From, obviously, Guido Fawkes. I take some small credit for pointing him towards this article in Sploid.
The alleged U.K. terror plot has been investigated for months by British intelligence, and the idea that the airliner attacks were planned for today seems to be nothing more than political fabrication and media hysteria.
Tony Blair and George W. Bush even planned the terror freakout in a series of phone calls that began last Friday and continued through the weekend. Blair and Bush put the finishing touches on their diabolical operation in a phone call early Wednesday, the Associated Press revealed today.
That’s right: While millions of travelers are going through absolute hell today because of the sudden terror “news,” it was last week when the U.S. president and U.K. prime minister began their cold calculations on how to get the maximum political benefit from the months-old investigation.
“U.S. President George W. Bush seized on a foiled London airline bomb plot to hammer unnamed critics he accused of having all but forgotten the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,” AFP noted this afternoon.
“Weighed down by the unpopular war in Iraq, Bush and his aides have tried to shift the national political debate from that conflict to the broader and more popular global war on terrorism ahead of November 7 congressional elections.”
But the American warmongers are hardly alone in
needing a “terror boost” for their fading political fortunes. The timing of the hysteria was even more useful to Blair, who was on the verge of being thrown out of Downing Street last night.
“A Scottish MP last night quit the government in protest at Tony Blair’s handling of the Middle East crisis, amid warnings from ministers that the Prime Minister’s continuing support for American foreign policy could cost him his job,” the Scotsman reported this morning.
“Jim Sheridan, Labour MP for Paisley and Renfrewshire North, became the first to resign from a government post over the war. He quit as parliamentary private secretary to the Ministry of Defense, saying he could no longer accept that Scottish airports were being used to refuel United States planes carrying arms to Israel.”
The newspaper made it crystal clear that Blair had mere days left in power, with some 150 members of parliament demanding Blair’s enemy Jack Straw call the politicians back to London, even though they’re on summer break:
“His resignation came as ministers furious at Mr Blair’s handling of the crisis said they would push for an emergency recall of parliament in a maneuver they hoped would trigger the Prime Minister’s downfall.”
Unlike the theoretical “massacre” of the theoretical terror plot that will soon be exposed in the courts as another make-believe scheme, actual massacres continue uninterrupted in Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon.
At least 2,000 Iraqis were slaughtered in July alone, most in Sunni vs. Shiite violence that has exploded under the U.S. occupation. Baghdad continues to be the capital of death, but the bloodshed happens everywhere, every day, all the time. Today in Najaf, another religious shrine was blown up, leaving at least 35 dead and another 100 hurt.
Morons and Patsies
If the suspected terrorists are anything like the amateur morons arrested recently in Toronto, London and Florida, the “terror plot” will eventually be revealed to be nothing more than idiot fantasies encouraged by the usual intelligence agents.
While Muslim nations will continue be bombed by the United States and Britain, travelers are stranded all over the Western World and England’s beleaguered Pakistanis can expect a new round of bogus terror raids, constant police harassment and attacks by neo-fascist skinheads, Bush and Blair can expect a solid boost for their bloodstained political parties.
The only other beneficiaries of today’s insanity are the “homeland security” and private-army industries, the defense contractors and the personal-hygiene business — having taken our corkscrews, pocket knives and fingernail clippers, airport goons are now seizing shampoo, deodorant, hair gel, toothpaste and pretty much everything else in your toiletries kit.
Not that you can even have a carry-on with your toothpaste and other essentials. As of today, British airports have banned all carry-ons.
Miserable passengers have been photographed standing around with nothing more than a clear plastic baggie holding their tickets and passports.
It’s the world of the future, and it sucks.
And you have to endure it iPodless. There is no god, people.
Here’s Guido‘s post:
“It’s the Wolf! It’s the Wolf!”
Facts:
- The tangible support of the U.S. and tacit support of the U.K. for Israel’s thrust into Lebanon has caused a political backlash for Bush and Blair.
- In Afghanistan a woefully under-equipped and politically mis-directed British military intervention is in tatters, the death toll is rising and British forces have been forced to reduce their risk in the face of rising casualties. Tory critics are angry.
- In Iraq senior U.S. military figures are openly describing the situation as one of increasing insurgency on the path to full-scale civil war.
- Political unease and outright opposition to the “war on terror” is rising, even from people like Guido, who supported the liberation of Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Blair might be on the beach in the Carribbean, but he is in a danger zone politically. The coming Labour party conference is the focus of malcontents and a source of instability. Thatcher and Gorbachev had coup attempts launched against them when they were out of the country. His internal opponents are now drowned out by the scare.
- Bush needed a security scare. Rove spins “the Democrats are soft on terror.”
Time for a terror boost…
The cast : an ongoing long-term investigation into terror suspects. Extras : thousands of held up holidaymakers.
