Planetarium - politics/music/culture/smarts

Gone for the weekend, but back with a totally shocking and simultaneously unsurprising story for you all. The New Republic broke this story on the Bush team and their playing politics with terrorism for political gain. You KNEW it wasn't true, you just didn't want it to be. We now present some of the highlights:

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on
Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri,
or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding
in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been
accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver
these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in
November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism
to the electoral calendar.


But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been
told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in
Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 'The Pakistani
government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his
associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to
deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.' Introducing target dates for
Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism
relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, 'no
timetable[s]' were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is
apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt.


A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant
General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed TNR that the Pakistanis 'have been told at
every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is
[an] absolute must.' What's more, this source claims that Bush
administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a
date in mind for announcing this achievement: 'The last ten days of July
deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during
[ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington.'

But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last
spring that 'it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were
announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July'--the first
three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

God bless America.