Voter Test

[HFishbine]

(That's a Letter to the Editor)

In reply to a republican who wrote to our paper today that there should be a test as a prerequisite to voting, because "The last thing Moore and the Democrats want is for their constituency to start thinking for themselves and basing their decisions on historical fact."

I'm going to write that I agree with him and propose a few questions. Help me add to the list. Here are a few to get us started:

1) Which nationality was NOT represented among the 9/11 hijackers? Egyptian, Algerian, Yemeni, Saudi Arabian or Iraqi?

2) True or false. Dick Cheney still holds stock options for Halliburton?


Your turn...

[iamtechus]

1. Oh boy a test!

3) What legislation outlawed voter tests?
















Answer: 1965 Voting Rights Act

[HFishbine]

2. That's a good one!

Any others?

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. True or False, if an elected official is not a member of the same

party as you are, (s)he is not obligated to assist you in any way should you require his or her help.

[gator_in_Ontario]

4. If you are

a)white
b)very white
c)other than white

will your vote be blocked in Palm Beach County?

[HFishbine]

5. Funny, but...

I'm trying to keep them in line with factual data.

[oldcoot]

6. Some additional questions

1) Large stockpiles of WMD have been found in Iraq. (T/F)

2) The United States has learned its lesson from its past dealings with Saddam Hussein and no longer supports brutal dictators. (T/F)

3) The United States successfully defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan making Afghanistan a stable democracy. (T/F)

4) Which of the following former U.S. presidents helped arm Saddam Hussein?
a) Richard Nixon
b) Gerald Ford
c) Ronald Reagan
d) Bill Clinton

[redqueen]

7. The Bush Administration was warned that Al Qaeda would

pose the greatest danger to our country. Knowing this, the Bush Administration held its first meeting addressing this thread in which month?

a) January
b) February
c) March
d) April
e) May
f) June
g) July
h) August
i) September

[HFishbine]

9. Har!

That's a great one!

[HFishbine]

10. Redqueen

It was September, right? (The 6th as I recall). Also, can you give me the specifics of by whom and when they were warned about Al Queda?

[redqueen]

11. Links here

The first meeting (apparently there were two) was in July.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&startpos=400#a070301principals

Bush's Cabinet-level national security leadership discuss terrorism in a meeting. This group of “Principals” —National Security Advisor Rice, CIA Director Tenet, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Shelton and others—meet around 100 times before 9/11 to discuss a variety of topics, but this is one of only two times when terrorism is discussed (see also September 4, 2001 (C)). This lack of discussion stands in sharp contrast to the Clinton administration where this group meets and discusses terrorism every two to three weeks after mind-1998 and nearly every day during times of heightened terrorist concerns.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2002/ap062802.html


The next one was in September.

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeperiod=2001%20-%200:05am%2011%20Sept%202001&timeline=complete_911_timeline&startpos=200
President Bush's Cabinet-rank advisers discuss terrorism for one of only two times before 9/11 (see July 3, 2001). National Security Advisor Rice chairs the meeting; neither President Bush nor Vice President Cheney attend. Counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke later says that in this meeting, he and Tenet speak passionately about the al-Qaeda threat. No one disagrees that the threat is serious. Secretary of State Powell outlines a plan to put pressure on Pakistan to stop supporting al-Qaeda. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld appears to be more interested in other terrorist concerns, like Iraq. The only debate is over whether to fly the armed Predator drone over Afghanistan to attack al-Qaeda (see separate September 4, 2001 (E)) Clarke's earlier plans to “roll back” al-Qaeda (see December 20, 2000 and January 25, 2001) have been discussed and honed in many meetings (see March 7, 2001 (B), April 30, 2001, May 2001 (L), Early June 2001 (B), June 27-July 16, 2001) and are now presented as a formal National Security Presidential Directive. The directive is “apparently” approved, though the process of turning it into official policy is still not done (see September 10, 2001). There is later disagreement over just how different the directive presented now is from Clarke's earlier plans. For instance, some claim the directive aims not just to “roll back” al-Qaeda, but to “eliminate” it altogether. However, Clarke notes that even though he wanted to use the word “eliminate,” the approved directive merely aims to “significantly erode.” The word “eliminate” is only added after 9/11. The Washington Post notes that the directive approved on this day “did not differ substantially from Clinton's policy.” Time magazine later comments, “The fight against terrorism was one of the casualties of the transition, as Washington spent eight months going over and over a document whose outline had long been clear.” The primary difference between this and the earlier plans is more direct financial and logistical support to the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taliban groups. The plan also calls for drafting plans for possible US military involvement. “But those differences were largely theoretical; administration officials told the <9/11 Commission's> investigators that the plan's overall timeline was at least three years, and it did not include firm deadlines, military plans, or significant funding at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.”



