Blah 3 does it again. If you go one place today, go here.

War is not the answer.

Yesterday's Dallas Fort Worth Star-Telegram's detailed editorial Reflecting On Rights Lost In the Past Year is well-worth a read. (Thanks to Buzzflash for taking us there.)

We are with Maxspeak on this commentary expressing our feelings of dread over the upcoming media barrage on the September 11 attacks.

"What TV should be doing on Sept. 11, in my opinion, is spending a day reflecting on how we still haven't caught the evil monster behind the tragedy. I would replay over and over again President Bush's fight talks about how we were going to get bin Laden dead or alive and other stirring speeches from his administration about the game plan for bringing him to justice."

"Also needed is penetrating analysis on why, after spending billions, we have hundreds of people in jail here, but bin Laden and his al-Qaida cohorts presumably are alive and well somewhere in 60 countries. "

"As NBC's Fred Francis summed up the bafflement in the Big Hunt almost a year after Sept. 11, "The FBI still does not have a paper trail of those hijackers - how they were organized, who gave them their tactical orders." I hope we won't still be looking for him and the suicide-bomber militants for the second anniversary. "

Readers looking for a break from the 9/11 coverage are welcome here where we will be continuing to write about crime and injustice news and this Administration's excesses in the name of the "War on Terror."

Let it Begin Here has a dire prediction on next week's U.N. Meeting in The Danger of Appeasement

"Frightened heads of state, blustering but in the end unwilling to oppose an aggressive and powerful country, capitulate and with a fig leaf of protocol, condone agression."

"This is really happening. It is not Munich 1938, but New York, 2002, at the upcoming session of the U.N. general assembly. Appeasement is a real danger, and many countries, from China and Russia to the European Union, are preparing to appease the U.S. by withdrawing their objections to a war of agression against Iraq."

Daily Kos has started a "War Watch" list on the left-hand column of his site. He says:

"A couple of caveats: Note that I write "lean", since positions may shift in the coming weeks. Also, for my tally, a vote against war means a vote against a unilateral invasion of Iraq without U.N. backing. There's no way the US gets UN backing, thus if the Senate insists on international authorization before any invasion, that position effectively is a "no" vote on war."

Scott Peterson in the Christian Science Monitor warns that in war, some facts are less factual. Peterson says some of the government's assertions from the last war on Iraq "still appear dubious."

"Past cases of bad intelligence or outright disinformation used to justify war are making experts wary. The questions they are raising, some based on examples from the 1991 Persian Gulf War, highlight the importance of accurate information when a democracy considers military action."

Peterson backs this up with specific examples. And these comments by others:

"John MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine and author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, says that considering the number of senior officials shared by both Bush administrations, the American public should bear in mind the lessons of Gulf War propaganda."

"These are all the same people who were running it more than 10 years ago," Mr. MacArthur says. "They'll make up just about anything ... to get their way."

Peterson says that analysts "note that little evidence so far of an imminent threat from Mr. Hussein's weapons of mass destruction has been made public."

An unnamed government source with twenty years intelligence experience had this to say:

"This administration is capable of any lie ... in order to advance its war goal in Iraq....It is one of the reasons it doesn't want to have UN weapons inspectors go back in, because they might actually show that the probability of Iraq having [threatening illicit weapons] is much lower than they want us to believe."

According to former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton from Indiana, who has received medals from both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, "I'm always skeptical about intelligence. It's not as pure as the driven snow."

Peterson's point: Keep all this in mind when listening to and evaluating the President's upcoming pitch in his speech to the U.N. next week on why we should go to war.

Law Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instpundit assesses the results of the War on Terror to date, giving it a less-than-stellar review.

"So a year after Sept. 11 we’re left with big and not-very-effective law enforcement bureaucracies that want more power, but show no signs of more accountability, promising to protect us against a terrorist threat while showing no great evidence of learning from past mistakes, or adjusting old policies in order to meet new threats. Somehow, I don’t feel safer."

