By now, you really should feel completely safe when it comes to national security. Don't worry, Republicans are on the job! They are using a great strategy that has worked really well in the past: the Flypaper Strategy. Most of you are familiar with the idea -- we draw the bad guys out and then pounce on them. What most don't know is how thoroughly the Republicans are pursuing the strategy. Take a look...
Starting at the top, we're going after
Zarqawi:
[Former US spy Mike Scheuer] claims that a July 2002 plan to destroy [Zarqawi's training camp] lapsed because "it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers".
"Mr Bush had Zarqawi in his sights almost every day for a year before the invasion of Iraq and he didn't shoot because they were wining and dining the French in an effort to get them to assist us in the invasion of Iraq," he told Four Corners.
"Almost every day we sent a package to the White House that had overhead imagery of the house he was staying in. It was a terrorist training camp . . . experimenting with ricin and anthrax . . . any collateral damage there would have been terrorists."
Scheuer worked in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and was headed up its Osama bin Laden unit. He is also the anonymous author of "Imperial Hubris," a book which exposes the administration's deception leading up to the Iraq War.
...
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
Some might have you think that not getting Zarqawi during that year was a bad move that cost American lives later on. What such people don't realize is that terrorist organizations are decentralized and taking out a leader would do little. What this strategy did, was allow Zarqawi to recruit many more terrorists, therefore saving us the effort of having to identify all those people in the future. We cut out years of undercover work and saved millions of dollars by allowing Zarqawi to identify these people for us. The money we saved can be used for more tax cuts.
This is part of a broader successful strategy of identifying future terrorists today:
The State Department's annual report on global terrorism, released Friday, concludes that the number of reported terrorist incidents and deaths has increased exponentially in the three years since the United States invaded Iraq, largely because of Iraq itself.
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The report said there were 11,111 attacks that caused 14,602 deaths in 2005. Those figures stand in contrast to prior State Department reports, which cited 208 terrorist attacks that caused 625 deaths in 2003; and 3,168 attacks that caused 1,907 deaths in 2004.
Seriously, how would we have identified these 11,111 people if we hadn't tricked them into showing themselves. This strategy also works in smoking out terrorist policies. For instance:
Homeland Security spokesman Larry Orluskie said the department does not routinely conduct background checks on its contractors.
See, now we'll find out exactly what policies the terrorists are pursuing. We'll know exactly what they are going to attack. All we'll have to do is follow the smoke to the burning buildings or just look in the direction of the mushroom cloud.
And don't think that we aren't applying this strategy on Iran, as well:
On Chris Matthews' Hardball Monday evening, just moments ago, MSNBC correspondent David Shuster confirmed what RAW STORY first reported in February: that outed CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson was working on Iran at the time she was outed.
This may be the most brilliant part of the whole idea, we actually reveal to the enemy our plans and let them know who our secret agents are, thus lulling them into a false sense of security. Then we swoop in and give them the coup de grace.
Don't feel too bad, though, our president is using a more traditional strategy in going after the real enemy:
But the Bush administration is exploring a more radical measure to protect information it says is vital to national security: the criminal prosecution of reporters under the espionage laws.
Seriously, if it weren't for the media, we'd have caught Bin Laden, won the war in Iraq, won the war in Afghanistan and won the global war against extremists. Who wants to bet that the first journalist Bush goes after with this one is Stephen Colbert?