Is our government making us safer?

You know the answer.

Although the U.S. government repeatedly warns its citizens of imminent terrorist attacks and takes draconian measures-both at home and abroad-in the name of “national security,” it really does not have many incentives to actually make those citizens safer. According to an anonymous active intelligence official, who has almost two decades of experience in the fields of terrorism, militant Islam, and South Asia and who is the author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror, “One of the greatest dangers for Americans in deciding how to confront the Islamist threat lies in continuing to believe—at the urging of senior U.S. leaders—that Muslims hate and attack us for what we are and think, rather than for what we do.” Yet President Bush continues to tell the American public that the terrorists “hate us for our freedoms.” The president's statements fly in the face of the opinions of experts on Osama bin Laden's motivations—such as the aforementioned author and Peter Bergen, one of the few Western reporters who have interviewed the head of al Qaeda. President Bush's rhetoric also contradicts poll after poll in Islamic countries (and much of the world), which indicate that those populations don't hate U.S. culture, freedoms, wealth, or technology, but U.S. foreign policy. So why does the president keep making such statements?

  Antiwar article

And about those troop deployments....the Progress Report offers this:

The New York Times writes, "the troop redeployment plan announced yesterday by President Bush makes little long-term strategic sense." It takes time to deploy troops from the United States and, as former Defense Secretary Les Aspin once said (which was quoted in the 2/26/03 St. Louis Post Dispatch), "The pros all say that you have to get there in the first few hours, because if you lose the ground, it's hard to get it back." John White, former deputy secretary of defense, says, "I don't understand how we gain strategic ability to respond by moving people to the U.S., further away from the likely trouble spots…I don't get it." The Washington Post concurs: "The conflicts of the past decade have been in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq; Africa is of increasing concern; none of these is closer to Kansas than to Germany."

You'll "get it" when you start thinking about it. This administration is not interested in the actual security of this country.

Try this on for size:

Last week, the administration deployed its FDA chairman to claim, without any proof, that reimported medicines are a top al Qaeda target.

...[Chairman Lester] Crawford said the possibility of such an attack was the most serious of his concerns about the increase in states and municipalities trying to import drugs from Canada to save money.

How obvious can you get?

And if you're buying that one, go purchase a lot of plastic and duct tape.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.