I searched the diary horde for stories on this comment Zbigniew Brzezinski made on Wolf Blitzer's CNN Late Edition. Found nothing, hence I post this first-in-a-long-time diary, as I think he said important things.
Al Rodgers had announced Zbig would be on Wolfie this AM, but I missed it. However, I heard Z smoking the Admin in a hot sound bite on CBC radio's 4 PM PDT news break. Whoa!!!
Follow below the jump for a link to the transcript and a tasty dose of what the old perfesser dealt out to the Neocon cabal.........
BLITZER: Are you comfortable with this NSA collection of phone records?
BRZEZINSKI: I'm not dodging, but I'm going to give you some distinctions. I was briefed at very high levels immediately after 9/11. And it seemed, at the time, that the administration was really expecting a follow-on attack in a fairly short period of time. I can see how, in that atmosphere, something like this was started immediately to see if we could get some clues.
But almost five years have passed since then. What I would like to know is what congressional leaders who were briefed and how were they briefed on this program during the intervening months and years?
Was a legal brief presented? If so, what did it say? And third, when Qwest refused to cooperate, why was it permitted not to cooperate if this was such a real, serious national security need?
So there are some weaknesses in the position of the administration, largely because of the passage of time.
BLITZER: So you're suggesting, at this point, you want more information before you draw a hard and fast conclusion on the legality or the usefulness of this whole program?
BRZEZINSKI: Absolutely. I think, in all these issues, there is tremendous vagueness, I don't know what case was made; I don't know what congressional leaders actually proved it. I don't know why we didn't press Qwest if we thought this was so necessary.
AND I DON'T BUY THE PROPOSITION WE ARE AT WAR. You know, this is really a distortion of reality. We have a serious security problem with terrorism, although we haven't been attacked for five years. We have to deal with it over the long haul.
But to create an atmosphere of fear, almost of paranoia, claiming that we're a nation at war, opens the doors to a lot of legal shenanigans that can infringe on civil rights.
Link: http://transcripts.cnn.com/...
I certainly have thought since 9/11 that the "War" imagery gave undeserved status to the non-state-actors who comprised the criminal enterprise called al-Qaeda. I agreed with John Kerry that the attacks of 9/11 should have been dealt with as a global crime spree, not a military assault. It's great to hear an old hawk like Zbig taking a similar stance. We need this meme to be mainstreamed bigtime. It seems to me that among the "course corrections" needed as we take our country back is to make it clear that terrorism is a crime, not a legit geopolitical option. Hence GWOT is no more meaningful than "war on drugs", &c. Just dumb metaphors.