The War
on Terror
"From 2002 to the end of 2005, Al Qaeda carried out over 17 suicide and other
terrorist bombings, killing nearly 700 people – more attacks and victims than
in all the years before 9/11 combined. Most Americans would like to believe
that Western counter-terrorism efforts have weakened al Qaeda, but by the
measure that counts – the ability of the group to kill us – it is stronger
today than it was before 9/11.
We must understand that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism, and conduct the war accordingly."
The "War on Terror" is, let's face it, the replacement for the Cold War. I personally wouldn't have thought there was enough lipstick in the world to turn the al Qaeda pig into the Soviet bear, but I guess I misunderestimated the power of marketing.
addendum:
(6/22/06) Just back from 12 days out of the country, and sitting in the Atlanta airport on my return I was struck by just how hysterical America, or at least its government and media, has become over terrorism. I don't think there's any other word for it but hysterical. And I thought how it wasn't the Japanese Navy or the German Wehrmacht or the Soviet nuclear threat that did this, but 19 men with box cutters. And I couldn't help but wonder what the US will be like in the wake of the next 19.
I also thought how the Constitution, not to mention simple dignity, counted for nothing compared to the quite small chance of catching a terrorist by random searches that currently stop just short of stripping, while at the same time the 10 in 10 chance of inciting further terrorism by blindly stomping around the Moslem world is deemed an entirely acceptable risk. It's strikingly irresponsible.
addendum2:
TECO,
believe it or not, stands for Tampa Electrical Company. This is a power
company guy. Which I think raises the question, holy paraphernalia,
what do the real anti-terror guys look like? Are they actual robots?
Of course, terrorists don't target power plants anyway, they target people. Targeting infrastructure like power plants is what we do, though in doing so we actually manage to kill many more people than the terrorists. But we don't mean to. And this, on some very abstract plane, is what's really important. Maybe not so much for the people we kill, but it's important to us. Why? Because it's important that we be right. And how do we know we're right? Because we're Americans.
Discuss.
addendum3:
(8/13/06) The new political definition of terrorism- swarthy people with foreign sounding names trying to make a quick buck. How exactly the trio in question were going to blow up a bridge with a minivan full of cell phones remains at this writing a mystery. "Authorities believe the men were either selling the phones to make money for terrorism or using them for explosives". Yeah, must of been one or the other. You pack enough of them cell phones together, they'll blow a bridge clean out of the water.
The bridge that the trio of death took a picture of and therefore planned
to blow up.
No word yet on what charges are planned for the NOAA photographer.
addendum4:
(8/24/06) I speculated on this before the last election, but there has since emerged something of a consensus that bin Laden actually wanted Bush re-elected, and may well have tipped the balance. The election was principally about the "war on terror", but Bush quite possibly won the first because he was losing the second. I trust that's weird enough for everybody.
As Robert Parry writes-
"So, in fall 2004, with Bush fighting for his political life in a tight race against Democrat John Kerry, bin Laden took the risk of breaking nearly a year of silence to release a videotape denouncing Bush on the Friday before the U.S. election.
Bush's supporters immediately spun bin Laden's tirade into his "endorsement" of Kerry and pollsters recorded a jump of several percentage points for Bush, from nearly a dead heat to a five- or six-point lead. Four days later, Bush hung on to win a second term by an official margin of less than three percentage points. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis."]
The intervention by bin Laden - essentially urging Americans to reject Bush - had the predictable effect of driving voters to the President. After the videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts concluded that ensuring a second term for Bush was precisely what bin Laden intended.
"Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President," said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret "strategic analysis" after the videotape had dominated the day's news, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.
Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."
Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush's heavy-handed policies - such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the war in Iraq - were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.
"Certainly," Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."
As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts were troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them - such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected - remained untouched," Suskind wrote.
Even Bush recognized that his struggling campaign had been helped by bin Laden. "I thought it was going to help," Bush said in a post-election interview about the videotape. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush."
