BATTLEFIELD USA

That most neocon of all former CIA directors, Woolsey the Woolly Thinker, asserted to a Senate committee investigating Dubya's domestic spying program yesterday that the entire United States is now a battlefield.

And a former CIA director, R. James Woolsey, who served under President George H.W. Bush, said the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 transformed all of the United States into a battlefield, and that Congress could not restrict a president's constitutional power to conduct war as the commander in chief sees fit.

"Unlike the Cold War, our intelligence requirements are not just overseas," Woolsey said. "The country has been invaded, though of course not occupied, and defending against an invasion is at the heart of the president's powers."

Following this logic, does Woolsey propose that all civil power now resides with the president? That he can override state and local law as well as federal in the execution of his holy war on terror? Boy, that was one hell of an invasion, wasn't it? Less than two dozen invaders facing a population of 300 million? Again with the upside-down-speak! It wasn't an invasion, it was a terrorist attack. One attack, not a series. It was a suicide mission. Finis.

Still, Robert Levy, a senior fellow in constitutional studies with the libertarian Cato Institute, sought to preserve a distinction between "real" battlefields, such as the Afghanistan war zone, and the threat of terrorism at home.

I have HAD ENOUGH of Bush administration/neocon fear-mongering. Wake up, America. The pseudo-cowboy president many of you profess to admire has spent his entire administration telling you you are a weak sister, that little scary freedom-haters are going to attack your family, destroy your country, and make you pray in mosques. He doesn't stand up and swat away Al Qaeda like so many annoying pests, he instills them with super-human powers and inflates their threats to a degree that they seem more terrifying than the old Communist boogeyman. There are perhaps hundreds of hard-core Al Qaeda -- certainly the number does not exceed the small thousands. They are not backed by any state. They are not enough of a threat to cause BushCo to secure our borders, inspect cargo containers, or back aggressive actions to prevent proliferation of WMD.

They're just effective as a Damocles sword in getting Bush what he wants: expanded presidential powers, limits on American civil liberties, and leverage for his domestic agenda with cowardly politicos who don't want to be accused of being soft on terrorism.

I refuse to view my country as a battleground. It is home. And if it IS a battleground, Messrs. Woolsey, Bush and Cheney, then what does that say about your current raison d'etre for Middle East interventionism, i.e., "We're fighting them over there so we won't have to fight them here."

Tags: illegal NSA spying, James Woolsey, presidential war powers