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It was a little amusing that Fox News contributor Wayne Simmons this weekend attacked WikiLeaks as "a terrorist organization that uses the First Amendment of the United States to hide behind."

Talk about projection -- for anyone associated with Fox News.

Because Glenn Beck has made it perfectly clear on his Fox News show this week that he has no intention whatsoever of backing down from his demonization and scapegoating of the Tides Foundation on Fox, even after one of his TV acolytes, ginned up by Beck's repeated smears and attacks on Tides, engaged Oakland police in a massive shootout that wounded two police officers, en route to a planned terrorist attack on Tides' Bay Area offices that no doubt would have left a number of innocent people dead had he not been apprehended beforehand.

Indeed, all this week he stepped it up: For much of the week, he pretended that the shootout hadn't even happened, refusing to even mention it in segments featuring Netroots Nation panel remarks in which the planned terrorist attack was the de facto context. On Wednesday, as you can see above, he continued to smear Tides' work by claiming it promotes an ideology identical to that held by the Weather Underground. Then on Friday, he made up his own "facts" in order to compare it to a sniper shooting in Oakland that had no known political component.

Make no mistake: Glenn Beck has been inciting acts of terrorist violence, and the Byron Williams case clearly establishes it -- even though it is far from the first such case. It in fact was preceded by several similar cases in which the dehumanizing rhetoric, scapegoating and conspiracist smears promoted by Fox clearly played a powerful role in the violence that ensued:

-- Jim David Adkisson's shooting attack on a Knoxville Unitarian church. Adkisson left behind a manifesto that repeated numerous right-wing talking points generated by Fox commentators and specifically cited a Bernard Goldberg book. His library at home was stocked with books by Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage.

-- Richard Poplawski's shooting of three Pittsburgh police officers, because he believed a conspiracy theory that President Obama intended to take Americans' guns away from them, and he reportedly believed the cops had arrived to carry it out. Poplawski, a white supremacist, liked to post Beck videos about FEMA concentration camps to the Stormfront comments board.

-- Scott Roeder's assassination of Dr. George Tiller. Roeder was heavily involved in Operation Rescue and avidly read its newsletters -- which featured weekly pieces from Bill O'Reilly, including several attacking Tiller as a "baby killer" -- and its website, which liked to feature O'Reilly videos attacking Dr. Tiller. Indeed, O'Reilly had indulged a high-profile and unusually obsessive (not to mention vicious) jihad against Tiller, resulting in 42 such attacks on Tiller, 24 of which referred to him generically as a "baby killer."

The Byron Williams case was functionally a shot across Fox News' bow: a warning that it is playing with extreme fire by allowing Beck to recklessly demonize specific targets and to inflame his audience against them by imputing the most extreme and nefarious motives to them. In the case of Tides, Beck has been claiming all along that they are trying to "brainwash your children" -- a charge that always raises extremely visceral reactions.

If Fox allows this continue, then eventually someone -- someone who eats, breathes and lives Fox News, as so many right-wingers do these days -- is going to succeed. Eventually, someone is going to walk into (or drive up to) the offices of some group that Beck has singled out as being part of a nefarious progressive "cancer" that is "destroying America" -- whether it is the Tides Foundation, or the ACLU, or the SEIU, someone at MSNBC, or from ACORN -- and shoot the place up or set off a bomb.

And then not just Glenn Beck, but Fox News and all its affiliates, are going to have blood on their hands. And there will not be any hiding it or pretending otherwise.

Beck wants to pretend that all he's done is "discuss" the Tides Foundation -- but in fact he's consistently portrayed them as nefarious key players in the progressive "conspiracy" to "destroy America from within", and he's cast them in a particularly slimy role: propagandizing your unsuspecting children. Is it any wonder someone decided to "take them out"?

We can talk until we're blue in the face about how profoundly irresponsible Fox and Beck are being. But matters have reached the point now that it is necessary to call them all out as an organization that is aiding and abetting domestic terrorism.

It must stop.