Bin Laden, a well-educated Saudi and a keen observer of U.S. politics, appears to have recognized the same point in cleverly tipping the election to Bush."
addendum5:
(10/23/07) Here's a story about how government agent MICHAEL TEMPLETON coerced a confession from an innocent man by threatening his family with torture, following which, believe it or not, the government actually charged the guy with lying because his "confession" sounded false, which of course it was, since the only real information the threat elicited was that the guy was willing to say anything to keep his family from being tortured, which seems to surprise some people. And what was the unfortunate individual supposed to have done? He supposedly had a radio to, and get this, help the 9/11 pilots find the World Trade Center. Which I recall being fairly easy to spot. But the real capper is that a federal court tried to declare the threats against the man's family a state secret after posting it on the internet.
Not making a word of that up.
addendum6:
(3/14/08) The government's terrorist watch list now has upwards of a million names on it, including a number of congressmen, war heroes, children, and dead people, plus every Robert Johnson and Gary Smith in the country.
Basically, the real problem with the Department of Homeland Security is that it is for the most part a giant brainless freedom destroying money pit.
We must understand that suicide terrorism results more from foreign occupation than Islamic fundamentalism, and conduct the war accordingly."
-Robert A. Pape, What
We've Learned About Suicide Terrorism Since 9/11
The "War on Terror" is an Orwellianism beyond Orwell. As its survivors
in Iraq and Afghanistan can tell you, war is terror.
The "War on Terror" has by every quantifiable measure been a "catastrophic
success", to use another of Bush's Oh Wellian additions to the language.
Like I wrote before the invasion of Afghanistan:
At
9:05 the White House Chief of Staff ... leaned in close to the President
and whispered:
"A second plane has hit the World Trade Centre. America is under attack."
"Rather than change our foreign policy to match
our principles we are now supposedly launching an open ended global war on
terrorism. The problem with a sweeping war on terrorism is that it won't be
like other failed delusional schemes like the war on poverty or the war on
drugs, because the word "war" will not in this case be a puffed up political
euphemism but an all too accurate description of a genuinely violent process
likely to generate enemies faster than it kills them, and if our government's
current saber rattling proves very much more than the transient political
posturing I expect or at least hope it to be and our latest war on terrorism
is indeed carried to the limits of our national capacity then it may well
bring such death and destruction as we cannot now imagine. Depending on how
vigorously we pursue it and how long it takes us to decide we've won, such
a war could quite possibly go nuclear or biological, and in any event the
end result will as with most wars likely be the cost." "A second plane has hit the World Trade Centre. America is under attack."
The "War on Terror" is, let's face it, the replacement for the Cold War. I personally wouldn't have thought there was enough lipstick in the world to turn the al Qaeda pig into the Soviet bear, but I guess I misunderestimated the power of marketing.
addendum:
(6/22/06) Just back from 12 days out of the country, and sitting in the Atlanta airport on my return I was struck by just how hysterical America, or at least its government and media, has become over terrorism. I don't think there's any other word for it but hysterical. And I thought how it wasn't the Japanese Navy or the German Wehrmacht or the Soviet nuclear threat that did this, but 19 men with box cutters. And I couldn't help but wonder what the US will be like in the wake of the next 19.
I also thought how the Constitution, not to mention simple dignity, counted for nothing compared to the quite small chance of catching a terrorist by random searches that currently stop just short of stripping, while at the same time the 10 in 10 chance of inciting further terrorism by blindly stomping around the Moslem world is deemed an entirely acceptable risk. It's strikingly irresponsible.
addendum2:
TECO,
believe it or not, stands for Tampa Electrical Company. This is a power
company guy. Which I think raises the question, holy paraphernalia,
what do the real anti-terror guys look like? Are they actual robots?Of course, terrorists don't target power plants anyway, they target people. Targeting infrastructure like power plants is what we do, though in doing so we actually manage to kill many more people than the terrorists. But we don't mean to. And this, on some very abstract plane, is what's really important. Maybe not so much for the people we kill, but it's important to us. Why? Because it's important that we be right. And how do we know we're right? Because we're Americans.
Discuss.
(8/13/06) The new political definition of terrorism- swarthy people with foreign sounding names trying to make a quick buck. How exactly the trio in question were going to blow up a bridge with a minivan full of cell phones remains at this writing a mystery. "Authorities believe the men were either selling the phones to make money for terrorism or using them for explosives". Yeah, must of been one or the other. You pack enough of them cell phones together, they'll blow a bridge clean out of the water.