Gimmicks : this time it is liquid bombs, following on from the previous Ricin, Red Mercury and Anthrax Powder scares.
Show date : silly season when the media is desperate, prior to party conference and the symbolic 9/11 anniversary.
Playing : all news channels, front pagesAsk yourself, why now? Do you really believe that a huge terrorist conspiracy was under way?
Or that, if it was, it was alone?
From a friend:
Thought you’d all appreciate the attached photo. It’s of a middle-aged woman, across from me, in seat 1C, knitting what appears to be the beginnings of, I dunno… Perhaps a sweater or something.
Anyhow, security was really, really tight this morning, on my flight from Newark to Phoenix. After declaring on my future child that I had no liquid beverages with me, and being subjected to explosive detection screening on my laptop, (yet, of course, my parachute went through security and didn’t raise as much as an eyebrow, sigh…) I finally got onto the plane and settled in. About an hour and a half into my flight, I awoke to some commotion…
Apparently, the Air Marshall on the flight had noticed the woman in the photo was knitting – He went up to her and told her to put the needles down. She asked why – He again, with much more force, demanded that she put the needles down! She again asked why, as it was just yarn, the needles were short, etc…
And then – to my and everyone else’s surprise, he took his gun from his holster, and knocked the woman out COLD with the butt of the gun. Now, if you look at the photo, this woman is in her 40’s, perhaps even 50’s – I didn’t think she was a threat.
He tied her hands while she was unconscious, and kept her tied up until we landed, without further incident, in Phoenix.
As we all deplaned, I had a moment to ask the Air Marshall why he felt the need to knock this poor woman unconscious! I mean, she was KNITTING!
The Marshall looked at me with a dead serious face, and said, “Son, we live in a time of war. We don’t know who our friends are, and who our enemies are. Sure, she looked like she might have been knitting a sweater. But think back to where those terrorists who were arrested yesterday were all trained.”
I told him I didn’t understand what one had to do with the other.
He said, “Son, think about it:
SHE COULD HAVE BEEN KNITTING AN AFGHAN!”
from the Guardian today. This is one of those articles with which my thoughts don’t quite align (like the anti-UN initiative from earlier), but it’s extremely interesting nonetheless. I shall have to mull this over for awhile.
Popular trust in government is a necessary foundation of a society’s defences against terrorism. We need to believe we are being told the truth and that our government is acting in good faith. Unfortunately there is now sufficient reason to be sceptical about who we should entrust our security to.
…the problem is not that his critics “don’t get” the terrorist threat, as the home secretary has put it, but that the government has, with the US, abandoned all the principles of effective counterterrorism. These were practised by the British against countless insurgencies. Whether or not you agree with Niall Ferguson and Gordon Brown about empire, it is instructive to review the five key principles that – usually – allowed imperial rule with minimum force.
First, ensure good coordination between security services and police. Karen DeYoung‘s indictment of the failure of the US security services to talk to each other in this week’s Washington Post is truly damning. By refusing to communicate, the US services render their, and by extension our, services less effective. We now know that US officials have a routine seat at Britain’s joint intelligence committee, a fact that one of its former chairmen told me makes it hard for the British state to think independently. Do US officials also sit in on the UK’s counterterror organisations, and if so how do they relate to the myriad, non-communicating services detailed by the Washington Post?
The other four principles are to deny the enemy a base, secure your own base, keep the political and moral high ground and address your opponents’ grievances.
Our leaders say there are no grievances to be addressed, despite the fact that the London bombers said they were motivated by the Iraq war and our security services warned that the occupation of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat.
Our moral high ground is preserved by a US attorney general who was promoted to this office after sanctioning the Guantánamo detention camp and the practices used at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The Islamist terrorists still have a base in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By shifting attention to Iraq after 9/11, we gave al-Qaida and the Taliban a respite for which British troops are now paying the price. And more people are prepared to provide tacit support to those fighting the US.
Our own base is now less secure than before 9/11, based on the number of actual and alleged threats, while our continued unnecessary dependence on oil makes our home base hostage to adverse regime change abroad. There are indeed those who do not get the terrorist threat.
Principal among them are the prime minister and his supporters.
I know Aldous Huxley and George Orwell wrote the originals, but this, from the Cato Institute via BoingBoing, is a very practical explanation of just how useful a state of terror can be to a government who wants to hang onto power when the people want to freshen up the litter box.
Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists
In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University’s John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism’s risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage — this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I’ve read since September 11th, 2001. The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.
Much of the current alarm is generated from the knowledge that many of today’s terrorists simply want to kill, and kill more or less randomly, for revenge or as an act of what they take to be The shock and tragedy of September 11 does demand a focused and dedicated program to confront international terrorism and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems sensible to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort by politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably and realistically about the terrorist context instead of playing into the hands of terrorists by frightening the public. What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.” Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled “a false sense of insecurity.”
raincoaster 
