Can we please stop freaking out every time a group of people who think they're Cobra from the old GI Joe cartoon try to do something that they're incapable of doing?

And by the way, nothing in the "War on Terror" stopped these guys. Not domestic spying. Not the two wars we've have in 6 years, not Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. They were stopped because, like most "criminal masterminds" these guys don't know what they're doing.

I know, I'm making light. Fact of life is that every now and then we'll have to deal with a Timothy McVeigh and that's a horrible thing to face. But the vast majority are incompetents who think that JFK airport is like the Death Star and that you can blow it up by setting off a chain reaction.

Actually, these guys really are like Cobra from "GI Joe." Cobra Commander's schemes all failed as well.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

But of course the attention is focused on the bad "Die Hard" situation in England and not our ongoing debacle, America can not admit it's wrong...ever. And we will go to great lengths to focus on something else, ANYTHING ELSE, in order to overlook something that we are doing badly.

But there's more to it than that. Perhaps there are sectors of the media that are behooven to some neo-conservative or Republican agenda but it is my belief that the real motivation behind much of our countries "information disemmination" is the bottom line - it's dollars with little or no sense. And a fantastical misadventure of bungled but oh-so-scary "bombers" in England is a much easier sell then the morbid and depressing droning of yet more American deaths in an illegal, botched and utterly corrupt military misadventure in the Middle East. It's a war that's draining our nations soul as much as it is our treasury and international standing. And that's just too depressing to watch after a long day stuck in traffic isn't it?

Anyone that's been paying any attention whatsoever here in the United States now knows that the news is not news anymore but entertainment. And it's marketed and sold as such. Not only are the headlines more fit for rags in the checkout lines of grocery stores, but the fact that we can now have several editions of "Hot News-on-News Anchor-Chick Calendars" is a dismal and obvious sign that the press in our country is gangrenous and will soon play it's own part in our nations fall.

* Just a note: the press and the politicians are not the only ones to blame here. No. Lazy, apathetic and ignorant citizens are equally at fault. All of that crap news coverage is driven by sales. And if the dumb-ass public weren't willing to buy it they wouldn't be selling it. That's part of how capitalism works...you know supply and demand. If the people really wanted the truth then that's what they'd give us. So we all need to adjust our part in this currently tragic play if there is ever going to be any hope of a happy ending.

Several years ago I would likely have fully agreed with you here but now I'm not so sure.

I don't think that the "War on Terror" is so much about Osama Bin Laden's agenda as it is about the agenda of those waging the war itself. I mean is Bin Laden even relevent anymore? He's more like an imaginary monster used to scare your kids into obeying you than a real threat that's being actively sought.

Larry this isn't something the company would do as a distraction, is it? Be honest.

I have begun to conclude that governments use the word "Al Qaeda" to scare us so we'll do whatever they want.

According to a British documentary the Name “Al Qaeda” was never used by Al Qaeda untill after the CIA used that name to describe them. I think I can find the link if you are interested.

~

Naw ... the Brits can handle this type of Psyops all on their own ...

Through their 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group (TinyURL preview link)

They've been very capable in Northern Ireland for decades...

~OGD~

If you want a concise history of Al Qaeda, I'd suggest this book by Jason Burke.

If can recall correctly from the book, the term Al Qaeda literally means something like "the base". It is however unclear when the term was first used - it may have been by Bin Laden at some point in the mid-to-late 1990's - but certainly when the Clinton DoJ was prosecuting the 1993 WTC bombers, they were looking to tie-in Bin Laden (using RICO statutes) and to do so they needed to name his "organization". They used Al Qaeda. So it seems we probably started using the term around the same time Bin Laden did, and it just sort of grew from there. But no-one is really certain how the phrase originated.

Something Burke makes clear in his book is that by assigning a name to Al Qaeda, we somewhat distort our understanding of the nature of the beast. That although there is often a unifying theme of militant Islamism across the diverse groups who use the Al Qaeda brand, their objectives are often distinct and limited to a specific regional grievance. And it seems the other obvious point about calling your group an "Al Qaeda affiliate", is that you basically call on Bin Laden's considerable financial resources.

