The Enemy Within.

This is what a Consie Rat in a hat looks like.

Hat-tip to commenter Frank for pointing this out from “Unqualified Offerings”

Outraged Moderate got hold of Steven Cambone’s handwritten notes of his meeting with Donald Rumsfeld from the afternoon of September 11, 2001.

The notes confirm CBS News’ report of September 4, 2002 that, at that meeting, Rumsfeld was already thinking of using the atrocities as an excuse to go to war with Iraq. It’s important to stress: Rumsfeld is not wondering if Iraq did it; he’s wondering if it can look enough like Iraq did it to pin the blame there.

It can’t be stressed enough: the Pentagon was aflame; there was smoke pouring from a hole in the Pennsylvania fields and the World Trade Center complex was belching its ghastly cloud, and already our rulers were thinking not, who is to blame? but what can we get away with? What will the still-bubbling fat of the murdered serve to cook?…

The article he refers to is this from CBS News…

Plans For Iraq Attack Began On 9/11
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4, 2002

(CBS) CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

That's according to notes taken by aides who were with Rumsfeld in the National Military Command Center on Sept. 11 – notes that show exactly where the road toward war with Iraq began, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.

At 9:53 a.m., just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, and while Rumsfeld was still outside helping with the injured, the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden's operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.

The caller said he had "heard good news" and that another target was still to come; an indication he knew another airliner, the one that eventually crashed in Pennsylvania, was at that very moment zeroing in on Washington.

It was 12:05 p.m. when the director of Central Intelligence told Rumsfeld about the intercepted conversation.

Rumsfeld felt it was "vague," that it "might not mean something," and that there was "no good basis for hanging hat." In other words, the evidence was not clear-cut enough to justify military action against bin Laden.

But later that afternoon, the CIA reported the passenger manifests for the hijacked airliners showed three of the hijackers were suspected al Qaeda operatives.

"One guy is associate of Cole bomber," the notes say, a reference to the October 2000 suicide boat attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which had also been the work of bin Laden.

With the intelligence all pointing toward bin Laden, Rumsfeld ordered the military to begin working on strike plans. And at 2:40 p.m., the notes quote Rumsfeld as saying he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H." – meaning Saddam Hussein – "at same time. Not only UBL" – the initials used to identify Osama bin Laden.

Now, nearly one year later, there is still very little evidence Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks. But if these notes are accurate, that didn't matter to Rumsfeld.

"Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

So what?

Another piece of titanium-clad evidence that the Administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq for secret reasons of its own that long pre-dated 9/11. That they saw the slaughter of 3,000 civilians not as a cause for mourning, but as Christmas morning.

Partisan, Neocon ghouls that looked at the dust of the dead sifting down into the hair and cloths and food and tears of the living as manna from Heaven. A cornucopia of corpses on which they could feed and feed and feed.

The sadness is that this will change nothing.

To those of us who care about this country even a little but, the FOIA-ed proof of this Administration’s decision –- mere hours after the worst attacks on US soil in history and while the WTC and Pentagon pyres were still burning -- to cynically exploit 9/11 and pimp our grief and fear to further their own, private agenda is not exactly a surprise; just another underscore and exclamation point on a matter long settled.

And of course, to a Republican this is all irrelevant.

Anything crime that their Leadership committed before breakfast this morning is irrelevant.

And, of course, any crime after breakfast will be conspicuously ignored until tomorrow...by which time it will technically have occurred before today’s breakfast, which means that it has now become irrelevant.

Anything that involves facts or proof or causality is irrelevant.

Anything that has even the faintest whiff of criticism of the Dear Leader is irrelevant.

Anything that doesn’t come vomiting out of Ann Coulter’s lie-hole is irrelevant.

And this is because Republicans don’t give a shit about anything to do with this country that doesn’t affect them personally and directly, so that anything that doesn’t kick in their door in the middle of the night and ram the business end of a shotgun against their forehead is irrelevant.

So as the world falls apart around them because of the treachery of their leaders they will do what they always do: blame Bill Clinton and turn Rush up louder.

Because to remain a Republican in the Age of Dubya is side with criminals against your own country.