Guest blogged by Winter Patriot
I wasn’t surprised to see the New York Times banging the terror drums again today. It seems to have become a specialty of the house. My attention was particularly drawn to piece in today’s NYT by Eric Pfanner of the Iternational Herald Tribune, which bears this headline: Europe Seeks to Unify Airport Security Rules.
I noticed that headline immediately, because I have good reason to believe it may be misleading…
Nowhere in the article — or anywhere else that I know of — is there any indication that “Europe” “seeks” to unify airport security rules. Instead, the article describes what regular readers of The BRAD BLOG — or of my own nearly frozen blog — have come to expect: that Britain, represented here by Home Secretary John Reid, is trying to force the rest of Europe to follow it down the garden path that starts with phony terror and leads to totalitarianism.
Based on what we’ve seen so far, we have no reason to believe John Reid and every reason to be suspicious.
But that doesn’t stop Reid from providing the usual scary quotes:
But his logic is faulty and his propaganda is showing. There is no good reason why measures that are taken in one country should be reflected in other countries, especially if they are imposed arbitrarily and most especially if they don’t prove effective.
The new security measures put in place in Britain last week, while inconveniencing tens — maybe hundreds — of thousands of people and causing the cancellation of more than a thousand scheduled flights, were not even sufficient to keep a 12-year-old boy from boarding an international flight without a ticket or a passport!
Thank God he didn’t have any contact lens cleaner with him!
In other words, the new “security measures” could be described as “laughable” if they weren’t so oppressive.
We’ve had all kinds of warnings, and unsubstantiated claims of anti-terror success, we even get all sorts of blather about “ongoing investigations” and “foreign connections”, but we still haven’t seen any actual evidence that would lead us to believe that our governments are telling us the truth about the “terror” threat.
While we wait for such proof to materialize, it is by no means clear whether or not we face a “persistent and very real threat” … unless we can count the persistent and very real threat that our so-called democratic governments may be setting up their own false-flag terror operations (such as this one), and rapidly turning non-democratic.
Oh wait, that’s not a threat — that’s reality!
Despite the rather obvious facts — or maybe because of them — I’ve been seeing an explosion of editorials from all over the world, clamoring for less freedom in the name of more “security”, but none so ludicrous as this piece from Japan, which accepts the reports from the British security forces at face value — without even the slightest hint of a question — and contains the following very specious claim:
So much for fair and reasoned analysis. So much for open debate. So much for so-called journalistic standards.
I could rage about that Japanese piece all day. But I want to get back to the piece in NYT for a moment. In my opinion, the most important sentence in the whole sorry tale comes at the very end, after most readers have already made up their minds to give up some of their rights in turn for some so-called “security”.
So … we are so sure of the “imminent threat” that we have to take away basic freedoms from all sorts of innocent people, not only in Britain and the USA but throughout all of Europe; but we don’t even have enough on the so-called “terrorist suspects” to charge any of them with a crime!
And it would be foolish to even imagine complaining about this?
Well, ok, then. I won’t. How about you?
We wouldn’t want to do anything foolish, would we?
For more on the thwarted alleged British-Pakistani simultaneous airplane bombing plot, see:
An Avalanche Of Bullshit: Republican Attack Dogs Hit Democrats Nationwide Over Lieberman’s Loss In CT Primary
Spin? CounterSpin! The Alleged British Airplane Bombing Plot, Counterclockwise
British News Full Of Terror Revelations; World Opinion Appears Skeptical
UPDATE: The NYT article which I quoted in this item has been changed significantly since I first read it. Passages which I quoted here no longer appear in the text. Jason noticed the difference and was kind enough to point it out. My response to his comment is here; the previous version of the article is mirrored here.
Thank you WP, Brad and all who post here, whose intentions are the exposure of lies leading this country and the world towards a dark future. You make the point rarely spoken that it is not just our beloved country at grave risk. We tend to see our problems as unique and separate from the rest of the world community. The same greedy SOBs that manipulate our media and governing system, sit on director boards with others of different origins who do the same in their respective countries. I know and accept that the main thrust of this blog are the E Voting issues. This site has made a difference, a big one. Please continue to make room for the discussion of other related topics. You guys do it better than any others. Thanks again.
NYT is the central mouthpiece for the government propaganda – witness judy miller’s role in the lies about WMD and the outing of a CIA asset.
The government “leaks” disinformation to the NYT that then publishes the lies. The rest of the MSM then “catapult the propaganda” by repeating what the NYT said it, becuause – well, its the “newspaper of record.”
The charges that NYT is liberal are more lies designed to downplay the importance of newsworthy items that even the lying liars can’t ignore completely.
