In the heat of this current battle to rationalize why Bush decided to circumvent the FISA court and illegally spy on whomever he personally felt needed spying on, don't you find it a bit odd that they aren't vociferously and repeatedly invoking the case of Zacarias Moussaoui?

Moussaoui, I'm sure you recall, was the French al Qaeda operative arrested in August 2001 while taking lessons at a flight training school in Minnesota. He wanted to learn how to fly a 747 jetliner, but exhibited little interest in how to take off or land one. He also paid the $8,000 tuition in cash, had recently traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and had connections to an Algerian terrorist group that attempted to crash an airplane into the Eiffel Tower in 1994.

In light of all this, local FBI agents asked headquarters if they could obtain a FISA search warrant for the hard drive on Moussaoui's computer. The FBI denied the request, claiming they didn't feel it met the FISA court's probable cause standard for granting a warrant.

So . . . why aren't we hearing a deafening chorus of Bush administration hacks and whores shouting something along the lines of: "Look what happened with the Moussaoui case! They didn't think they could get a warrant!! Don't you see why the president felt he had to go around FISA in order to keep us safe? Just think . . . if FISA wasn't so bureaucratically obstructionist, 9/11 might have been averted! All those people would be alive!! Alive I tell ya!! Don't you want the president to have the ability to keep us alive?"

On the surface, this line of argument would seem to be just what the Bush backers love -- a case closed, you're either with us or against us, banality. And yet Moussaoui is hardly ever mentioned. Why do you suppose that is? Could it be that the last thing the Bush Cabal wants brought into this discussion is the Moussaoui case?

Maybe they suspect that after the initial "Gosh, when you put it that way I guess it does make sense that he had to break the law to keep us safe", the very next thought from an average Joe might be: "By the way, why didn't the FBI apply for a FISA warrant to search the computer of a known terrorist associate wanting lessons to fly, but not take off or land, a commercial airliner?"

Humm . . . good question. Especially considering that at this very same time there were multiple alarms coming from a variety of sources -- including the August 6 presidential briefing specifically warning of an imminent al Qaeda attack with the potential for hijackings!

Since it's inception the FISA court has approved 19,000 warrants and denied only 4. So why on earth would someone high up (way up?) in Louis Freeh's FBI refuse to pursue a FISA (or even a criminal) warrant in the Moussaoui case?

Colleen Rowley, the FBI agent who had requested the Moussaoui warrant, was so overwhelmed at the inexplicable bureaucratic roadblocks the FBI put in her way, that she was compelled to testify before Congress about her concerns. She wrote in a followup report that some field agents were frustrated enough to joke that key officials at FBI headquarters "had to be spies or moles . . . who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut [our] effort."

4 years ago I wrote an essay, entitled "One Terrible Pilot," in which this Moussaoui issue was only one (and a relatively minor one at that) of dozens of bright red and alarming flags surrounding 9/11. And, of course, I was instantly accused of being a raving conspiracy nut for voicing any suspicions.

Since then we have seen literally hundreds of individual steps this administration has taken to subvert our constitutional protections at home and to begin to implement, on a global scale, a dangerously myopic military strategy. And every move they make is either prefaced or followed by the words "9/11."

But contrary to what they want you to believe, this strategy was not thrown together shortly after, and as a response to, 9/11. Much of it had in fact already been mapped out prior to Bush's 2000 selection as president.

The document was entitled "Rebuilding America's Defenses, Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century" and it's authors were all members of a neoconservative think tank called the Project For A New American Century (PNAC). They included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, Jeb Bush, and several other key GOP movers and shakers. The strategy outlined therein called for (among many other things currently in full swing) the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the establishment of new military bases there and throughout the Middle East, and a dramatically increased role for the US to act as the entire world's (defined as those places who have something we want) policeman.

Remember, this was all planned out prior to the 2000 election.

The signatories of this radical new global strategy admitted, within the document itself, that such a controversial strategic goal would be a difficult sale to the vast majority of Americans, and would likely take many years to implement. Unless, that is, they inadvertently stumbled upon a bit of 'good luck'. A "trifecta" if you will.

This is the direct quote from that 2000 PNAC document: "The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event -- like a new Pearl Harbor."

Yep, nothing like a bit of 'good old luck' when you're advocating a long term (1,000 year?), fundamental and unprecedented takeover of the geopolitical/military landscape of the entire planet, as well as a subsequent dismantling of the Bill Of Rights here at home (in order to "discourage" the inevitable smattering of dissent).

Imagine how overwhelmingly frustrating it might have been for all those PNAC members if the "catastrophic and catalyzing event" of 9/11 had not so fortuitously come along during George W's reign! All those years of planning, going all the way back to the Ford administration and the end of the Cold War, all the secret meetings and the positioning of the "right people" in the right places to be ready at the right time, all the media they had been buying up . . . all their hard work would have been for naught, just going to waste, with little hope of coming to fruition.

Heck, had 9/11 not occurred, these folks -- realizing the window of opportunity could very well close upon them -- might have gotten so desperate they may have been tempted to put together another "Operation Northwoods" type of plot or something.

In case you're unfamiliar, "Operation Northwoods" was a top secret Pentagon plan that was submitted to Defense Secretary McNamara in 1962. The scheme called for the staging of actual 'terrorist' attacks, including airline hijackings and crashes, against U.S. civilian and military targets in order to deceive the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Fidel Castro. The plan was flatly rejected by President Kennedy, infuriating those in the Pentagon who had devised it.

Kennedy was assassinated a couple months later by an alleged lone nut for no apparent reason.

Oh, oh. Now I've done it. I've violated the "Conspiracy Theory Dictum" by combining three or more conspiracy theories into a common narrative. The Dictum (which was formulated by a team of top psychiatrists after years of study) states that most people can handle one conspiracy; a few can manage a couple; but very, very few can handle three or more interconnected conspiracy theories without fusing out and reverting to a vacuous numb-like "that can't possibly be true, so please stop bothering me about it" state.

A troubling thought just came to me. If one takes into account the unavoidable 'please go away now' consequence of the "Conspiracy Theory Dictum," then why wouldn't a truly devious person or group of persons, figure out a way to use the Dictum to their advantage?

For instance, they could orchestrate their goals in such a way that an outsider would have to consider multiple interrelated 'conspiracy theories' in order to uncover what they are or have been up to.

The result? They would, by definition, be free to do whatever they wanted, no matter how outrageous, with very little oversight whatsoever from the general public. In fact, the more outrageous their plans and actions, and the bigger the lies they tell to mask them, the less likely people would be to suspect or entertain any accusations against them!

The "Conspiracy Theory Dictum" is the perfect cover! It's unlikely they would ever be caught or stopped!

Now that's what I would call a brilliantly devious plan.

All I can say is . . . it's a good thing we in the United States do not have a group of people like that to contend with right now.