As for Berger's and Clark's warnings:

(Reich-wingers love to set up the 'plan' strawman. By saying there was no 'plan', they try to divert attention from the fact that they were warned, but apparently didn't take the threat seriously.)

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,333835,00.html

Could 9/11 Have Been Prevented?
Long before the tragic events of September 11th, the White House debated taking the fight to al-Qaeda. It didn't happen and soon it was too late. The saga of a lost chance


Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields, sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have been missed even by those who took part in it.

One such meeting took place in the White House situation room during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10 briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley.

Berger attended only one of the briefings-the session that dealt with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is." Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other subject." The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security Group (CSG), Clarke was known as a bit of an obsessive-just the sort of person you want in a job of that kind. Since the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on Oct. 12, 2000-an attack that left 17 Americans dead-he had been working on an aggressive plan to take the fight to al-Qaeda. The result was a strategy paper that he had presented to Berger and the other national security "principals" on Dec. 20. But Berger and the principals decided to shelve the plan and let the next Administration take it up. With less than a month left in office, they did not think it appropriate to launch a major initiative against Osama bin Laden. "We would be handing (the Bush Administration) a war when they took office on Jan. 20," says a former senior Clinton aide. "That wasn't going to happen." Now it was up to Rice's team to consider what Clarke had put together.

Berger had left the room by the time Clarke, using a Powerpoint presentation, outlined his thinking to Rice. A senior Bush Administration official denies being handed a formal plan to take the offensive against al-Qaeda, and says Clarke's materials merely dealt with whether the new Administration should take "a more active approach" to the terrorist group. (Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present.) Other senior officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations, however, say that Clarke had a set of proposals to "roll back" al-Qaeda. In fact, the heading on Slide 14 of the Powerpoint presentation reads, "Response to al Qaeda: Roll back." Clarke's proposals called for the "breakup" of al-Qaeda cells and the arrest of their personnel. The financial support for its terrorist activities would be systematically attacked, its assets frozen, its funding from fake charities stopped. Nations where al-Qaeda was causing trouble-Uzbekistan, the Philippines, Yemen-would be given aid to fight the terrorists. Most important, Clarke wanted to see a dramatic increase in covert action in Afghanistan to "eliminate the sanctuary" where al-Qaeda had its terrorist training camps and bin Laden was being protected by the radical Islamic Taliban regime. The Taliban had come to power in 1996, bringing a sort of order to a nation that had been riven by bloody feuds between ethnic warlords since the Soviets had pulled out. Clarke supported a substantial increase in American support for the Northern Alliance, the last remaining resistance to the Taliban. That way, terrorists graduating from the training camps would have been forced to stay in Afghanistan, fighting (and dying) for the Taliban on the front lines. At the same time, the U.S. military would start planning for air strikes on the camps and for the introduction of special-operations forces into Afghanistan. The plan was estimated to cost "several hundreds of millions of dollars." In the words of a senior Bush Administration official, the proposals amounted to "everything we've done since 9/11."

[kimchi]

8. Some good ones.

I don't have any to add, but I'd love to see the finished product. Methinks it could be quite useful for edumacating freeps.