"War on Terror" Numbers To Silence Republican Candidates

Bob Geiger

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Thu Sep-14-06 09:21 AM
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"War on Terror" Numbers To Silence Republican Candidates

When George W. Bush made a prime-time television appearance Monday night to give a political speech -- under the guise of commemorating the five-year anniversary of September 11 -- he started right off by telling both a lie and the truth in one short sentence.

"Today, we are safer, but we are not yet safe," said Bush, which means he was batting .500 with the truth in just one short statement. Not bad for him. It is undeniably true that we are not yet safe, but to imply that we are safer than we were before Bush turned the world against us is demonstrably false.

And Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) sketched out the only numbers needed to confirm that Bush's "war on terror" is not only going very badly, but has gotten much, much worse on his watch.

"Osama bin Laden is still on the loose. Al-Qaeda's membership, estimated at 20,000 on 9/11, is now estimated by our intelligence agencies at 50,000. Instead of shrinking and disappearing, they are growing geometrically," said Durbin on the Senate floor Tuesday, in describing how unsafe Republicans have made America.

Now there's a number we want to talk a lot about between now and the midterm elections, as Republicans beat their chests and say how safe they've kept Americans.

And Durbin's numbers check out. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, "U.S. intelligence estimates put the total number of fighters who underwent instruction at bin Laden-supported camps in Afghanistan from 1996 through 9/11 at 10,000 to 20,000."

And recent research by the nonprofit, nonpartisan Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, funded by the Department of Homeland Security and other government grants, says that the number of Al-Qaeda has jumped from the 20,000 reported by the 9/11 Commission a few years ago to 50,000 today.

This is an astonishing and disturbing number given that these are the people our own government said attacked us on September 11 -- and there's a hell of a lot more of them now.

Durbin also responded to charges by Rick Santorum (R-PA) that floor-statements made by Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) about Iraq were damaging and purely political in nature, by citing a report released Monday from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) entitled "Stabilizing Iraq: An Assessment of the Security Situation."

"The GAO published a graph yesterday. The number of attacks rose from around 100 in May of 2003 to roughly 4,500 in July of 2006," said Durbin. "Is it political or partisan to note the obvious, the GAO report to which Senator Reid made reference? That is not political partisanship; that is a reality, and we should face that reality because Iraq does continue to slip into civil war despite the billions that we have spent and the thousands of American lives which have been lost in that battle."

And here is the chart from the GAO report:

"Since June 2003, the overall security conditions in Iraq have deteriorated and grown more complex, as evidenced by increasing numbers of attacks and Sunni/Shi'a sectarian strife," said the GAO report.

More... Please go to BobGeiger.com to read the rest.