August 12, 2006
Trading off the success of others
Pakistani and British security officials made a series of arrests and foiled a major international terror plot last week. This is absolutely wonderful new which should be recognized and studied to see how these arrests can help us in the future. Maybe more sensible people overseas will do that, but unfortunately for us Americans, the first thing our polarized government did with this news was to process it down and find ways to push it aid their pursuit of their individual political objectives.
Our Fine President’s people are already out there trying to sell the public on the concept that these arrests are that one extra justification they need for their unchecked domestic spying programs and unlimited secretive detention and trial schemes at Guantanamo. Personally, I see no direct connection between the actions of law enforcement in the UK and Pakistan and the need to grant our president unchecked access to powers usually only employed by despots and tyrants.
To quote the New York Times and their quote of White House Press Secretary Tony Snow:
White House officials said the moment could prove helpful beyond the realm of politics, saying news of the plot had served to focus the public on the White House’s campaign against terrorism at a time attention seemed to be waning.
‘Yesterday simply reiterated the importance of the approach that the administration has taken,’ Tony Snow, the White House press secretary, said at a briefing here.
Mr. Snow continued by listing antiterrorism measures supported by Mr. Bush, ‘whether it be with the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act extension, whether it be with various surveillance techniques, of which members of Congress have been made aware.’”
I’m still not sure how those likely illegal policies are justified by the success of other nations anti-terror efforts, but of course I also was too dense to see the connections between Iraq and Al Qaida or those ever so shy weapons of mass destruction as well. Maybe I’m just not as smart as thems peoples in Washington. Nah, I think it’s much more likely that the current administration is once again grasping at anything they can use to temporarily buttress their misguided policies while they simultaneously lash out at the opposition for opposing those policies and thusly being soft about national defense.
So far it seems like our anti-terror efforts are fairly successful despite all the wasted money and misdirected efforts from the Department of Homeland Security. There has been no major attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001 and numerous arrests have been made. Of course we have given our enemies plenty of opportunities to kill our young men and women in Iraq and most of the American terrorist arrests have seemed to be of bungling gangs of would bes and wanna bes instead of the fully formed operational threats like we see from our allies overseas.
At the most basic level, the current administration wants to turn the national attention toward its war on terror as election season approaches. They want to be able to tout all their successes and oppressive strategies to guarantee the masses lots of safety and maybe even an extra sunny Saturday once in a while. The reality of things is that our clumsy anti-terror efforts overseas have actually increased the frequency of terror acts and destabilized a large swath of the globe. If the opposition party can focus on these failures and present a new direction for efforts to decrease terrorism and foster peace they can let the administration hang from their own actions. It’s too bad the opposition is most likely to let itself be dragged down into a debate at the level of:
“You’re weak on terror!”
“No I’m not, you are the one who is weak!”
“I called you weak first!”
“Well I called you weaker!”
“Well I called you weak last now too! First and Last I win!”
“dang…”
It certainly seems as if the major news outlets have turned over the responsibility of writing the news to Goebbels or someone like him. All of the news stories here are completely lacking in facts and information regarding the terrorist plot, to the degree that one might ponder for a moment whether there was actually a plot to begin with. For all any of us know, it is a completely manufactured news story that originated with the people who say it happened.
Instead the news is filled with stories about how inconvenient and difficult international travel has become (but how travellers are accepting of this, in light of the danger - you should be too) and how fortunate we are that our unconstitutional lack of privacy and freedom led to government spies capturing the suspected terrorists… and by terrorists I mean the 3 or 4 British nationals of Pakistani descent who planned, ingeniously, to assemble bombs on 10 or 11 planes as they crossed the Atlantic. This is way scarier than the time those politically-motivated hairdressers from Florida accepted marijuana cigarettes from FBI plants.
Oh, and I almost forgot the side story about how the Pakistani government had been working closely and cooperatively with Britain and the US to capture these bad guys. (This news item is not designed in any way to draw a very public wedge between the governments of Pakistan and those of other Middle Eastern countries. Really. Also, Oswald acted alone. You are getting veeery sleeeepy.)