Cassio Furtado reports at length on the current and historic overseas role of the FBI in the Sunday Philadephia Inquirer. See, FBI Finds the Going is Tough Overseas.

Furtado says that FBI agents' "lack of skills and uncooperative nations hamper the agency as global demands on it have grown."

"In an effort to attack terrorism, drug trafficking, organized crime and other threats at their roots, an unprecedented number of FBI agents now are working overseas."

"But the bureau's effectiveness is limited by a shortage of agents with language skills and foreign expertise, and by relationships with foreign governments that range from reluctant cooperation to outright obstruction. And some of its activities raise concerns among civil-liberties groups."

Furtado uses Saudi Arabia's and Yemen's non-assistance in the FBI investigations into the 1996 Khobar Towers and 2000 USS Cole bombings as prime examples.

He also reports on the concerns of civil liberties organizations:

"Because the bureau sometimes obtains information from interrogations that violate U.S. legal standards, human-rights groups say the FBI has been complicit in human-rights violations. Critics contend that in Pakistan, for example, agents have participated in raids and tolerated detentions that breach U.S. norms."

That concerns us as well.

Furtado reports that there are currently FBI agents based in 44 countries and operating in 52.

"The FBI's critics say its agents often are culturally hidebound. "They operate in the Middle East like they're in New Jersey, and that doesn't work," said a senior U.S. official who has worked with them, who spoke on condition of anonymity."

"Today, the FBI looks harder for internationalists. Nonetheless, it "never has enough agents or linguists who speak... critical languages" such as Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Farsi or Vietnamese, an official from the investigative services division, David Alba, told a Senate oversight subcommittee in 2000."

"The FBI appears to have been most effective in Kenya, Tanzania and Pakistan - all countries where English is widely spoken. " After discussing how cooperative efforts between the FBI were fruitful during the Daniel Pearl murder investigation and in apprehending Ramsey Yousef, Furtado notes:

"U.S.-Pakistani cooperation has been troubled, however, by reports that FBI agents have received intelligence from interrogations in which Pakistani questioners used torture, and have joined raids in which those captured have disappeared without a trace into the Pakistani detention system."

"Although the United States signed the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, which bans participation or complicity in the torture of prisoners or other forms of mistreatment, it would be nearly impossible to hold the United States liable for the actions of its partners in the war on terrorism."

Apparently, some U.S. officials see no problem here. Amnesty International disagrees.

"Amnesty International's 2002 human-rights report says police forces use torture in 18 of the 44 countries where the FBI has offices."

"Government officials should be very clear in condemning this," Amnesty official Vienna Colucci said. "Otherwise it sends a signal that they support it."

We agree with Amnesty. But we also wonder what is taking the FBI so long to hire and train new multi-lingual agents. Surely there is a pool of young men and women in this country with these skills. We'd bet large numbers of them have applied. We wonder how many of their applications are being held up in red tape and why it takes so long for applications to be approved. Does anyone have a good answer?

There is a really good column today in the Des Moines Register by Rekha Basu entitled Americans forget some lessons in freedoms, rights.

Here is some of it, but we think you should read the whole thing.

"Security - the feeling that nothing could touch us - is one assumption we've had to unlearn since last Sept. 11.

But from the Bush administration's war on terrorism we're also learning that the rights and freedoms we took for granted in America - due process, equal treatment, free speech, probable cause - were not absolute.

The response to Sept. 11 has reinforced the country's racial and ethnic fault lines, as immigrants came under new scrutiny, sometimes just because of their different names and appearances.

The attacks showed how vulnerable our buildings and economy were to terrorist attacks. Now the response to those attacks is showing how vulnerable our democracy is when we allow people to be held without charges, homes to be searched without probable cause, neighbors to be turned into informants.

From Columbine to Oklahoma City, this country has known different kinds of terrorism but didn't respond by casting suspicion on entire demographic groups.