Or, or another possibility is that the "authorities" are in this case a bunch of headline grabbing nitwits who couldn't find a real terrorist if one was biting them on the butt.
Hm. Looks kind of shifty.
Oh yeah. Definitely guilty.
How was this guy even loose?
Maybe just along for the ride.
KAAABOOM!
addendum3a:
(8/14/06) Uh ... yeah.
"(The FBI) said there was nothing illegal about buying
cell phones in bulk, but that profits from that kind of activity can be
suspicious".
Excuse me but "suspicious profits"? What does that even mean?
But not to worry. It's just the FBI.
The bridge that the trio of death took a picture of and therefore planned
to blow up.No word yet on what charges are planned for the NOAA photographer.
addendum4:
(8/24/06) I speculated on this before the last election, but there has since emerged something of a consensus that bin Laden actually wanted Bush re-elected, and may well have tipped the balance. The election was principally about the "war on terror", but Bush quite possibly won the first because he was losing the second. I trust that's weird enough for everybody.
As Robert Parry writes-
"So, in fall 2004, with Bush fighting for his political life in a tight race against Democrat John Kerry, bin Laden took the risk of breaking nearly a year of silence to release a videotape denouncing Bush on the Friday before the U.S. election.
Bush's supporters immediately spun bin Laden's tirade into his "endorsement" of Kerry and pollsters recorded a jump of several percentage points for Bush, from nearly a dead heat to a five- or six-point lead. Four days later, Bush hung on to win a second term by an official margin of less than three percentage points. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis."]
The intervention by bin Laden - essentially urging Americans to reject Bush - had the predictable effect of driving voters to the President. After the videotape appeared, senior CIA analysts concluded that ensuring a second term for Bush was precisely what bin Laden intended.
"Bin Laden certainly did a nice favor today for the President," said deputy CIA director John McLaughlin in opening a meeting to review secret "strategic analysis" after the videotape had dominated the day's news, according to Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine, which draws heavily from CIA insiders.
Suskind wrote that CIA analysts had spent years "parsing each expressed word of the al-Qaeda leader and his deputy, [Ayman] Zawahiri. What they'd learned over nearly a decade is that bin Laden speaks only for strategic reasons. ... Today's conclusion: bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."
Jami Miscik, CIA deputy associate director for intelligence, expressed the consensus view that bin Laden recognized how Bush's heavy-handed policies - such as the Guantanamo prison camp, the Abu Ghraib scandal and the war in Iraq - were serving al-Qaeda's strategic goals for recruiting a new generation of jihadists.
"Certainly," Miscik said, "he would want Bush to keep doing what he's doing for a few more years."
As their internal assessment sank in, the CIA analysts were troubled by the implications of their own conclusions. "An ocean of hard truths before them - such as what did it say about U.S. policies that bin Laden would want Bush reelected - remained untouched," Suskind wrote.
Even Bush recognized that his struggling campaign had been helped by bin Laden. "I thought it was going to help," Bush said in a post-election interview about the videotape. "I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden doesn't want Bush to be the President, something must be right with Bush."
Bin Laden, a well-educated Saudi and a keen observer of U.S. politics, appears to have recognized the same point in cleverly tipping the election to Bush."
addendum5:
(10/23/07) Here's a story about how government agent MICHAEL TEMPLETON coerced a confession from an innocent man by threatening his family with torture, following which, believe it or not, the government actually charged the guy with lying because his "confession" sounded false, which of course it was, since the only real information the threat elicited was that the guy was willing to say anything to keep his family from being tortured, which seems to surprise some people. And what was the unfortunate individual supposed to have done? He supposedly had a radio to, and get this, help the 9/11 pilots find the World Trade Center. Which I recall being fairly easy to spot. But the real capper is that a federal court tried to declare the threats against the man's family a state secret after posting it on the internet.
Not making a word of that up.
addendum6:
(3/14/08) The government's terrorist watch list now has upwards of a million names on it, including a number of congressmen, war heroes, children, and dead people, plus every Robert Johnson and Gary Smith in the country.
Basically, the real problem with the Department of Homeland Security is that it is for the most part a giant brainless freedom destroying money pit.
