An 'Idiot Wind'

Note from Greetings: Has John McCain disavowed and condemned the acts of G. Gordon Liddy, his "friend" (in McCain's words), who suggested shooting government agents and bombing the Brookings Institute and who was sent to jail for subverting the Democratic Process in the 1960's? Has Sarah Palin condemned the Alaska Independent Party who want to secede from the U.S., and whose conference Palin addressed as recently as June of this year, saying "Keep up your good work"? (And to which her husband belonged.)

And has John McCain talked about the large sums of money he helped to give the same below-mentioned Rashid Kalidi? ????

And what about Governor Palin's church in Alaska, where she had hands "laid on her" to "drive away witches" by Pastor Muthee who persecuted women in Africa for being withches, much like our days in the Salem witch trials. Let's hope we do not return 4oo years in our history.

What IS a terrorist? If we go by McCain and Palin's own words (which I don't), then McCain and Palin fit the bill as well. By their own definition.

John McCain's latest attempt to link Barack Obama to extremism

Friday, October 31, 2008; A18, Washingtonpost.com Editorial

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him "a PLO spokesman"; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers -- a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance -- was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don't agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn't, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis -- or even to Mr. Ayers -- is a vile smear.

Perhaps unsurprising for a member of academia, Mr. Khalidi holds complex views. In an article published this year in the Nation magazine, he scathingly denounced Israeli practices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and U.S. Middle East policy but also condemned Palestinians for failing to embrace a nonviolent strategy. He said that the two-state solution favored by the Bush administration (and Mr. Obama) was "deeply flawed" but conceded there were also "flaws in the alternatives." Listening to Mr. Khalidi can be challenging -- as Mr. Obama put it in the dinner toast recorded on the 2003 tape and reported by the Times in a detailed account of the event last April, he "offers constant reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases."

It's fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable -- especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous, as Mr. McCain surely knows.

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that "I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over." That's good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign's increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

Confessions of a Phone Solicitor

By GAIL COLLINS

Word comes from Madison, Wis., that a telemarketer named Ted Zoromski quit his job this week over John McCain’s message.

Zoromski was prepared to interrupt people during their dinner hours to encourage them to vote Republican. But when he got the script saying “you need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home and killed Americans,” he packed it in.

“Even though I was paid to do it, I didn’t feel comfortable,” Zoromski told WKOW-TV.

This story, relayed via Mike Allen on Politico.com, struck me because I once worked as a telemarketer, and it is an occupation so soul-numbing that it is hard to imagine that anything could make it worse. I woke up people on the overnight shift who had just managed to fall asleep for the first time in six days. Sometimes, when there was clearly nobody at home, I would just let the phone ring and ring in order to avoid having to call anybody else. Once after about 30 rings, I heard the breathless voice of a man who had climbed down off the roof in hopes that this was the critical business call he had been waiting for all year, the one that was going to change his life forever. Imagine his joy when he discovered that it was, instead, an exciting opportunity to purchase an entire packet of portrait photographs of his loved ones at a special discount price.

So truly, if you can come up with something that would send a telemarketer over the edge, you have really overachieved on the offensiveness front.

For a while, John McCain and Sarah Palin were so over-the-top about Barack Obama that people in the crowds started yelling death threats — sometimes while simultaneously begging McCain to “take the gloves off.” The idea of what they were hoping to see in a post-glove era scared everybody so much that the campaign tamped things down.

Opening for a McCain rally in North Carolina last weekend, Representative Robin Hayes said he wanted “to keep the crowd as respectful as possible.”

In order to pursue that goal as efficiently as possible, Hayes then announced that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” This was an especially unfortunate turn of phrase given the fact that he had begun his remarks by saying he wanted to “make sure we don’t say something stupid.”

All this was a direct outgrowth of Sarah Palin’s own comments in North Carolina, in which she praised the “pro-America” areas of the country. But Hayes had clearly been absent for the day in scurrilous campaign school when they explain that you aren’t supposed to specifically name the anti-American parts.

Meanwhile, over on MSNBC, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota was launching into the Obama/terrorist spin when she suggested that the news media should investigate “the views of the people in Congress and find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America.” So far, the only person who’s felt the impact of her call to reinvent McCarthyism for a post-Communist planet has been her opponent, a hitherto totally ignored Democrat named Elwyn Tinklenberg, who was stunned to discover in the following days that he had received close to $1 million in donations.

