Al Qaeda no longer needs its bombs to detonate. It merely needs to toy with those who have allowed themselves to be governed by fear.
By pursuing a strategy with minimal cost to itself, al Qaeda can be assured that we will inflict the maximum economic damage to ourselves because of our unwillingness to face life’s only certainty: our mortality. Neither the TSA, nor the US Government, nor the US military, nor the war on terrorism, can make us safe, because life isn’t safe.
In pursuit of an unattainable level of safety we show ourselves willing to accept all manner of indignities — all in the name of security. But as one of the latest airline passengers, recounting the humiliation he suffered at the hands of TSA officers, said: “if this country is going to sacrifice treating people like human beings in the name of safety, then we have already lost the war.”
Indeed, as al Qaeda’s planners survey the American scene, they can only marvel at the ease with which they have established their own competitive advantage.
As the New York Times reports:
In a detailed account of its failed parcel bomb plot last month, Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen said late Saturday that the operation cost only $4,200 to mount, was intended to disrupt global air cargo systems and reflected a new strategy of low-cost attacks designed to inflict broad economic damage.
The group, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, released to militant Web sites a new edition of its English-language magazine, called Inspire, devoted entirely to explaining the technology and tactics in the attack, in which toner cartridges packed with explosives were intercepted in Dubai and Britain. The printers containing the cartridges had been sent from Yemen’s capital, Sana, to out-of-date addresses for two Chicago synagogues.
The attack failed as a result of a tip from Saudi intelligence, which provided the tracking numbers for the parcels, sent via United Parcel Service and FedEx. But the Qaeda magazine said the fear, disruption and added security costs caused by the packages made what it called Operation Hemorrhage a success.
“Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the magazine said.
It mocked the notion that the plot was a failure, saying it was the work of “less than six brothers” over three months. “This supposedly ‘foiled plot,’ ” the group wrote, “will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage.”
The magazine included photographs of the printers and bombs that the group said were taken before they were shipped, as well as a copy of the novel “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens that it said it had placed in one package because the group was “very optimistic” about the operation’s success.
Although Western security officials have insisted that at least one of the parcel bombs was hours away from exploding, it seems just as likely that this operation was designed to showcase security vulnerabilities — that indeed it was conceived as a magazine cover story.
Is there anybody out there who can tell me :
– how much private security companies, government contractors, and the rest are making on the counter-terrorism activities as the result of this kind of action on the part of this said to be “branch of Al Qaeda”?
– do you think they needed Al Qaeda to carry on with their meteoric expansion of business and profits? If Al Qaeda was really a myth in the first place, do you think they couldn’t have cobbled it together for these important purposes.
– does anybody out their really know who and what Al Qaeda or its branch offices in Yemen or Maghreb are? It seems like all the people the US had thrown into Gitmo or had kidnapped and tortured here and there were the wrong bunch. Now they say there are about 200 in Pakistan, and new groups popping up all over the place, but the US and NATO keep flattening peasant housing compounds and killing women and children.
What a game? One could imagine how any organization with a few million dollars could created (what did they say?)”what we call leverage”. Where do you think the money is coming from and more important going to?
All in the pretense of terrorism. You can be afraid, no very afraid, if you want to, I just see two groups of gangsters using each other to put gullible people in the middle paying through the nose for protection they never needed and doing just as they are told.
For how many years and how many so called “terrorist groups” did agents of the CIA and Mossad infiltrate? And how many of those people could set up a cell over night if need be, and how much is there to be made?
If the NWO had not invented Al Qaeda they certainly should have as it serves all the purposes I see them standing for, namely the control and enslavement of humanity through ignorance, fear and in debt.
As far as I can see Al Qaeda could be anything. So who is it who benefits from telling us what it is?
Very good point that Ian makes. Who indeed, is Al Qaeda? If memory serves me correctly, the U.S. helped create bin Laden back when the Russians were fighting in Afghanistan. When the Russians quit, so did the U.S. The Taliban took over, the rest is history. One thing that has been missing in all the noise that has been generated about this War, is the Opium production & disbursement. At some point, the truth will come out, leading to the one entity that has had its fingers in the pie since Vietnam. If one follows the action, then it becomes obvious who really controls the Drug trade. Roll the total up into one controlling enterprise, it leaves just one being top dog. There is only group who has the where with all to do this. All the lessor players are just there as background cover. This NWO crap is just that, crap. The so called people believed to be leading such an enterprise, are not that stupid or deluded by the rhetoric, that they will control the total population of the Earth. That is a pipe dream for romanticist theory’s.
The NWO does not have to control “directly”. People seem quite happy to cower in their corners and do as they are told by some symbol of authority or the television commentator. They just have to control the issuance of debt and the trade in weapons, as well as their secrets and their own propaganda put out to the corporate media on a global basis. The rest is the monopoly of power, the pecking order, and the trickle down, so to speak.
Ask yourself if the dollar boom and busts are not orchestrated and in who’s interests? Or did you see the interests of any ordinary Americans (besides the wealthiest 1%) or any other “people” being protected by the latest financial shenanigans at the FED which are far from finished.
You can call it what you like but for example the principles of the IMF is to control nations and consequently the activities of their people through debt, ostensibly for their development within the capitalist system which in turn is dependent on usury and war. Nearly one fifth of the world’s population, Muslims, consider usury to be a sin, and they also sit on top of most of the oil, a singularly strategic energy reserve so why do you think they comprise the new “invented” enemy and global battlefield.
Ask Mr. Kissinger or Obama about the NWO, (it is they who repeatedly use the term) and they will tell you about “leading powers” and “the positioned of the Western democracies” and the “international community”, and all about what they have determined… And you are absolutely right, it is a load of crap.
Hahahaaahaaaa!!! Delightful!
WHAT,
So there IS such a magazine . . . . . . , that has not been jumped on, by the forces of “law and order”, and reaction, and has been able to produce monthly issues of their nefarious plots. Have I just stumbled onto a Monty Python spoof, something like the handbook of the Al Quaida knitting circle ? Or are we being spoonfed something that tastes funny ?
And this article misses the serious point completely. That is, that security is much more attainable, by not doing things. Like not exporting terror, corruption etc.
Anyone or group of people who harbors terror should have a bright red targeting laser dot on them. The Ameican Armed forces can make a Jihad look like a childs game.
Hilarious, Redacted. The targets need to have someone provide a targeting dot on them before the bumbling US Armed Forces has a hope of finding them.
When in the past ten years did they make anything look like a child’s game? Al Qaeda makes running circles around the huge US security apparatus look as easy as a child’s game.
It must really gall people like you to recognize that these foreigners are so much smarter than anyone in power in the US in the past ten years. The smart people in the US have been marginalized — cut out of the dialogue and of power by the corporate owned media, the corporate owned think tanks, the corporate owned lobbies, and the whole corporate owned Beltline establishment. The ‘foreigners’ will continue to win until Americans get their own house in order.