Even more attempts to scare us!
This teaser up now at Raw Story: “Alberto Gonzales: terrorists are in our neighborhoods.. Soon….”
Never one to eschew foolishness, I’m still looking for the “imminent threat” – have been since 2001. Where is it? Can someone point it out to me? We are at “war” with “Islamo-Fascism” and they can’t do better than this? We are not at war just because someone says we are.
What a tragedy this is. We need to address real threats right now – peak oil, global warming, mass extinction. Instead, we are wallowing in primitive and stupid tribal conflicts and being “led” by those whose object is personal power or class power, not the power to successfully address real problems. Every stupid act, every lie, every failure of rational thought takes us further away from the moral, intellectual, and human center where we have to be. And it is all so foolish. The sun is shining, the horizons beckon but we don’t even see them, we are so intent on digging our own grave.
What tragic decadence when contrasted with the promise of democracy.
Has anybody considered the logistics of blowing up an airliner over a city with a lens cleaning solution bomb? I’ve been in airplanes before. You wouldn’t be able to AIM; you wouldn’t be that sure your effort would even cripple the plane enough to stop it from landing safely; the best you could hope for would be plane parts falling in unpleasant places, or messing with a runway and part of a terminal. Nothing remotely approximating a massive threat to air travelers or the populations below them. And now their big solution is for us to put our solutions in our checked luggage? What? It’s okay to blow up the cargo hold?
Even as I don’t buy the story about the box cutter hijackers hijacking the planes on 9/11, I know for certain that anyone trying to hijack a plane now will immediately be taken out by a mob of passengers, even at the cost of their lives. There are prudent measures to help assure the safety of airline travel that needn’t hold up the passengers. If someone’s spiked toothpaste blows a hole in a plane or two or ten, or even blows the whole plane or two or ten, HOW is that worse than the the traction for fascism garnered by all these “security” measures and terror alert codes and alarmist/sensationalist megaphoning we have to call media coverage?
The thing that insured our security before was our unwillingness to limit freedom, even for security. Our country was founded on the principle that if the cops don’t have a warrant when they enter OJ’s property, he gets a walk. THE REASON FOR THAT WAS SO NOBODY HAD TO FEAR THE GOVERNMENT. We agreed that it was ALWAYS more important to maintain our democracy and freedom from fear of our government than any other consideration. That kind determination is what brought real democracy to plenty of other countries. They SAW what it wrought, and wanted it. We have ALWAYS been willingly and wittingly vulnerable to attack because it was the guarantee of freedom.
Where is it now, folks? Where is it now? This will never stop until we have reaffirmed our commitment to our founding principles. Never.
Hi, Arry. Funny you should mention “Islamo-Fascism”. I’ve been sitting on this phrase (and its partner, “Islamic Fascism”) and wondering whether to write a full post about it or just stick a comment somewhere. Looks like “stick a comment somewhere” has won, but it’s gonna be a long comment…
In my opinion, the term has been kicked around so much that it has become part of the “prevailing myth”, even though it makes no sense.
Even the victims of this racial-cultural slur don’t seem to understand it. Consider this excerpt from a recent BBC report (my emphasis):
The point Mr. Younis seems to be missing is this:
There is nothing Fascist about it either!!
Professor Juan Cole has written about this at length and is at his clearest here:
Bush, Islamic Fascism and the Christians of Jounieh
A few key excerpts:
Juan Cole knows what he’s talking about; he never succumbs to the temptation to talk in vague generalities. If you read his work you can learn an awful lot in a very short time, but you have to prepare yourself for a huge shock: virtually nothing that you think you know about the Middle East is true; especially if you got your “information” from American “news” sources.
So reading Professor Cole can be tough going, especially at first. But you’ll notice I didn’t say it wasn’t worth the effort.
IMVHO, Juan Cole’s Informed Comment is one of the very best blogs on the net, and it deserves a lot more attention than it gets — especially from people who really want to know what’s going on in the world. Hint, hint.
Bottom line: Bush calls Islamic people Fascists because he doesn’t want anyone to realize that it is actually his administration that is Fascist. It’s part of a trend so pervasive it’s tough not to call it deliberate. He also says “they have no respect for human life”, even though it is his administration that started America’s love-affair with torture, and has been starting wars — and encouraging others to start wars — for no good reason.
I could belabor this point — I could drive it into the ground if I wanted to — but I don’t think that’s necessary. We have a lot of smart readers around here.
99: I agree completely with your comment #5; further, I think it’s quite clear that one event knocked all reason out of us, and stifled — no! quashed! — the national debate about everything that’s real, and everything that’s really important.