When reporters first began covering political speeches in the 19th century, politicians were so appalled at the idea that somebody planned to write down what they said that they would stop speaking if a reporter showed up along the campaign route. Today, in the post-macaca era, you’d figure that politicians would be so sensitive to the perpetual presence of recording devices that they’d censor their comments even while muttering to themselves when taking a shower. Not to mention comments made right after they have been made up, offered coffee in the MSNBC green room, had a technician install three different recording devices under their clothing and given a seat in front of a large camera.

But the tone of this campaign has given some of the Republican faithful, even those who are members of Congress, the impression that questioning the patriotism of large groups of the population is now O.K.

Right now, all the polls predict that in less than two weeks, Barack Obama is going to be elected president. The McCain campaign disputes this. Large numbers of Obama supporters are also in doubt, possibly because they keep getting e-mails from their relatives in Toledo revealing that Obama has gone to Hawaii not to visit his ailing grandmother, but to destroy evidence that he is not actually an American citizen.

For John McCain, the best question now is not whether he’s going to lose, but what kind of a country he’d wind up with if he won after a campaign even a telemarketer can’t love.

The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama

By FRANK RICH

IF you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.

Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

We're Not Gonna Let John McCain Distract Us

The Leader isn't protecting us and keeping us safe

I could not have put this any better than Glenn Greenwald. 1) The President refuses to sign an extension to FISA because he doesn't get EVERYTHING he wants, i.e., retroactive immunity for his pals at the telecoms who likely illegally collected information on you and me; 2) He lets it expire... holding his breath until he turns blue... but saying it's "our fault" or "the Democrats" fault; and 3) FURTHER... he instructs the Republican house members to vote against extension of the FISA Act !!!!

It's no one's fault if we're less safe than this President's. And it's HIS administration (no one else's) where planes were flown into buildings even WITH advance warning from our nation's security people... he continued to read a book to an elementary class while it was all happening; he let Bin Laden escape and continues to let him live in the hills of Pakistan. YET he tells us Armageddon is coming. Perhaps if he could make one correct decision based on the ACCURATE information he was given ahead of time.

I hope the House Democrats have the fortitude to hold their ground, unlike some of the House Democrats.(Keystone)

Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com
Saturday February 16, 2008 11:45 EST

(updated below - Update II - Update III)
According to the President and his followers, we will be -- as of the stroke of midnight tonight -- no longer safe, no longer protected, no longer snug and secure in the strong and loving arms of our Federal Government. That's because the Protect America Act -- a law which has only existed for six months yet is now indispensable to America's ability to survive and avoid being slaughtered by the Terrorists -- expires tonight.

The President himself this morning dramatically intoned: "At the stroke of midnight tonight, a vital intelligence law that is helping protect our nation will expire." Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell gravely pointed out: "What will happen at midnight tonight is much more significant than stump speeches, steroids or superdelegates. On Sunday, the terrorist tracking program . . . no longer will be fully operational." National Review warrior and all-around tough guy Andy McCarthy fretted: "When the Clock Strikes Midnight, We Will Be Significantly Less Safe."

This is one of the most bizarre propaganda dramas ever, even when weighed against other Bush Terrorism propaganda dramas of the past. There is one reason, and one reason only, that the Protect America Act expired. Its name is "George W. Bush." That is who refused to agree to the Democrats' offer to extend the law by 21 days (or longer), then repeatedly threatened to veto any such extension ("US President George W. Bush on Wednesday vowed to veto another temporary extension of a domestic spying law"), then directed the always-obedient House Republicans to vote unanimously against the extension, which they (needless to say) did. This vital-to-our-safety piece of legislation expired only because George W. Bush repeatedly blocked its extension.

It's just that simple.

All of the right-wing war cheerleaders who will be rendered sleepless as of midnight tonight, petrified that the Muslims who normally lurk menacingly on their corners will now be free to spring attacks since we now live under FISA (1978-8/2007) rather than the PAA (8/2007-2/2008), have only the Warrior-Protector Commander-in-Chief to blame for making us all so very "unprotected and unsafe." And George W. Bush's (absurd) claim this morning that, as of midnight tonight, "it will be harder for our government to keep you safe from terrorist attacks" amounts to a confession that he has deliberately chosen to make us all Unsafe because he is the one who single-handedly ensured the death of this Vital Intelligence Tool. This is an extremely straightforward, clear and indisputable fact which even our national press corps ought to have no trouble conveying.

