Month: March 2003

There are rumors running around right now about the possibilty that Osama bin Laden might have been captured by Pakistan and US intelligence services somewhere in Pakistan.

Is it true? Who knows — it could be a leak of real information, or it could just be crazy rumormongering. What I’m pretty damn sure of, though, is that whether or not it’s true, there’s no way that it would be officially announced until sometime after Bush has sent the first few missile barrages into Iraq. Bush has done too good of a job of moving the blame of 9/11 from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein, and bringing bin Laden back into the spotlight — especially as a captive — would likely do more harm than good to Bush’s push for war.

In the words of William Greider of the The Nation:

By relentless repetition, Bush and his team accomplished an audacious feat of propaganda — persuading many Americans to redirect the emotional wounds left by 9/11, their hurt and anger, away from the perpetrators to a different adversary. According to a New York Times-CBS News survey, 42 percent now believe Saddam Hussein was personally responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. In an ABC News poll, 55 percent believe Saddam provides direct support to Al Qaeda. The Iraqi did it, let’s go get him. As a bogus rallying cry, “Remember 9/11” ranks with “Remember the Maine” of 1898 for war with Spain or the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964 for justifying the US escalation in Vietnam.

If bin Laden is still free, well then, no big surprise, he’s been that way for a while now. If he’s been captured, though, you can bet that he’ll be sitting in a deep, dark hole until Bush is certain that bringing him out to parade before the cameras would be sure to do him more good than harm.

(Via Tom Tomorrow)

Meg reminds us that in the midst of all the brouhaha in Iraq and Korea, things are still downright scary here at home.

With legislation that would impose sweeping new restrictions on abortion seemingly headed toward approval by the Senate this week, the assault on women’s reproductive freedom has reached an ominous turning point.

Although billed as a narrow attack on one particular late-term abortion procedure, the measure’s imprecise wording would criminalize the use of the safest and most common pre-viability abortion method used after the first trimester, namely dilation and evacuation. The bill would thereby replicate a key defect that caused the Supreme Court to reject a similarly worded state law in 2000. Moreover, the bill omits an exception in cases where the mother’s health is in jeopardy, ignoring the Supreme Court’s insistence that such an exception is a constitutional requirement for any abortion regulation.

It may be too late to do much about this, but we can hope that it will get struck down if it gets contested and goes to the Supreme Court — though at the moment, it looks like the bill’s backers are counting on a newly conservative Supreme Court to rule in their favor by the time the case makes it that far. Not encouraging, in the least.