Because it didn't affect them, most Americans have stayed silent about infringements on the rights of ethnic minorities. But the changes spilled over into areas of everyone's lives. The USA Patriot Act, passed by Congress and signed in October, gave 40 federal agencies sweeping powers to eavesdrop on phone conversations, intercept e-mail, and get access to medical, financial and even library records. Warrants to be used on Americans are approved in secret by judges in a court created to target foreign powers. Probable cause that a crime was committed is no longer necessary. The FBI can also monitor political and religious meetings. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System would have citizens report suspicions about each other, and businesses and lawyers could be required to report any "'suspicious activity" involving clients."

Basu references other laws passed that civil libertarians and immigrant-rights groups attribute to Sept. 11. "After previous unsuccessful attempts, official English was signed into law. And a new state driver's license was instituted for noncitizens, stamped "Nonrenewable - documentation required."

She argues that the press has been "cowed into submission by government secrecy and self-censorship."

Are we going to get to the point where there's no turning back? Where our liberties and rights are gone forever?

Columnist Paul Roberts takes the Justice Department to task over its treatment of Dr. Steven Hatfill in A person of interest published in today's Washington Times.

But what is up with his gratuitous slam of feminists, gays and minorities?

"Today the media is even less likely to protest prosecutorial abuse of civil rights. Only members of victim groups can turn to the media for help. As recent best sellers by media insiders make clear, feminists, minorities and homosexuals now dominate the American media. Most are indebted to government-enforced quotas for their jobs, and they view white heterosexual males, such as Dr. Hatfill, as members of a hegemonic "oppressor class." Why should they help one of their oppressors defend his rights? "

Thumbs down to this column. We hope his email box fills up with protests.

(and thanks to NACDL Media Affairs Director Dan Dodson for sending the column to us)

Rather than re-capping the events of September 11 and their aftermath, we'd rather review the responses and reactions to date of the Bush administration, including but not limited to Attorney General Ashcroft.

We begin with comedian and political humorist Barry Crimmins who has this to say about Bush (via Blah3):

"W says he doesn't need Congress to approve of his war. He says he doesn't need trials to dispose of people he deems dangerous. He says doesn't need to answer questions about obvious ties to enormously corrupt corporations or about his own sleazy business dealings. Perhaps if we had just insisted on him needing to be elected before he took office, he wouldn't have drawn some of these other bizarre conclusions."

On a more contemplative note, we recommend Let it Begin Here's take on Ashcroft, the media, and what people seem to care the most about.

Atrios sends us to Frank Rich's column in the New York Times today where he recaps the last year in Slouching Towards 9/11.

After questioning whether Bush's strange assertion of executive privilege over the Clinton Pardons isn't just a prelude to his administration clamming up over Enron, Rich turns his attention to Ashcroft and the detainees.

"There's a legitimate debate whether the defeat of terrorism justifies constitutional shortcuts and that argument is playing out in court, where there have now been four judgments against the government this year, including a unanimous appellate decision this week. But more and more the argument is academic. The administration's blanket secrecy has less to do with the legitimate good of protecting our security than with the political goal of burying its own failures."

"By keeping the names and court proceedings of his detainees under wraps, John Ashcroft could for months cover up his law enforcement minions' inability to apprehend a single terrorist connected to 9/11. The same stunt has been pulled by designating prisoners "enemy combatants" at Guantánamo. Jose Padilla, the "dirty bomber," whose arrest was trumpeted by the attorney general as the breakup of a major terrorist plot, turns out to be a nonentity who may not be charged with anything. But as long as Mr. Padilla is locked away in a legal deep freeze, that embarrassment can be kept on the q.t."

Moving on to the subject of war with Iraq, Rich says:

"An all-out attack on Iraq will entail a level of risk and sacrifice that the U.S. has not assumed since Vietnam," wrote the author of "Black Hawk Down," the combat journalist Mark Bowden, this week. As this reality sinks in, support for war with Iraq is falling — from 70 percent last fall to 51 percent now, according to the new Time/CNN poll. A Washington Post/ABC News poll shows that only 40 percent would approve if there are ground troops and significant American casualties. "

Our view: Hardly a passing grade, let alone the inspired leadership we deserve from this team.