.

I thought the former British prime minister actually was going to say he was sorry for joining the parade into war with Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Then he backed away.

Blair tempered his apology by saying it was not a mistake to get rid of Saddam, but then said he regrets following the faulty intelligence that persuaded his country and the United States that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.

You know how it turned out. We invaded Iraq, tossed Saddam out, captured him, tried him, hanged him … all the while scouring Iraq for those WMD.

They weren’t there.

Am I glad Saddam Hussein is gone? Of course I am! The price we paid in thousands of American lives lost, however, was too great.

Blair’s almost-apology, though, does go a lot farther than President Bush, Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ever have done — or likely ever will do.

If only the U.S. brass would acknowledge the mistake. If only it acknowledge the war’s impact on the enabling of the Islamic State, the Sunni militant group that is waging war against the Shia government in Iraq.

That won’t happen. Instead, we hear from Cheney (mostly) about how they were right and how others, namely the Obama administration, have squandered all the progress we made in Iraq.

Well, the Iraq War was a war of choice.

Saddam Hussein was being contained within Iraq. He posed barely a fraction of the threat that he was said to pose.

And, oh yes. Let’s not forget that Saddam Hussein and his Baath party had nothing — zero — to do with the 9/11 attacks, which was another pretext that the Bush administration used to justify our invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

I don’t expect an apology from the Bush administration. I was hoping one might be forthcoming from our allies across The Pond.

It came. Sort of …

Intgernational news, national news, political news

Bush seeks to dodge 9/11 responsibility

October 19, 2015 kanelis2012

CNN’s Jake Tapper might have asked the most incisive and insightful question of the 2016 president campaign.

Over the weekend on “State of the Union,” Tapper asked former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush the following question: “Obviously Al Qaeda was responsible for the terrorist attack of 9/11, but how do you respond to critics who ask, if your brother and his administration bear no responsibility at all, how do you then make the jump that President Obama and Secretary Clinton are responsible for what happened at Benghazi?”

Gov. Bush answered this way: “Well I — the question on Benghazi which, is hopefully we’ll now finally get the truth to, is was the place secure? They had a responsibility, the Department of State, to have proper security. There were calls for security, it looks like they didn’t get it. And how was the response in the aftermath of the attack, was there a chance that these four American lives could have been saved? That’s what the investigation is about, it’s not a political issue. It’s not about the broad policy issue, is were we doing the job of protecting our embassies and our consulates and during the period, those hours after the attack started, could they have been saved?”

Did you follow the former governor’s answer? I had trouble getting the connection.

Bush once was thought to be the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination next year. He’s no longer the front runner, based in part on the stumble-bum answers he’s given to questions regarding whether President Bush — Jeb’s big brother — was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

Gov. Bush said his brother “kept us safe” during his presidency. Hmmm. The loved ones of the 3,000 or so Americans who died on that terrible day might disagree with that view.

The attack occurred nine months into Bush’s presidency. He had been briefed by national security advisers about the threat that al-Qaeda posed. He was warned in advance about the possibility of an attack. The massive intelligence apparatus that we employed did not do its job in protecting the nation.

Is that the president’s responsibility? Well, gosh, it seems that the commander in chief ought to be held accountable. However, Gov. Bush chooses to avoid holding his brother accountable for that breakdown.

As for Tapper’s question, it still requires some clarity in the answer.

If George W. Bush doesn’t deserve blame for the tragedy that befell us on 9/11, how can Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama be held responsible for the Benghazi attack that occurred 11 years later to the day?

Is there a double-standard being applied?

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