President Obama orders a ban on fly-swatting in the Ministry of Information
The buck stops here; the president’s responsible; everyone’s accountable; no one gets the blame; the system’s not broken – just needs a tune up.
The problem with a war on terrorism – at least where it takes place on the communication’s front – is that the terrorists often end up coming out with the more credible statements.
In 1984, after the Brighton bombing which targeted the leadership of the British government then led by Margaret Thatcher, the IRA said:
Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war.
Yesterday, Agence France-Presse reported:
Al-Qaeda hailed the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA agents in Afghanistan as “revenge” for the deaths of top militants in US drone strikes in Pakistan, Islamist websites said on Thursday.
Treat terrorism as bereft of political content then the issue will perpetually be framed as one of national security and we’ll get reports like this:
In a briefing after the President’s remarks, counterterrorism advisor John Brennan said he had personally let the president down.
Brennan said that the intelligence and law enforcement community had done a “stellar” job over the past year. “It was in this one instance that we did not rise to that same level of competence and success.”
Brennan said the president had told him he must do better. Said Brennan, “I told him that I will do better and we will do better as a team.”
Must do better… Indeed.
No more fly-swatting at the Ministry of Information — that should fix the problem.
(Anyone who’s seen Brazil will know what I mean. Anyone who hasn’t seen the movie, should — it’s as relevant now as it was when it came out in 1985.)
An ordinary American Citizen has a better understanding, I think, of why someone would want to blow up a plane and kill American ( mostly ) civilians. And it is only going to get worse. Unfortunately, the govt as a whole and the administration in particular just does not get it. There is NO ABSOLUTE GUARANTEE on security and all the explanation and talk of doing better just does not wash. Only if they had the guts to admit to themselves and the country that as long as we continue our killing of innocents in AfPak and Iraq and support morally indefensible policies vis a vis Israel/Palestine conflict, we will be victims! May be, we would all be better off then.
Clintonista sleeze as the Executive Branch around Obama has replaced the neo-American want of CHANGE. Hillary’s boa-constrictor, made up of segments loyal to El Presidente Bill, holding Obama tight in a death grip. These her minions screw up every thought in Obama’s mind so that by 2012 everyone in the Democrat Party will be wishing he had been truly born outside America; all will then see Hillary as the party’s El Salvador. Clumsy failed acts of terrorism will until then only accentuate how even more clumsy are our massive self-serving Clinton/Bush bureaucrats clogging our intel/security establishment. Finally, in 2012 Hillary will go down in electoral flames as people will far prefer the tall and fit general Petraeus over the squat little woman who puts her foot ever in her mouth, married to the man for whom principles are like manners– discarded so they don’t get in the way of any opportunity at hedonia. Obama? By 2013 people will respond: who is Obama? He will be forgotten, victim of his self-imposed silence as President while the documents were all in his care, so no one will know what a near-death America he inherited in January 2009. Let loose the Truth Commissions, Obama, or forever hold your peace as the maker of your own doomed presidency.
I am afraid most people in my opinion are wrongly framing this supposed war on Muslim extremism. In fact it has been a creation and nurturing of extremism since the CIA recruitment of Bin Laden and the Mujahidin in Afghanistan through Saudi and Pakistan offices. Counter-terrorism is a loose cannon, being ever more privatised. Two out of the seven killed in the CIA bombing were mercenaries.
When conflict is the cause of profit it becomes only a short step to make profit the cause of conflict. So if this war is caused by “terrorism”, and terrorism is the cause for profit to Blackwater (Xe), it does not require a great stretch of the imagination to suggest that some critical stimulating assaults, assassinations, bombings or other dirty deeds that even the CIA could not get authority for, might well be quietly suggested as an extra curricular activity to an un-accountable, cooperative, gung-ho “contractor”.
And to get away with it is just as easy; Blackwater pays a local who tells a local to drive a truck to…. Boom…., and by the way, how did a 10 ton truck pass the US security into the UN Headquarters compound in Baghdad in August 2003 to get right under Sergio Vieira de Mello’s office, and could the illegal activities of the US occupation have continued to pass UN criticism, and the UN mandate been extended, without the withdrawal of the UN from the scene of US crimes there?
Speculation sure! Proof? Who needs it anymore, since it has become sufficient even in US courts to convict on the basis of “association”. Just ask the men in Bagram prison who are not even charged with anything. The CIA is associating with murderers and criminals such as Xe, ask the Germans ask the Italians, and act as terrorists, ask the people of Pakistan or Somalia.
Let us not loose sight of the fact that such Contractors as Xe are paid out of a bottomless and secret CIA or Pentagon budget, and it is doubtful that they would work towards ending any insurgence anywhere while the money rolls in, and the right bomb in the right place can just keep things bubbling.
Is this possibly happening? Well just ask yourself how could it possibly not be happening with these, highly moral and ethical people that run the CIA and Pentagon as well as your Senate oversight? Is there anything to stop it happening? Patriotism, your joking right? Follow the money.
An excellent article by Rami Khuri…..
“The US Media’s Misconception of Terrorism”
http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=2232