Bush: No one is safe, ever

WASHINGTON, D.C. (AP)---Seeking to rally support for his endless, useless war, President Bush released intelligence asserting that Osama bin Laden in 2005 ordered the creation of a terrorist unit to go back in time and hit targets outside Iraq, including the United States. Their first big challenge: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which were apparently hit by Sunni suicide squads from the future on September 11, 2001.

The information was declassified by the White House on Tuesday so Bush could use it Wednesday to look like a big shot when he gives the commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy. It expands on a classified bulletin the Homeland Security Department issued in March 2005, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the Past."

The bulletin, which warned that bin Laden had enlisted Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his senior operative in Iraq, currently dead, to plan potential strikes in the recent history of the United States, was described at the time as terrifying but not comprehensible. It did not prompt the administration to raise its national terror alert level, as there were no imminent elections.

Bush, who is battling Congress over spending for his savage, pointless war in Iraq, will highlight U.S. successes in foiling terrorist plots unless they involve commercial airliners and/or time travel. He plans to use the intelligence to argue that terrorists remain a threat to Americans throughout history, said Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House temporal security adviser.

"We know from the intelligence community that al-Zarqawi welcomed the tasking and claimed he already had some good proposals, as well as access to a time-travel device, possibly through A.Q. Khan," Townsend said.

She said the information was declassified because the intelligence community has tracked all leads from the information, and that the players were all either dead, in U.S. custody, or caught in some kind of loop.

The Bush White House has habitually fabricated and disseminated sensitive intelligence information whenever they need to terrorize a credulous electorate. On a few occasions, the declassified materials were intended to be proof that terrorists see Iraq as a critical staging ground for global operations into the past, and always will have.

Democrats and other critics have accused Bush of selectively declassifying intelligence, including portions of a sensitive National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, to justify the U.S.-led invasion on grounds Saddam Hussein intended to travel through time and join forces with Hitler. That assertion proved false, for now.