FDR THEY AIN'T

Excerpt from "George & Tony Get Their Al Qaeda Fix" by Greg Palast.

The cruel, evil jerks who blew up the London subway last week, despite appropriating al-Qaeda's name for their website and T-shirts, have about as much to do with al-Qaeda as a Beatles tribute band has to do with the Fab Four.

I'm not belittling the heartbreaking hideousness of this crime, but let's get the facts straight. If al-Qaeda is the Panzer Division of terrorism, these London bombers were terrorism's Cub Scouts. We're talking a few pounds of nitro wired to a clock -- a design badly copied off the Internet.

Al-Qaeda this ain't.

Blair knows it. And Bush knows it... because Blair and Bush are al-Qaeda junkies. They've sold us on everything from fingerprinting five-year olds to invading Baghdad to tolerating plummeting paychecks all on the slick line that we are under attack by a well-trained, well-armed, well-funded hidden army called al-Qaeda.

For Bush and Blair, organized terror's diminishing powers was a political problem -- until last week, when the al-Queda addicts of the White House and Downing Street got a new terror fix. Even if it wasn't the real al-Qaeda, it was enough for them to mainline into the body politic a big, fat dose of fear.

FDR calmed a nation when he said, "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." But the Bush and Blair slogan is, "We have nothing to sell but fear itself."

[Note: Greg Palast is the reporter who blew the lid off the Great Disenfranchisement Florida 2000. SEE: www.GregPalast.com.]