The other day our sometimes demented president, George W. Bush, Jr., blurted out, “Because we acted to liberate Afghanistan, a threat has been removed, and the American people are safer.” He also bragged, with that deer-caught-in-the-headlights look on his mug, how Iraq is “an example of reform to the region” (07/12/04, at Oak Ridge, TN). The other half of the administration’s vaudeville act, V.P. Dick Cheney, was caught bellowing, at a rally in Tucson, AZ, on 07/31/04, “Our accomplishments these past four years have made America safer, stronger and better...”

Cheney, an ultra war hawk, with a Genghis-Khan complex, wasn’t finished. At Hot Springs, AK, on 08/03/04, he roared that Bush’s reelection this coming November 2nd, “is critical to make America safer.” Cheney is the same yellow-bellied cowboy that Sen. Harkin (D-IA) called a "coward", at Des Moines, Iowa, on 08/14/04, for getting five student and marriage deferments for the Vietnam War. Yet, today, he is urging others to send their sons and daughters to get slaughtered in Iraq. Harkin blasted Cheney “for wanting to be tough with someone else’s kid’s blood” (Mike Glover, AP). Harkin is a former U.S. Navy pilot.

What, I wondered, have the reckless, Islam-bashing, oil-and-natural-gas deposits-pursuing, Israel-protecting, imperial politicking of Bush and Cheney, and their immediate GOP predecessors in the White House, made America really safer for? It occurs to me they've made America safer for opium dealers, terrorists and the warmongering Neocons.

Let’s start with the opium dealers. When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, the drug industry was almost totally suppressed. Now, close to three years after the Bush-Cheney Gang launched its invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and made wiping out its drug trade a priority, “poppy growing and heroin production have exploded, providing money and logistical aid to al-Qaida and other militants, bolstering Afghan warlords and threatening that nation’s stability...Afghanistan is again the world’s largest source of opium... The drug accounted for $2.3 billion last year - half the nation’s economy” (Mark Matthews, Baltimore Sun, 08/12/04, “Opium Trade Threatens Afghan Stability Again.” You can bet that much of that opium has already been put out on the streets of urban America by European gangsters, the Mafia and the Russian-Jewish mobs. (See, also for the covert inter workings of the slimy drug dealers, corrupt government intelligence organizations, slick politicians, and corporate and multinationals connivers, the insightful “Drugs, Oil, and War: The U.S. in Afghanistan, Columbia and Indochina” by Peter Dale Scott, and the seminal "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic," by Chalmers Johnson).

On the terrorism front, according to the riveting book, “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” by author Steve Coll, the CIA was in bed with the Mujahedin guerrillas in Afghanistan for mostly all of the 80s and into the early 90s. This is the same group that morphed into Al-Qaeda. The White House, and Congressional cheerleaders, regularly referred to the Mujahedin as “Freedom Fighters.” Who was running the U.S. from 1981 to 1989? Why that great man himself, Ronald Reagan, who was just given a state funeral worthy of George Washington. Reagan’s V.P.? Why “Daddy” Bush, who took over the presidential reigns from that big fibber of a "Gipper" (1989-93).

Coll documents how the Mujahedin were funded by the CIA on Reagan and Bush’s watch, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and trained and armed with lethal weapons, like: Stinger missiles, Buffalo gun sniper rifles and even tanks captured from the Iraqis, in “Operation Desert Storm.” The Mujahedin were also encouraged to engage in sabotage and assassination of Russians in “cross-border assaults... inside Soviet Central Asia” (p. 104, “Ghost Wars”). And even more relevant to present U.S. security, the CIA instructed the Mujahedin in the latest techniques in terrorism, particularly how to use “E cell detonators...delay timers... plastic explosives." When a U.S. official involved in the CIA supply program was asked by Coll to estimate the amount of plastic explosives that had been transferred to the guerrillas, he answered, “We could have blown up half of New York with the explosives...” (p. 135, “Ghost Wars”). Gee, that's comforting to know!

Who were the CIA geniuses surveilling during Reagan and “Daddy” Bush’s tour of duty? Osama bin Laden? The Muslim Brotherhood? The Contra thugs? The Mossad's Jonathan Pollard? The CIA turncoat, Aldrich Ames? No! Try, “secular leftist” groups (p. 145. “Ghost Wars”).

Closer to home, the Bush-Cheney Gang's subversive habit of sucking up to the Neocons has struck again with the recent appointment of the hapless Porter Goss (R-FL) to be the new head of the CIA (For background on these ideological intriguers, check out "The Neocons' War," Justin Raimondo, 06/02/04, www.antiwar.com/justin/).

Jude Wanniski summed it up best with this posting to his web fans, on 08/18/04. It's entitled, “Another Richard Perle Stooge.” Wanniski wrote: “If the United States Senate confirms Rep. Porter Goss as the new Director of Central Intelligence, it will simply replace one stooge of Richard Perle and the Neocons with another. There’s no way George Tenet could have bumbled his way through the job all those years without the backing of the Neocons, and in the end it was Perle who went to the White House with his team, to meet with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and demand Tenet be cashiered for turning against Ahmed Chalabi, a more prized Perle agent.

"Tenet fell on his sword," Wanniski continued. "But of course Perle had the backing of Vice President Cheney on this matter, and Porter Goss, chairman of the House 'Intelligence' Committee, has been Cheney’s lapdog at least for these last four years. We can see that Perle and his pals do not give up, and President Bush is still being manipulated by them. When the 9-11 Commission issued its report last month, the one word it used to sum up the failure of the Intelligence Community was that it lacked 'imagination.' The dimmest bulb in the Intelligence Community had to be Porter Goss, an ex-CIA agent who parleyed his experience in that realm into a seat in the House, plus the chairmanship of the Intelligence Committee," Wanniski emphasized (www.wanniski.com/).

All of this leaves me with a quote, attributed to the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY), once a popular bartender from the East side of Manhattan and ex-boss of Iran-Contra villain, Elliott Abrams, who had served earlier on his Senate staff. Moynihan supposedly barked, between belts of his favorite beverage, "The CIA couldn't catch a cold!" What a prophet old whiskey-face turned out to be. Now, Americans are slowly finding out to their regret, how that same CIA, the Bush-Cheney Gang and its empty-headed GOP predecessors in office, have made the U.S. safer for all the wrong things.

© William Hughes 2004

William Hughes is the author of “Saying ‘No’ to the War Party” (IUniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at liamhughes-AT-comcast.net.