I wrote about this before I even started blogging. If you haven’t already read my post about it, you might want to do so now … or you might not — that’s ok, too! … but for those who are interested, here’s a “golden oldie” from please don’t read my blog:
Fear and Loathing after 9/11: Trouble
I think the latest “liquid bomb” terrorism threat is just such a hoax with purely political motivatons. The irony I see is that airline passengers are having their bottles of water, tubes of lipstick, toothpaste, and all sorts of other carry-on toiletry items confiscated in the supposed belief that some of them may contain a liquid or substance which is volatile if it comes in contact with certain other substances and perhaps set off by a spark from someplace.
All of these confiscated items are dumped together at the airport security check point, thus helping to meet the physical conditions a would-be terrorist is seeking to create. If this is real and not a hoax, then to act consistently and logically, every suspect item should be handled separately and a safe distance should be maintained at all times until the items are either tested or destroyed in a secure environment.
I have read that airport security people are now perplexed what to do with all the contraban they have seized. Some have talked about donating it to the homeless!
Hey, thanks, WP. Yes, it helps to read what you wrote so long ago. Good for you to have managed to keep it in order to post it so much later, and now to be able to link to it. If I could recover the stuff I was writing about THIRTEEN years ago, I could show you how wary I was for the safety and integrity of our founding principles even then, how worried I had been since Reagan took office, actually since Washington seemed to turn on Carter so unaccountably. They of course gave accounts, but they were flimsy excuses. We know now that all through the 1990s, PNAC anyway, wanted a fascistic aggressor kleptocracy, but I had been feeling the tumblers falling into place for quite a while before that. It felt to me as if the rank and file federal employees were having their paychecks and pensions used to insure their loyalties to something un-American even back then. A look at some of the work of the last two SCOTUS appointees from the 1980s gives some idea of what that was. My point: We have to do a THOROUGH cleaning to get our country back — top down AND bottom up.
Boy are they ever pouring it on thick now:
Prepared Text of Attorney General Gonzales at the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh
It’s starting to feel like the 50’s, when we practiced hiding under our desks at school from the A bombs. When you were the cool kid on the block if your folks had a bomb shelter. When us kids in the neighborhood thought a reclusive family were Russian spies with a robot. When Senator McCarthy ruled the roost and everyone was blacklisted. When I had nightmares of enemy soldiers coming down the street and marching families out of their homes and then shooting missiles into the homes. When we would take field trips at school to the local missile silos and the soldiers in their spiffy uniforms and shiny badges would tell us all was ok – they were protecting us. When we were taught to hate people we didn’t even know anything about.
Duck and Cover
Oh were did my 60’s go???
Be sure to read the reviews at “Duck and Cover” – very consistant with today!
Well, I take that back – it looks like most reviewers don’t get it! I guess I should have read more first! LOL
The one which caught my eye was:
“The main point to get from this, it seems to me, is that one of of creating a sense of community is by dramatising (and exaggerating) external threats.
Don Delillo, in Underworld, remembers the dog-tags that some children were given so that in the case of nuclear holocaust, their little charred bodies would be identifiable.
At this point, surely, we must agree that the propagandists’ objective is not to educate and save lives, but to drive the image into parents’ heads of their child, killed by a Soviet bomb; a political objective by the govt, achieved through fear, even the mental torture of its own citizens.”
Bluebear2, Peg and I are working on getting your 60’s back. 😉
Agent99 and Peg
Thanks – that would be so great!
Not that there wasn’t turmoil, but at least people gave a damn and got together to work for change and much was accomplished. (Only to be torn down by the ush cabal.)
Mussolini said a better term than fascism would be ‘corporatism’, since fascism is the merger of corporations and the government. Using his ‘expert’ definition, it’s obvious fascism has NOTHING to do with Muslim fundamentalism, and EVERYTHING to do with the K Street Project!
WP — You’ll see that “mirror” kind of talk all through the Busheviks statements. (I think Agent99 had a word for it in some post.)
The big one is, “They hate our freedoms.” What they mean, of course, is, “We hate your freedoms.” Yes, it’s pervasive.
The “Islamo-Fascist” term has been making my blood boil as blatant and racist/cultural fear-mongering — strictly an animal of propaganda – fascist propaganda.
Thanks for the Juan Cole article link. I used to read Juan Cole regularly, but, for some reason, I got distracted and haven’t read him in awhile. Now, I remember why I always read his pieces.
Yes, Arry, my dear man who should be back in the redwoods, they speak antonymically. 8)
Thanks, the beautiful Agent99.
