Osama who? Greg Palast Smoked Out and Charged!

Five years on and no Osama. We're not really even looking. But, that was the first priority after 9/11, remember? Or no? Further, no successful prosecutions for Terrorism. It's amazing. But we still have plenty of resources to go after others...

Palast Charged

We've long abandoned the search for Osama. The Taliban is on the rise. Falluja isn't secured, nor much outside Baghdad, and even within, things are ugly. We've stopped counting BOTH U.S. and Iraq deaths in Iraq unless they are a direct result of a deliberate attack, not collateral damage. It's been shown over and over there were no connections between Osama and Saddam. It's been shown there were no WMD's. Further, we jumped from $28 million spent on government PR under Clinton's last years to over $1 billion with Bush in the past few years. What is it we need convincing that costs that much? We've taken the world's sympathy at 9/11 and turned it to antipathy in five years flat, actually a few years less. We have more impoverished and uninsured and imprisoned than ever before. Our planet is changing and the climate growing worse. We have the highest infant mortality rate of all industrialized countries, and the highest incarceration rates. And we're worried about a guy filming Exxon pollute the air? Or a guy in an Oakland, CA gym talk about his dislike of the current war? Or a college student with posters on her wall critical of Bush as TX governor? Why? We're worried about this, the New McCarthyism, too?. A very partial, yet long and interesting list for our free society...Especially that no fly list! CAPPSII? Total Information Awareness? I mean Terrorist Information Awareness?

More to come on domestic impacts of the so-called war on terror.

Given even the few examples here, and the many more chronicled and available in a variety of media (links to right), it may be past time to reassess our priorities.