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It seems that the Fox talkers who have been attacking President Obama this week for allegedly being "soft on terror" -- particularly Wayne Simmons, who sneeringly referred to Obama as 'the boy king' earlier this week -- are especially upset that two of the key leaders of Al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, the organization claiming credit for the attempt attack on Flight 253, are men who were released from Guantanamo Bay and sent back to Yemen.

Simmons was on Fox's Your World yesterday with David Asman, and they both were appalled that these men had been freed.

Asman: You stay in touch with all your exes in the military and intelligence community. What's the morale like there, where people see prime targets being released back where they can do damage?

Simmons: It's pathetic. It's low. It's horrible. It's frustrating. It's every adjective you can think of to describe the work that these outstanding men and women in the intelligence community and in the military put into tracking these guys down and killing them or capturing them. And then end up now like maybe the SEALs do. So, a lot of men and women are questioning, just where is the leadership? Or why is there a lack of leadership? They are putting their lives on the line, grabbing these guys, only to have them turned loose again. It's pathetic.

But there was one little fact missing from the entire discussion: These two men were released by the Bush administration and returned to Yemen to participate in "art therapy."

In fact, it was none other than Dick Cheney himself -- who only the day before was similarly attacking Obama -- who secretly released the men. As Eric Massa pointed out:

"I would remind the American public that the apparent leaders of the al Qaeda cell in Yemen were 2 terrorists who were released by Vice President Cheney in secret. I think there's a level of accountability that has to be levied personally on the vice president," Massa said in an interview. "He is personally responsible for that."

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The hysteria has reached new heights by FOX News as they spin the Pelosi outrage as far as it can go. How far is that? The CIA will just stop working and America may be attacked because of her. Wingnut Du Jour, ex-CIA agent and FOX Newser Wayne Simmons said that Pelosi has. What is the impact of Nancy Pelosi saying that the CIA lied to her and members of Congress? We're doomed!!!

Simmons: The best thing about not being a diplomat or a politician is that I can tell you that first and foremost Nancy Pelosi, the woman whose third in line to be President of the United States, the Speaker of the House is a pathological liar and her attacks on the CIA, the release of the CIA memos has so sent a chill through the CIA to guys like me who were not only interrogated in our entire careers, but ran interrogations and interviews that I can assure you that we are not going to go the extra mile EVER in this climate to secure information and intelligence that's going to protect the Untied States so understand that the American people need to, this has directly affected the National Security of the United States.

Martha MacCallum: The Church Commission in the seventies and eighties, a lot of people think that those cracked down on our intelligence and made them very hesitant to do the job that hey needed to do and that those failures may have led to September eleventh.

Martha MacCallum, the FOX host, actually blames the Church Committee for the 9/11 attacks, and Simmons agrees. They always bring it back to 9/11. The FISA courts were instituted because of the Church Committee.

Simmons paints the CIA as one big chickenshit outfit that can't take a little criticism from the big bad Nancy Pelosi. They will even abandon their posts and let terrorists attack the country because their itty-bitty feelings are so hurt. I say they should all quit right now if Simmons is correct.

This clip also speaks volumes about the type of agent Simmons is. Don't call me names or I'll let Cleveland get bombed. Of course the CIA would never do that, but that's how coordinated this attack of Pelosi is by the entire right wing. Doesn't the media ever get tired of the robotic responses by the Right whenever they want to push a narrative to the American people?

Wayne Simmons was on H&C last night (8/24) to help sanitize Pat Robertson's remarks. Not only did he endorse Hugo's hit, but called for more assassinations.

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Colmes: If we're going to kill him, aren't there some dictators even a little more dangerous to us. Komenhi in Iran, should we kill him? Should we kill Kim Jong II in North Korea, should we knock those guys off too?

Simmons: Yea absolutely...

Jon Stewart had funny quotes from some other talking heads about Robertson (Update-I pulled it off until I study more.), but to advocate murder is ridiculous and only exposes the US to more damning accusations and possible retribution. I thought we have to watch what we say or we'll hurt our troops. Oh right, that's only if you're a Democrat.

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