Dr. Death...Er, I Mean Sec. Chertoff's Got A "Gut-Feeling"

Chertoff's gut is telling him Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, and the ghost of Suleiman, the Magnificent, or anyway, some REALLY SCARY ARAB is gonna attack the US "this summer."

This is, on the face of it, far less intelligence--the reliability of it remains to be seen--than was provided to the Busheviks in the Aug. 11, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing which declared Bin Laden was planning an attack, and which the Chimp & minions dismissed with the cavalier admonition that the CIA had "covered their asses."

It also happens to come at a time when the Chimp & minions' fortunes, politically, are at an historically, disastrously low ebb. Those fortunes would be materially assisted on the event of another attack in the US, especially if it were bloody and serious enough to allow the Chimp to invoke the emergency powers he arrogated unto himself a couple of months ago--emergency powers to suspend the Constitution, for example, or revoke habeas corp...oh, yeah, they've already done that...

Well, anyway, I suspect Chertoff's gut feeling arises from inside knowledge of the kind that permitted the Busheviks, and especially Cheney and the PNACabal, to so placidly await the impending AlQaeda attacks of IX/XI and essentially do nothing about them except to hope they wouldn't be toooo bad.

I have always suspected the regime--Cheney, since his brief was intelligence--knew just about everything about the AlQaeda plans except (I'll be charitable) the exact date and the targeted flight numbers. They withheld this information, and refused to act upon it for purely political reasons: they feared harming the airline & travel industry which 1) was a major source of campaign donations and 2) was teetering so precariously on the edges of financial instability that precautions necessary to protect the flights (and their passengers) would have flipped the balance. Instituting the security measures now in place through the TSA, before the attacks of IX/XI would have spooked the traveling public to drive them away from air-travel.

And insisting on installing hijacker-proof cabin doors on the flight deck--which would have stymied the attackers--was something the industry had resisted ferociously for decades, on the grounds of their being too weighty...Or something.

So they waited for their "Pearl Harbor moment." And sprang into long-contemplated action when it occurred. And the rest, as they say, is history.

(Late Flash: I recently learned that the guy in the skeletor suit (as opposed to the REAL one at HSA in DC) in real life is the dad of my incredible masseuse. Waddayano?)