Military Is Called Unprepared for Attack

Note from Greetings: This sounds a bit like the "pre-9/11 warning that the Bush administration was given and chose to ignore. Now those troops (and money) are being diverted to Iraq... not even Afghanistan/Pakistan, where the real battle is and the attackers reside. Perhaps this time some heed will be taken?

'The United States military is not prepared for a catastrophic attack on the country, and National Guard forces do not have the equipment or training they need for the job. February 1, 2008

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: February 1, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States military is not prepared for a catastrophic attack on the country, and National Guard forces do not have the equipment or training they need for the job, according to a new report.
The study of the military’s readiness to respond to a chemical, biological or nuclear weapons attack found “an appalling gap that places the nation and its citizens at greater risk.”

The report was released Thursday by the Commission of the National Guard and Reserves, which is charged by Congress to recommend changes in law and policy concerning the those forces.

“Right now we don’t have the forces we need, we don’t have them trained, we don’t have the equipment,” the commission’s chairman, Arnold L. Punaro, a retired Marine Corps general, said in an interview. “Even though there is a lot going on in this area, we need to do a lot more.”

General Punaro added, “There’s a lot of things in the pipeline, but in the world we live in, you’re either ready or you’re not.”

Because much of the military is fighting in Afghanistan or Iraq, the commission said, the country has “no reasonable alternative” to relying heavily on the Reserves to supplement the active-duty forces both at home and abroad.

But fully equipping the Guard would cost billions of dollars, General Punaro said, adding that the commission planned to ask the Congressional Budget Office to do a cost analysis.

In perhaps its most controversial recommendation, the panel again said the nation’s governors should be given the authority to direct active-duty troops responding to emergencies in their states. That recommendation, when it first surfaced last year, was rebuffed by the military and quickly rejected by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates.

“I believe we’re going to wear him down,” General Punaro said.

Responding to the report’s conclusions, Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr. of the Air Force, commander of the United States Northern Command, said the Pentagon was putting together a specialized military team to respond to catastrophic events.

General Renuart said that over the next year, specific active-duty Guard and Reserve units would be trained, equipped and assigned to a three-tiered response force totaling about 4,000 troops.

There would be a few hundred first responders, who would be followed by a second wave of about 1,200 troops that would include medical and logistics forces, he said.

The third wave would include aircraft units, engineers and other support forces.

Bush’s Dangerous Liaisons - What is a Terrorist?

Note from Greetings: This is a WONDERFUL OpEd from the NY Times. As you read about what lead up to (and followed) the French Revolution, below, does any of it sound a bit too familiar?

October 28, 2007 From the NY Times
By FRANÇOIS FURSTENBERG Op-Ed Contributor

Montreal

MUCH as George W. Bush’s presidency was ineluctably shaped by Sept. 11, 2001, so the outbreak of the French Revolution was symbolized by the events of one fateful day, July 14, 1789. And though 18th-century France may seem impossibly distant to contemporary Americans, future historians examining Mr. Bush’s presidency within the longer sweep of political and intellectual history may find the French Revolution useful in understanding his curious brand of 21st- century conservatism.

Soon after the storming of the Bastille, pro-Revolutionary elements came together to form an association that would become known as the Jacobin Club, an umbrella group of politicians, journalists and citizens dedicated to advancing the principles of the Revolution.

The Jacobins shared a defining ideological feature. They divided the world between pro- and anti-Revolutionaries — the defenders of liberty versus its enemies. The French Revolution, as they understood it, was the great event that would determine whether liberty was to prevail on the planet or whether the world would fall back into tyranny and despotism.

The stakes could not be higher, and on these matters there could be no nuance or hesitation. One was either for the Revolution or for tyranny.

By 1792, France was confronting the hostility of neighboring countries, debating how to react. The Jacobins were divided. On one side stood the journalist and political leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville, who argued for war.

Brissot understood the war as preventive — “une guerre offensive,” he called it — to defeat the despotic powers of Europe before they could organize their counter-Revolutionary strike. It would not be a war of conquest, as Brissot saw it, but a war “between liberty and tyranny.”

