One of Ours

President-elect John F. Kerry's rise to the nation's highest office came as little surprise following almost four years of remonstrations against President George W. Bush for his bizarre attack on the defenseless people of Afghanistan.

Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was the right man for a nation outraged by the Bush administration's pre-emptive war, which, it now seems clear, was based on highly speculative intelligence that Saudi Arabian-born terrorist Osama bin Laden was planning an attack on the U.S.

Absent absolute proof of such an imminent attack, Bush's Sept. 10 bombing of Afghanistan earned him international condemnation and, in all likelihood, an indictment in coming weeks. United Nations (U.N.) Secretary-General Kofi Annan, appearing last night on Larry King Live, said the U.N.'s International Criminal Tribunal likely would bring charges of genocide against the president.

Bush also faces federal charges at home for his baseless arrest of 19 foreign nationals, many of them native Saudis, whose "crime" was attending American flight schools. The Council on American-Islamic Relations has joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a joint suit against both Bush and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, charging racial profiling, unlawful arrest, and illegal search and seizure.

Kerry's campaign mantra - "You go to war because you have to, not because you want to" - clearly resonated with Americans as they tried to make sense of Bush's September 10 attack on Afghanistan. Neither the president, nor National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice convincingly defended their actions during the recent "9/10 Commission" hearings, which Congress ordered in response to public outcry. The commission's purpose was to try to determine what compelled the president to launch a war against Afghanistan. What kind of intelligence suggested that such an act was justified?...

...Even though Bush's military campaign was successful in ending the oppressive Taliban regime, bin Laden apparently escaped and al Qaeda continues to flourish...

...experts say that intelligence about Saddam's WMD program are just as speculative as was the intelligence that prompted Bush to attack Afghanistan. The man credited with sounding the alarm on bin Laden and al Qaeda was Richard Clarke, a counterterrorism expert who has served four presidents, including Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton.

In a January 25 memo to Dr. Rice, for instance, Clarke urged immediate attention to several items of national security interest: the Northern Alliance, covert aid, a significant new '02 budget authority to help fight al Qaeda, and a response to the USS Cole.

At Rice's and Clarke's urging, Bush called a meeting of principals and, after "connecting the dots," decided to wage war against Afghanistan. What did the dots say? Not much, in retrospect. Apparently, the president decided to bomb a benign country on the basis of "chatter" that hinted at "something big."

With no other details on the "big," and by weaving together random bits of information from a variety of questionable sources, Bush and company decided that 19 fundamentalist Muslim fanatics would fly airplanes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon on 9/11.

Under questioning by the "9/10 Commission," Clarke denied that his memo was anything more than a historical overview with a "set of ideas and a paper, mostly." The bi-partisan commission concluded, therefore, that Bush's "dot-connecting" had destroyed American credibility and subjected the U.S. to increasing hostility in the Arab-Muslim world...