The Purpose of Spin

...is to make you dizzy. So dizzy that you can't think.

Take, for example, this email sent to me by my STBESIL.* She's a lawyer for Smug County, competent enough to survive as a Democrat in a GOP-controlled government for the past fifteen years:

I received this interesting bit of information from a friend from work: The new law "now allows detainees to examine evidence that is used against them. They haven't been allowed to do this of late, but in the early nineties we allowed it in a tribunal against one of Osama's men. The intelligence was from Osama's satellite communications that we bugged. During the trial the evidence was leaked and as a result Osama's phones went dead; we didn't hear from him again till 9/11."

Is this last part of the information true?

Hokey Smokes! Who wants to drive the first truck through the logic loopholes? Here's what I wrote to her:

What?

Didn't hear from him again until 9/11? Do you mean him, personally? Like he never sent us Christmas cards again?

The Clinton administration had a plan in place for attacking him that was finalized in late November 2000. It was decided to hand off that plan, since there was going to be a new president from a new party in office. This was in response to the attack on the USS Cole, which was attacked on October, 2000, by agents of Osama bin Laden.

Didn't hear from him again? What about the report, entitled "bin Laden determined to strike US" that was given to-and ignored by--Rice, Rummy, and dubya's handlers in July of 2001? What about the briefing by Clarke and Tenant on bin Laden that was so urgently requested of Condoleeza Rice in June of 2001, but so yawningly attended that she didn't even remember being there, even though the State Department records show that it indeed happened?

Your friend's got the wrong copy of the GOP liebook. Right now, the argument is we knew plenty about bin Laden in the mid-nineties, but Clinton was too busy being a heterosexual horndog who liked women who were in their twenties* to pay attention to him.

Perhaps they meant that a specific cel phone line went dead? Wow. You mean we had a bin Laden operative--apparently, one high enough up in the ranks that he had direct contat with bin Laden--in custody, and had him on trial, and the trial was going on, and the communications system that bin Laden used to communicate with him was still active? How the hell did that happen? If I was a clandestine leader, and one of my operatives was captured or disappeared, the first thing I would do would be to shut down the communications pipeline to him as far back as possible.

In short, this is a crock of shit.

And since you are a lawyer, please advise me: is it standard practice to remove judicial instruments simply because security's been breached? There have been cases where juries have been tampered with. Does this mean we'll no longer have trials by jury?

Wait--don't answer that. I don't want to give Alberto any Ideas.

*as opposed to, say, a closeted homosexual who liked underage boys--in which case it's the boys' fault--just ask Matt Drudge or Rush Limbaugh.

There's got to be a pushback here. If nothing else, be sure to keep your heads while the GOP and its minions start throwing the crap around.

Yeharr

*Soon-To-Be-Ex-Sister-In-Law.