US homeland, interests poorly defended

As these words were written, the Sobig.F worm was racing around the Internet, jamming email boxes all over the world. Among those email boxes closed by the overflow of spam were a number of those belonging to the US military. All told, the amount of labor required just to delete and erase the spam has been enormous. The FBI said it was closing in, having found that a computer somewhere in Arizona had taken control of several computers in Canada to launch the attack. No suspect or motive had been identified. US President George W. Bush had said nothing about the attack.

Neither had Bush made any pronouncment, nor had the FBI identified any suspect, in the Blaster computer virus attack of a few days before. (Yes, they made a big deal about a dumb teenager who was caught spreading a copycat program, but no, they didn't get the person or persons who launched the original.) That attack went after the more recent Microsoft operating systems and caused businesses large and small, Internet cafes and individuals all over the world, including in Panama, to call in technicians to repair the damage.

Between the Blaster virus and the Sobig.F worm, the cost to the world economy has been in the billions of dollars and continues to grow.

Another computer problem caused a major power outage across northeastern parts of United States and adjacent areas of Canada. Though the exact nature of and person or persons responsible for that costly disaster remained unknown days later when this editorial was written, George W. Bush went on television before the lights were back on to assure the American people that it wasn’t a terrorist attack. To Americans who think about such things, it must have been anything but reassuring to realize that Bush would rule out terrorism without possessing the facts to honestly arrive at such a conclusion.

Meanwhile, no suspect has been brought to justice for the wave of anthrax letters that killed several people and disrupted the US Postal Service nearly two years ago.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden and his erstwhile Afghan host, Mullah Omar, remain at large and the Al Qaeda network continues to stage deadly attacks around the world.

Meanwhile, the Taliban has regrouped and made new alliances, guerrilla attacks are mounting in frequency and scope, and most of rural Afghanistan is a “no-go area” for US and allied troops.

Meanwhile, the United States is bogged down in a guerrilla war in Iraq that has no end in sight. The invasion of Iraq has alienated most of the people and governments of the world and provided bin Laden with a new battlefront and new recruits from across the Muslim world.

Meanwhile, a CIA whose defects as an information gathering service manifested themselves on September 11, 2001 has been turned into a fall guy for George W. Bush’s lies to the nation and the world about Saddam Hussein’s alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. The attacks of two years ago cried out for the replacement or serious reform of the CIA, but none of that has happened at the president’s father’s old agency.

Let’s be honest about it. George W. Bush took an oath to defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic and he’s doing a poor job of carrying out that duty.

The basic problem is that he puts personal, family and partisan political prejudices, and well connected special economic interests, above the interests of the United States of America.

Now, having thumbed his nose at the United Nations and led America and Great Britain to war for a lie, he’s obnoxiously blaming the UN itself for the devastating bombing at its Baghdad offices and demanding UN military assistance to extricate himself from the jam he has maneuvered into. Yet, in defiance of world opinion, the Bush administration considers the Iraqi oil contracts granted to Vice-President Cheney’s Halliburton corporation to be non-negotiable war spoils.

Surely few Iraqis miss Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, but the Iraq war was about the Bushes’ sense of family pride rather than the freedom or welfare of the Iraqi people. Even though it has forced most major US media corporations into bed with its military campaign and American forces have assassinated several independent journalists, the Bush administration is having an ever-harder time concealing the failure of its colonial war with Iraq.

On the home front, the Bush administration can’t defend America’s vital electronic and postal communications systems, but he maintains lists of dissidents --- people who have nothing to do with Osama bin Laden or attacks on civil aviation --- who are not allowed to travel by air, or who are singled out for special harassment whenever they set foot in an airport. Bush urged the American people on to a wider than necessary global war against a fictitious “Axis of Evil” with hokey rhetoric about how the likes of Osama bin Laden hate America because of its freedom, but at the same time he has the FBI monitoring what Americans read and people are being arrested and held incommunicado, without the right to know what the charges or evidence against them might be.

Americans find themselves with less security, fewer freedoms and fewer friends abroad under the Bush administration. Surely that’s something that the US electorate ought to consider next year.

editorial

The US homeland and American interests are poorly defended

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