Arry (AKA “The Sensitive Cad”)
Bluebear2 #10
I feel better now. This paragraph from Gonzales’s statement assures us he has turned over a new leaf and will now be following the constitution, protecting civil liberties instead of ignoring them and even work under the rule of law! Thank God, because the rest of it is pretty fucking scary!
Somebody should produce a film showing INCUMBENTS how to “Duck and Cover”!
I am non-violent and do not own a gun. I think Lou Dobbs probably does though.
The NYT is not the only MSM outlet that ignorantly or purposefully exudes propaganda.
And it is not the sole province of the left to realize that fact of American political life after the republican dictatorship evolved:
(FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein). It is being done on a massive scale, and we see scare tactics on the menu.
(ibid.)
As much as I would like to agree with the “they have not been charged” point of your statement, the article does not say they have not been charged, it says that the British can hold them for up to 28 days without being charged. It does NOT say they have not been charged.
That’s a good catch, Jason (#23) … but I’m not sure whether you caught what you think you caught. You are quite right to say that “the article does not say that they have not been charged” … TODAY!
Here’s the closing paragraph, as posted at this moment:
But YESTERDAY — when I read the article, and when I posted this item — the closing paragraph said:
If you want to see the text of the originally posted article, click here.
You will also notice that the headline has been changed. Yesterday it said:
Europe Seeks to Unify Airport Security Rules
But today it reads:
European Nations Plan New Anti-Terror Efforts
Also worth noting: The original article was credited to “Eric Pfanner, International Herald Tribune” and began this way:
Today the article is credited to “Heather Timmins and Eric Pfanner” and it starts like this:
There have been other changes to the text, as well.
Why? You tell me!!
As for the question of whether the suspects have been charged, the NYT was not the only “news” agency reporting that they hadn’t been.
As reported yesterday by the CBC: British police extend detention of alleged bomb plotters (my emphasis)
The CBC article, by the way, does not appear to have been changed since yesterday.
I have seen several other news articles in the last few days which say the suspects have not been charged; none claiming that they have been. What does this tell us?
If charges had been laid, it would be big news and we would be reading about it everywhere.
But meanwhile, many stories are ducking the question, even while reporting that authorities have been asked for more time to hold the suspects and that the request has been granted.
Of course, if charges had been laid, there would be no need to ask for an extension.
I think that the most terrifying thing about all this is that so many powerful, established countries are going along with the drive towards fascism. In Hitler’s day, it was resisted tooth and claw. Today it is acquiesced to, even embraced, by much of the world. Even as South American countries are attempting to pull themselves out from under the crushing boots of international corporatism, that same corporate monolith is drawing almost unlimited power unto itself.
Resistance to this takeover must begin on the individual level, I’m convinced. The voices on this thread are the voices of sanity and humanity. To all of you, I say, “Thank you for being here and caring enough to make yourselves known!” And to Brad and WP, I add heartfelt thanks for providing this spot to gather in and be warmed by!!!
Peggy I agree with everything you said #25. Sending Thanks back at ya!
Hey, Peg, Laura, thanks, I needed that.
Been watching too many Frontline episodes and C-SPAN videos and wrestling with the urge to enlist as Bollyn’s bodyguard…. Have had myself on a pretty serious bummer for a couple of days. So words like yours help.
WP! They changed the hmpflgt article? The New York Times? I’ve been telling everyone for years that the Albanians always refer to the United States as “the revisionists” and no one is ever confused by this usage… but THE NEW YORK TIMES CHANGED THE RECORD OF ITS OWN REPORTAGE? Oh! Crap! This is getting seriously, seriously bad. What contortions will eventually convince us that appeasement of these murdering thugs isn’t going to cut it? Do we have to see the vote yanked away from us again, and again, and again, and even again to finally know appeasement doesn’t work any better with our own fascists than it did with Germany’s and Italy’s?
Agent99
For you.
{Thanks so much, dear friend. xoxox –99}
99 #27 –
We share our bummers, it seems. 😉 I’ve been on a real paralyzer, and today I began pulling myself out of it, one bootstrap after the other. (You see, I attach them to sky hooks with sheer willpower!) Our time machine will solve a lot of problems…
Latest Vanity Fair is saying NYT is going under big time. I have wondered why people continue to buy it. Since it has turned into a rag. Well, as it turns out…people aren’t.
Wow, this website is amazing. I’ve been getting really passionate about this scare-tactics stuff that the gov has been up to lately. I’m a webmaster myself (of a humble rock drum lessons site), but maybe I should make a web resource and link this site up!