Thank God Bush Was Lazy

[babylonsister]

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2009/7/25/84811/8899

Thank God Bush Was Lazy

by Steven D
Sat Jul 25th, 2009 at 08:48:11 AM EST


Imagine for a moment Bush had followed through on everything his <puppet master Cheney> advisers had recommended he do to fight the evildoers in the "War on Terror." We might have seen widespread use of US troops patrolling US cities, for just one example:

Some of the advisers to President George W. Bush, including Vice President Dick Cheney, argued that a president had the power to use the military on domestic soil to sweep up the terrorism suspects, who came to be known as the Lackawanna Six, and declare them enemy combatants.

Mr. Bush ultimately decided against the proposal to use military force.

A decision to dispatch troops into the streets to make arrests has few precedents in American history, as both the Constitution and subsequent laws restrict the military from being used to conduct domestic raids and seize property. <...>

In the discussions, Mr. Cheney and others cited an Oct. 23, 2001, memorandum from the Justice Department that, using a broad interpretation of presidential authority, argued that the domestic use of the military against Al Qaeda would be legal because it served a national security, rather than a law enforcement, purpose. <...>

The memorandum — written by the lawyers John C. Yoo and Robert J. Delahunty — was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked the department about a president’s authority to use the military to combat terrorist activities in the United States.

If you don't remember the horrific dangers posed by the Lackawanna 6 you're not alone. Here's brief primer on who they were and how advanced their nefarious scheme had gone and the grave threat they posed:

For {Sahim Alwan, a 29-year-old from upstate New York} traveling to Afghanistan with a handful of his friends from the steel town of Lackawanna, was more of a thrill ride than a spiritual journey. Speaking to FBI investigators later, he likened his brush with jihadism to a teenager's decision to steal a car: He knew he shouldn't, but a youthful rush made him do it anyway. Alwan was one of the group of suspected terrorists now known as the Lackawanna Six, a handful of Arab American 20-somethings who went to an al-Qaeda camp outside the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in the spring of 2001 and returned to the United States just months before 9/11. Their arrests in September 2002 gave shape to American fears of post-9/11 homegrown terrorism. Headlines called them the enemy within, and U.S. authorities called them an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.

But after I spent three years researching the case -- interviewing family members and law enforcement officials and seeing public and internal legal documents -- what emerged was something much more nuanced and complicated: a story about how young Muslims reared in the United States can be swept up in the undertow of international jihad, and about just how clumsy preemptive justice has become in the age of sacred terror. <...>

But for the Lackawanna Six, the flirtation with Osama bin Laden's vision of life was fleeting. We often forget that, unlike their European counterparts, they never took the last step and traveled the short distance from al-Qaeda trainee to bona fide religious warrior.

At the time of their arrest in September 2002, none of the Lackawanna Six appeared to be actively plotting to attack anything. None of them had signed the true jihadist's pledge of loyalty to bin Laden. And none of them seemed eager to put what they had learned at the training camp to use. For some reason, they traveled to the brink of radicalization but didn't go over it. <..>

{Their Al Qaeda recruiter} Derwish assumed that after spending time at al-Farooq camp, rubbing shoulders with dedicated jihadists determined to change history, the Lackawanna Six would find it easy to leave their aimless lives in upstate New York. But in the end, the young men could hardly wait to get back home. They faked injuries and left the camps early. Nearly all the men returned to the United States hoping that they could put their brush with Islamic extremism behind them.

In other words, people who had no plans to commit any acts of terrorism were the excuse Cheney attempted to use to convince his Commander in Chief that we ought to employ the military in the streets, and damn that quaint document known as the US Constitution. (That last story is from The Washington Post, by the way, Freddy Hiatt's romper room for people like George Will, Charles Krauthammer and at one time, Robert Novak, plus and any neoconservative guest columnist you can shake a stick at such as Dick's baby girl Liz Cheney, so it's hardly an unfriendly media source). So, because of the media drumbeat about the dangers of these minor and frankly insignificant members of an upstate New York Yemeni community, Cheney and others tried to bamboozle Bush and the rest of the country into authorizing something that no President had done since the Civil War -- use US soldiers to capture "enemy combatants" on US soil. Lincoln might be forgiven that excess, considering the South was in open rebellion and fielded armies in the field capable of invading the Northern states (which they did on several occasions). Cheney on the other hand saw these inept young men as an excuse to eliminate the Fourth Amendment whenever the President deemed it necessary. Spying on US citizens using the resources of the NSA to sweep up information on our financial, medical and online transactions and communications wasn't enough for this Dick. Truly, this was an attempt at an executive branch power grab of monumental proportions.

Good thing Cheney never sent his CIA "death squads" after Bush. Imagine what a President Cheney would have done had he not been hindered by such a lazy faux cowboy like Dubya?