/11: He Saw It Coming
A career diplomat, Bremer was President Reagan’s ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism. A decade later he sat on the Gilmore commission. In 1999 another congressionally mandated panel, the National Commission on Terrorism, began a six-month study of America’s capacity to prevent and punish acts of terrorism. “Seriously deficient,” it would conclude. Bremer chaired this commission.
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“We concluded that the general terrorist threat is increasing,” Bremer said, “particularly because of a change in the motives of terrorist groups….We have seen a move from narrow political motivation to a broader ideological, religious, or apocalyptic motive for many terrorist groups–groups that are not attacking because they are trying to find a broader audience, but are acting out of revenge or hatred, or simply out of an apocalyptic belief that the end of the world is near.” The new terrorists, he said, weren’t interested in killing just enough innocent people to get noticed. For them it was the more dead the better.
Bremer’s remarks, somewhat abridged, survive in Terrorism: Informing the Public, the McCormick Tribune Foundation’s book-length report on the conference. By the time it was published, in 2002, that window of opportunity had slammed shut.
Air America disappeared suddenly last Wednesday from WNTD in Chicago and KBLA in Los Angeles, both owned by MultiCultural Radio Broadcasting of Manhattan. MultiCultural owner Arthur Liu claimed a check had bounced. The Tribune reported being told that the Air America rep overseeing the feed from New York was tossed out of WNTD by a MultiCultural representative who switched to a Spanish-language feed and changed all the locks.
He’s probably too nice to understand that talk radio doesn’t have to be useful and funny. The liberals who cling to Rhodes’s every word were starved for a slimer.
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