Don't Tell Them We're Looking For Them

The announcement hits all of the right buttons. It's al-Qaeda. One suspect had sworn allegiance to Osama bin Laden. Fear. Be afraid.

But what this really came down to was careful, painstaking police work over the course of close to a year. The suspects discussed their plans in internet chat rooms. The FBI made arrests once the plans were, '... about to go to a phase where they would attempt to surveil targets, establish a regimen of attack and acquire the resources necessary to effectuate the attacks."

That's right. Despite complaints that exposure of the NSA's hush-hush super-secret warrantless wiretap program, these clowns were still yakking it up on the internet.

Funny how there's no problems announcing that the FBI was monitoring chat rooms to the extent of recognizing code phrases.

And speaking of the six-foot-tall dialysis patient that nobody can find, President Bush declared today that, well, Osama is really a threat and that we're still looking for him.

Apparently, we'll look for Osama as long as we can get political mileage out of it. But when we were jonesing after Saddam's oil fields, Osama was deemed irrelevant.

And again, here's an example of an enemy who is apparently conducting business without turning up in any of the NSA's surveillance gill nets. He's been doing this since 2001, well before any of the surveillance programs were revealed, because he fully understood the likelihood of his communications being monitored.

It's called operational security. It's what you do when you shield the ATM keypad with one hand as you type in your PIN. It's looking over your shoulder when you work a combination lock.

Mr. Bush also couldn't assure Americans that the missile interception system would actually stop a successful launch by North Korea, but affirmed that we need one.

But, as columnist Molly Ivins has pointed out, previous tests of the missile defense program have been spectacularly non-productive. We don't even have a good percentage against targets we've designated.

An executive for Royal Dutch Shell says using food crops to make biofuels is morally inappropriate.

"If you look at Africa, there are still countries that have a lack of food, people are starving, and because we are more wealthy we use food and turn it into fuel," said Eric G Holthusen.

Hey, Eric, hate to rain on your parade, but people have been starving in Africa for most of my lifetime, and it's not because we've been turning corn into biodiesel.

The Southern Poverty Law Center has issued a report claiming that large numbers - possibly in the thousands - of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists have found a place in the United States military, despite a decade-old policy of zero tolerance for racist hate groups.

Yeah, that'll win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people.

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