Pro-war Jacobins believed theirs was a mission not for a single nation or even for a single continent. It was, in Brissot’s words, “a crusade for universal liberty.”

Brissot’s opponents were skeptical. “No one likes armed missionaries,” declared Robespierre, with words as apt then as they remain today. Not long after the invasion of Austria, the military tide turned quickly against France.

The United States, France’s “sister republic,” refused to enter the war on France’s side. It was an infuriating show of ingratitude, as the French saw it, coming from a fledgling nation they had magnanimously saved from foreign occupation in a previous war.

Confronted by a monarchical Europe united in opposition to revolutionary France — old Europe, they might have called it — the Jacobins rooted out domestic political dissent. It was the beginning of the period that would become infamous as the Terror.

Among the Jacobins’ greatest triumphs was their ability to appropriate the rhetoric of patriotism — Le Patriote Français was the title of Brissot’s newspaper — and to promote their political program through a tightly coordinated network of newspapers, political hacks, pamphleteers and political clubs.

Even the Jacobins’ dress distinguished “true patriots”: those who wore badges of patriotism like the liberty cap on their heads, or the cocarde tricolore (a red, white and blue rosette) on their hats or even on their lapels.

Insisting that their partisan views were identical to the national will, believing that only they could save France from apocalyptic destruction, Jacobins could not conceive of legitimate dissent. Political opponents were treasonous, stabbing France and the Revolution in the back.

To defend the nation from its enemies, Jacobins expanded the government’s police powers at the expense of civil liberties, endowing the state with the power to detain, interrogate and imprison suspects without due process. Policies like the mass warrantless searches undertaken in 1792 — “domicilary visits,” they were called — were justified, according to Georges Danton, the Jacobin leader, “when the homeland is in danger.”

Robespierre — now firmly committed to the most militant brand of Jacobinism — condemned the “treacherous insinuations” cast by those who questioned “the excessive severity of measures prescribed by the public interest.” He warned his political opponents, “This severity is alarming only for the conspirators, only for the enemies of liberty.” Such measures, then as now, were undertaken to protect the nation — indeed, to protect liberty itself.

If the French Terror had a slogan, it was that attributed to the great orator Louis de Saint-Just: “No liberty for the enemies of liberty.” Saint-Just’s pithy phrase (like President Bush’s variant, “We must not let foreign enemies use the forums of liberty to destroy liberty itself”) could serve as the very antithesis of the Western liberal tradition.

On this principle, the Terror demonized its political opponents, imprisoned suspected enemies without trial and eventually sent thousands to the guillotine. All of these actions emerged from the Jacobin worldview that the enemies of liberty deserved no rights.

Though it has been a topic of much attention in recent years, the origin of the term “terrorist” has gone largely unnoticed by politicians and pundits alike. The word was an invention of the French Revolution, and it referred not to those who hate freedom, nor to non-state actors, nor of course to “Islamofascism.”

A terroriste was, in its original meaning, a Jacobin leader who ruled France during la Terreur.

François Furstenberg, a professor of history at the University of Montreal, is the author of "In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery and the Making of a Nation."Op-Ed Contributor

Thompson Linked to Work for Libyans

Note from Greetings: Would Fred also say (as he does below) that those at Guantanamo deserve fair representation, as he said of the Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing? Would he be willing to advise them, as well, just as he did the Libyans?

9/7/07, NY Times Editorial

A little over three years after Pan Am Flight 103 blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, Fred D. Thompson provided advice to a colleague about one of his law firm’s new clients: The man representing the two Libyan intelligence officials charged in the terrorist bombing.

The colleague, John Culver, a partner at the Washington firm of Arent Fox Kintner Plotkin & Kahn began advising the two suspects’ Libyan lawyer in February 1992. Mr. Thompson, according to a memorandum from that era written by his secretary, held “discussions with Culver re: Libya” that same month.

At the time, Libya was facing international outrage for refusing to comply with a United Nations demand that the two suspects be extradited to the West for trial in the 1988 bombing, which killed 270 people. Revelations that American firms were representing Libyan interests provoked a furor among the Pan Am victims’ families. Some law firms refused to represent the country or the suspects, while others withdrew.

