Three Dominican nuns whose Plowshares direct action last fall damaged a Minuteman III missile silo in Northern Colorado were finally sentenced for their "crime" this past month. Kitsap County anti-nuclear activist Jackie Hudson received the lightest of the three sentences, which ranged from 30 to 41 months; with time already served and more off for "good behavior," the three could all be out in a couple of years.

That's good news, considering that the trial itself was a farce, with the trio not allowed to present any of their arguments that this country's burgeoning use and development of weapons of mass destruction is itself a far greater crime, both in international law and by any sane sort of moral reckoning. Instead, federal prosecutors wanted the presumably dangerous terrorist nuns--who range in age from 56 to 68--jailed for 30 years. The government's outrageous conduct and the nuns' own eloquent, articulate, principled stand made them something akin to folk heroes in Colorado, where their case was front page news. Their action serves as inspiration--and a pointed reminder that in these horrific times, we all need to be taking some risks to make our world a saner place. Jackie and her cohorts took tremendous risks, and they deserve our admiration and thanks for having done so. --Geov Parrish

Yet another horrid Bush Administration appointment deserves far more scrutiny and publicity than it's getting, and this one has some local connections. Karen Tandy, a federal prosecutor who is the new Bush choice to head the DEA, is a zealous War On Drugs crusader who has gotten her prosecutorial hand slapped on several occasions for violating the rights of defendants. A recent Nation article outlines several cases from her stint as a federal prosecutor in Virginia.

Turns out Tandy also worked that job for a while in Washington state. More importantly, one of her distinguishing policy "credentials" is her unrelenting hostility to marijuana in general and medical marijuana in particular. Tandy has pledged to carry on and even escalate the feds' war against medical marijuana programs in California and Oregon; several other states, including Washington, have also passed initiatives legalizing marijuana use for medical purposes, and it's one issue on which the Bush crowd's crowing about "states' rights" grows notably silent.

So here we have an appointee with a consistent record of misconduct and a pronounced zealousness for a drug war that has miserably failed to curb drug use, put a generation of nonviolent offenders in prison for up to life, and bankrupted states in the process. Despite this, or maybe because of it, Tandy has sailed through her Senate hearings with nary a critical question or word. The headlines may suggest that Democratic and Republican lawmakers hate each other, but when it comes to consigning the lives of ordinary people to oblivion, everyone on the Hill is all warm and fuzzy and palsy-walsy. If a Clinton appointee had a record on, say, pro-choice policies that was half as strident as Tandy's anti-pot jihad, Republicans would have brought the whole Senate to a standstill to block the nomination. For Tandy and scores of other Bush hires, the Dems have instead been too busy blowing wet kisses to care.--G.P.

SPECIAL:

Selections from the 9-11 Report by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees

Factual Findings

4. From at least 1994, and continuing into the summer of 2001, the Intelligence Community received information indicating that terrorists were contemplating, among other means of attack, the use of aircraft as weapons.

5.c. The Intelligence Community obtained information indicating that an individual named "Khaled" at an unknown location had contacted a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East. The Intelligence Community reported some of this information, but did not report all of it. Some of it was not reported because it was deemed not terrorist-related.

5.d. This Joint Inquiry confirmed that these same two future hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had numerous contacts with a long time FBI counterterrorism informant in California and that a third future hijacker, Hani Hanjour, apparently had more limited contact with the informant.

5.e. On July 10, 2001, an FBI Phoenix field office agent sent an "Electronic Communication" to 4 individuals in the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) and two people in the Usama Bin Ladin Unit (UBLU) at FBI headquarters, and to two agents on International Terrorism squads in the New York Field Office. In the communication, the agent expressed his concerns, based on his first-hand knowledge, that there was a coordinated effort underway by Bin Ladin to send students to the United States for civil aviation-related training. He noted that there was an "inordinate number of individuals of investigative interest" in this type of training in Arizona and expressed his suspicion that this was an effort to establish a cadre of individuals in civil aviation who would conduct future terrorist activity....The communication generated little or no interest at either FBI Headquarters or the FBI's New York field office.

5.f. In August 2001, the FBI's Minneapolis field office, in conjunction with the INS, detained Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national who had enrolled in flight training in Minnesota....personnel at FBI Headquarters, including the Radical Fundamentalism Unit and the National Security Law Unit, as well as agents in the Minneapolis field office, misunderstood the legal standard for obtaining a [search warrant (ed.)] under FISA. As a result, FBI Minneapolis Field Office personnel wasted valuable investigative resources trying to connect the Chechen rebels to al-Qa'ida.

5.i. Prior to September 11, the Intelligence Community had information linking Khalid Shaykh Mohammed (KSM), now recognized by the Intelligence Community as the mastermind of the attacks, to Bin Ladin, to terrorist plans to use aircraft as weapons, and to terrorist activity in the United States.

Systemic Findings

6. Agencies within the Intelligence Community experienced backlogs in material awaiting translation, a shortage of language specialists and language-qualified field officers, and a readiness level of only 30% in the most critical terrorism-related languages used by terrorists.

13. (Censored)

14. Senior US military officials were reluctant to use US military assets to conduct offensive counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan, or to support or participate in CIA operations directed against al-Qa'ida prior to September 11. At least part of this reluctance was driven by the military's view that the Intelligence Community was unable to provide the intelligence needed to support military operations.

Related Findings

17. Despite intelligence reporting from 1998 through the summer of 2001 indicating that Usama Bin Ladin's terrorist network intended to strike inside the United States, the United States Government did not undertake a comprehensive effort to implement defensive measures in the United States.

The full report can be found at http://datacenter.ap.org/wdc/911report.pdf