No, I’m not referring to this blog, but to what our codpiece in chief refers to as our “War on Terror.” This excellent article drives home just how vast our failure on the terror front actually is, and how Bush continues to lie about it, making grandiose claims of success when the reality on the ground is altogether different. One by one, it picks apart the “success stories” so loudly touted by the government’s noise machine and exposes the myths. For all the noise, there are no convictions to speak of, no proof of Al Qaeda cells in America, no evidence of any benefits derived from the “War on terror.”

[T]he only criminal convicted for a terrorist act since September 11 is the shoe bomber Richard Reid, captured not through any preventive initiative of the government but because an alert flight attendant noticed a strange-looking man trying to set fire to his shoe. Three people have been convicted of conspiracy to engage in terrorist conduct. Zacarias Moussaoui pleaded guilty in April 2005 to six counts of conspiracy to attack the United States—but of course he was captured not through any post–September 11 “preventive paradigm,” but one month before those attacks occurred. Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver, allegedly an associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with a single acetylene torch, a plot that raises more questions about Faris’s sanity than about US national security. And Ahmed Abu Ali was convicted in November 2005 of conspiring to kill President Bush while Abu Ali was studying abroad in Saudi Arabia. The only person with whom he allegedly discussed the plot was killed by the Saudis, and Abu Ali’s conviction rested solely on a confession that he claims was extracted from him by Saudi security services through torture, a practice for which they are well known….

What can be known is that the administration’s tactics—a curious amalgam of outmoded thinking and dangerous new ideas—have created unprecedented levels of distrust toward US law enforcement within the Arab and Muslim communities here as well as intense anti-Americanism abroad. The administration is accurately perceived as unfairly targeting innocent Arabs and Muslims, using coercion against them preemptively and without a solid case, and disregarding fundamental principles of the rule of law and human rights. In the long run the resentment provoked by these measures is the greatest threat to our national security, and the most likely source of the next attack.

Lots of details about stories that were announced with much fanfare only to disintegrate later on. And oh, that government web site. A sea of talking points and vacuous slogans, with some slippery half-truths thrown in for good measure. Thank you very much, Karen Hughes.