Britain claims it caught 20 terrorist plotting to blow up lots and lots of airplanes, therefore the invasion of Iraq was a great idea.
You may have noticed Robert S. Mueller III, of the FBI, carefully linking the plotters to Al Qaeda, though he admits no proof of their association with Al Qaeda has been advanced by anyone. Responsibility, anyone? It doesn’t matter. It works. The letter writers to the New York Times insisted that this was obviously an Al Qaeda plot.
And once again we have sensational charges, gloating security czars, and that bizarre Republican insistence that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and Al Qaeda.
How easily the frightened are led.
As with almost all of the previous sensational thwartings of nefarious terrorist plots, there is no specific description of any particular actions by any individuals which actually took place. Yet. We might get such details. We might not. We might, in a few weeks or months or years, discover that we have another group of foolish Islamic would-be radicals shooting their mouths off in internet chat rooms, or getting informed on by dubious individuals with a vested interest in scoring with the cops.
The New York Times received numerous letters from pro-Bush people sneering at their editorialists and insisting that this proves that Bush is right to spy on Americans without warrants or congressional over-sight. These letters disturb me. They assume that the sensational charges are probably true. They seem to assume that confrontation and war-like militaristic gestures make us more secure. They definitely assume that we need to live in a police state because America is under siege by powerful enemies who stalk us at every turn, and that this was never the case before recently, and that the Soviets– are you ready for this?– were really a very mild threat compared to Al Qaeda.
They also buy into the absurd logic that no measure is too extreme if it there is even the most wildly improbable possibility that it might save one life. This is the ultimate in selective logic: it plays into the politics of the authorities, because they choose which absurdly improbable action they address, even if it saves only one life.
It makes me think we should have a “malaria alert”. Whenever there is a possibility of some child dying of malaria in Africa, we immediately embark on a host of bizarrely expensive and inconvenient measures. We spent tens of millions of dollars on pesticides and new hospital beds and vaccine development, and treatments. Don’t agree? Do you want to be the one responsible for a child dying of malaria when you could have prevented it? I suppose you believe there are no mosquitoes…
Women in Africa should form a committee and demand that their governments spend $1 billion erecting a giant, 3,000 foot tall mosquito, to commemorate all the children who died from malaria last year. You think that’s a strange idea? So you are in favor of children dying of malaria? It’s obvious that your child didn’t die of malaria, because you don’t understand. This is the right memorial. We must honor the memories of these children. This is a sacred bug. To question the need for this memorial is to buy into that defeatist attitude that somehow mosquitoes will just go away if we are only nice to them.
I suspect that we will find out that the plot was not quite as fully developed as we have been led to believe, especially since both Britain and the United States have more or less avowed that they will arrest, charge, and incarcerate people for even thinking about doing anything nasty. After all, do we wait for murderers and drug dealers to do their nasty deeds before we arrest them? Well, actually, we do.
It is striking also how many people seem to believe that, if there really were numerous people out there plotting to bomb and poison and disrupt our oil supplies, the government could be 100% successful at stopping these attacks. A reasonably astute statistician could prove to you with charts and graphs and mathematics that this just can’t be so. If there were 50 plots out there, and the police stopped 40 of them, they would be doing astoundingly well. But there would still be the ten.
The fact is, there hasn’t been a single attack on American soil since 9/11.
I’m not saying there couldn’t be an attack. In fact, I am a little surprised myself that there hasn’t. I am saying that we haven’t yet built a world in which terrorist attacks don’t take place: they always have and the probably always will. I simply take issue with this bizarre idea– and it really, absolutely is bizarre– that we suddenly live in a hugely dangerous world filled with grave threats to public safety. That this is different from the world we lived in in the 1960’s or 70’s.
Most people seem to believe it. That’s is why inland cities in the United States received homeland security grants for scuba gear.
(It is odd that anyone should undertake to “end terrorism” today at all. I don’t think anybody serious in the 1970’s would have proposed to “end” terrorism. I think that would have been perceived as a preposterous idea. It wouldn’t have been possible.)
That’s why pop machines in U.S. airports were sealed off. These idiots thought, what if they put nitroglycerin in a Coke can, smuggle it into a Coke machine in an airport, manage to remove the right can just before getting onto an airplane…..
This is sock-puppet security. The biggest piece of bullshit in the world right now is the Republican claim that they are doing a good job of security, if the only thing they do well, because Democrats are “soft” on terrorism. It becomes more and more clear by the day that these people are not merely incompetent. They are dangerously unbalanced. They are prepared to shoot down civilian aircraft on a degree of suspicion, but don’t for one moment suspect that a world better than this one could come about through intelligent, prudent leadership.
In Case You Believe the Authorities That we Have Never Been as Threatened as we are Now:
- Munich
- The IRA
- The Red Brigade
- The PLO
- Libya (Khadafy– now our “friend”)
- The Black Panthers
- The Mafia
- Lockerbie
- Oklahoma City
Or That the World was at Peace Back Then:
- El Salvador
- Nicaragua
- Guatemala
- Ethiopia
- Iran
- Algeria
- The Congo
- South Africa
- Zimbabwe
- Rwanda