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The Republican Party has reduced its political platform to two planks - virulent, reactionary opposition to anything Barack Obama does, and rooting for another 9/11-style terrorist attack against the United States.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has all but promised such an attack, which he and his cohorts will gleefully blame on the weakness of the Democrats. At least in their own minds, they will then ride that attack to political victory in 2010 or 2012.

That should give us all pause if and when such a horrible attack occurs. Let's make certain we analyze it with a classical police investigative strategy - determine who benefits from the crime, and consider them suspects.

The issue here is not simply "lone wolf" attacks on abortion doctors, or death threats like the recent one against journalist David Sirota.

During John McCain's presidential campaign, his top national security advisor Charlie Black stated a terrorist attack "would be good for him (McCain)."

Former CIA official Michael Scheuer recently stated on Fox's Glenn Beck show that "the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

But Republicans, despite their angry rhetoric, would never stoop so low as to ally themselves with U.S.-hating, terrorist-supporting Islamic extremists - or would they?

Yes they would. They did it once before.

For those too young to remember the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s, it went something like this:

The Reagan administration desperately wanted to help the right-wing Contras overthrow the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, but wiser minds in the U.S. Congress prohibited it.

So the Reagan administration made a secret and illegal deal with the militant, U.S.-hating Islamic government of Iran.

You remember, the fundamentalist Islamic state that only a few years earlier had seized the American Embassy in Tehran, taking our citizens hostage. The one the U.S. State Department officially listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. The one we fear may now be working on a nuclear weapon.

The deal basically made Iran the middleman in arming the Contras - in effect a terrorist group - in effort to hide the Reagan administration's role.

When caught helping the civilian-slaughtering Contras, Reagan famously remarked, "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." Showing that Republicans have always been flexible when it comes to aiding terrorists.

So working with Islamic militants to violate the U.S. Constitution is nothing new to Republicans.

If elements within the Republican Party wanted to make Cheney's prediction of a terrorist attack come true, they have the contacts to do so.

Some branch of Halliburton or the former Blackwater or some other even more secret company would approach a friendly Middle East government - or its intelligence agency - to broker a quiet deal.

Private U.S. money and support would go to the government, which in turn would pass it on to some obscure militant group, perhaps with links to Al Qaeda.

From then on, the militants would find themselves incredibly lucky. Security would be slack the day they entered the country; vehicles and explosives would become magically available. The militants would all die in the attack, and the Republicans would ride the violence back to power, able to quash any embarrassing investigations.

Paranoid? Perhaps. But listening to the shrillness on the right, the rising level of threats and domestic political violence, and the Republican Party's obsession with a terrorist attack, it's not a scenario we can rule out.

If, god forbid, such an attack ever comes, first identify the attackers. Second, determine who benefits. Then investigate them very, very thoroughly.

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