The involvement of Mr. Thompson, who worked part-time for Arent Fox as a lawyer and lobbyist from 1991 until shortly before his election to the Senate in 1994, never became public. But Arent Fox’s chairman, Marc L. Fleischaker, confirmed that Mr. Thompson, who is now seeking the Republican presidential nomination, briefly provided Mr. Culver with advice about the suspects’ case, billing the firm for 3.3 hours of his time.

The firm was hired to provide guidance on the tense questions surrounding where the two men should be tried, Mr. Fleischaker said, and Mr. Thompson’s background as a former prosecutor, as well as his government relations experience — he had close ties to senior officials in the first Bush administration — “gave him insight on jurisdictional issues such as that.”

Karen Henretty, a spokeswoman for his presidential campaign, said that Mr. Thompson had no authority to decide which clients the firm represented. Mr. Thompson has faced questions about his work for two other Arent Fox clients. He initially denied working on behalf of a family planning group seeking to overturn an abortion counseling ban at federally financed clinics, but billing records showed that he spent nearly 20 hours on the matter. His work on behalf of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the deposed Haitian leader — a phone call to John Sununu, then the White House Chief of Staff — has also become fodder for his rivals because of human-rights abuses during Mr. Aristide’s presidency.

The memorandum by Mr. Thompson’s secretary reviewing his work for Arent Fox, compiled in 1993 as he was running for the Senate, was buried among thousands of Mr. Thompson’s papers archived at the University of Tennessee, and casts new light on his time there, beyond his work on the Libya case.

It lists the clients he brought into the firm, which included construction firms and a Texas chemical company embroiled in a case involving the illegal dumping of hazardous waste.

Mr. Thompson also helped others at Arent Fox, the memorandum shows. He met, for instance, with the Chilean ambassador in 1991 and then traveled to Chile to try to garner business for the law firm from that country’s government. He consulted with one of the firm’s partners about a Mexican trade agreement and helped other lawyers with introductions to important Republican officials.

Mr. Thompson has said he makes no apologies for his legal and lobbying work, emphasizing in one online essay that every person, no matter how unpopular, is entitled to representation and that lawyers’ work on behalf of a client is no indication of their own personal views.

Asked about Mr. Thompson’s participation in the Libya case, James Kreindler, a lawyer who represents 130 of the victims’ families, said: “Pan Am 103 was really an attack on the United States, so while some families understood the concept that everyone deserves a defense, a number were offended and angered that American lawyers were willing to earn fees by doing anything to help this pariah nation or the two bombing suspects.”

Today, in the post-Sept. 11 political climate, all the presidential candidates are jockeying to prove their antiterrorism credentials, with Mr. Thompson vowing last week to fight “radical Islamic terrorism” vigorously. Yesterday, his campaign noted that during his eight years in the Senate, Mr. Thompson supported sanctions against Libya.

In 1992, Libya was among those countries the United States listed as state sponsors of terrorism for acts that included the 1989 bombing of a French airliner and the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco that killed two American soldiers.

Arent Fox, in papers it was required to file with the federal government, reported that from February 1992 to August 1993, it provided advice on American and international law to Ibrahim Legwell, the Libyan lawyer appointed by the Libyan Bar Association to represent the two intelligence officials charged with the Flight 103 bombing. Arent Fox received $833,960 in fees and expenses for its work on the case.

Mr. Legwell, reached in Tripoli, said his main goal was to see that his clients were tried in Libya or in a neutral country. He said Arent Fox “contributed a lot” to the defense effort. Mr. Legwell said he had no record of ever speaking with Mr. Thompson but noted: “I remember that this name was mentioned.”

Mr. Culver, a former Democratic senator from Iowa, said that Mr. Thompson was not a primary member of his team, and that his contribution amounted to “a couple of conversations.”

“In a large firm, you frequently consult with people who have experience” in the field of law at hand, he said. In the end, after protracted negotiations with the United Nations, Libya agreed in 1999 to hand over the two men for trial by a special court in the Netherlands. One of the men was convicted and is serving his sentence in a Scottish jail.

In 2003, Libya accepted responsibility for the Pan Am bombing and agreed to pay the victims $2.7 billion in compensation. After Mr. Qaddafi’s renunciation of terrorism and his agreement to end programs to develop unconventional weapon, the United States last year removed Libya from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.