But to Larry's post, I think the true danger this episode exposes is what fearmongering by our government can do to us. On the one hand, these incidents in London and Glasgow are not trivial. The bombs might have been poorly made and the bombers thankfully inept, but it is a sobering reminder that people with these homicidal intents exist in our midst. And perhaps most notably, British intelligence agencies evidently had very little clue about these planned attacks (although you would never have learned this fact from the thoroughly dumb ramblings of the Chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee).

Yet on the other hand, it should remind us to keep the terrorist threat in perspective, that the probability of an attack is really quite slim.

And to look at how British leaders respond to these incidents - by basically saying that police and intelligence agencies will chase down the suspects, and in the meantime people should continue to live as normal... isn't that just the most marvellous antidote to the terrorist threat?

To remind the public that the terrorist threat is not some kind of existential crisis; that there is no need to disappear into bomb-shelters whilst hanging on to the words of our Leaders; that Al Qaeda whilst real, is not always the killing machine we sometimes imagine it to be.

I can't find the citation at the moment, but I read this weekend some analysis which said Al Qaeda will try to avoid getting linked with these failed UK bombings. Apparently feckless jihadi activity will damage Al Qaeda's street cred... which seems to me to be a pretty good reason to cover these incidents in their proper context, that is, brainwashed, incompetent crazies doing their cause more harm than good.

Was Timmothy McVeigh a great genius as a terrorist? How many people did he kill, including young children, in Oklahoma City?

The use of fear by the Bush crowd is a disgrace. They seem not to remember that the Founders of this country faced hanging in if they lost their fight for independence and the rights they sought. Physical safety is not the be all and end all of being an American. Protecting the rights defended for us by previous generations should be the highest duty of any President or any citizen.

However, I do not understand the insistence on the left to match the inanities of Bush and the right. How many people should be killed in a terrorist attack before it is worth your notice. Should we giggle because this doctor in Scotland didn't really know what he was doing? Should we just let all these "yuppy" terrorists alone and see if they can get it right? If at the airport someone was stopped carrying a boxcutter would you dismiss this and a minor incident? Wasn't that pretty much the lone weapon of the 9/11 murderers?

The need of Bush to gin up the fear and the left to deny the existence of real threats largely from a group or groups of Muslims is equally scary.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

However, I do not understand the insistence on the left to match the inanities of Bush and the right.

Democratic Party members were ridiculed for emphasizing law enforcement as the major means of combating domestic terror. Remember Rove's comments?
In reality, it will be very difficult to crack a very dedicated small group of fanatics. Tracking odd/large purchases of the building blocks of the weapons they would craft is of utmost importantance. Post- Oklahoma City, efforts to label the materials used to build the bomb were blocked by the NRA, not by crazy lefties.
The terrorists who made the London/Scotland attacks could be tracked by because of surveillance cameras placed throughout large cities in England. The debacle in Iraq, fostered in by Cheney's 1% solution, delays an internal US discussion about how much of our civil liberty we will be willing to give up for the ability to back-track through surveillance the small but lethal groups of terrorists that cannot be detected before they carry out their mission.
It is the Cheney 1% solution that got us bogged down in Iraq and the NRA and it's supporters that block law enforcement efforts that could have an immediate effect in the "war on terror". The problem is with the right.

There was a Theodore Sturgeon science-fiction story about a mysterious powerful alien attacking the Earth, and how all of the various international governments banded together to combat the threat. At the end of this Sturgeon sci-fi story, it was revealed to the reader that the threat was entirely made up, that there was no mysterious alien, but that it had been created so that everybody would be cooperative. Well, the parallels between that story and Bush & Company's use of the "War on Terror" are striking, only Bush & Company seem to be using such a mysterious powerful group (the "Terrorists and "Al Qaeda") to grab power, abolish rights under the Constitution, and grow the Republican Party. Anyone questioning the "War On Terror" is deemed a traitor or a wimp. Very ingenious, wouldn't you say?

Maybe it is time to give Tony Blair and George Bush some credit for a solid achievement in the war on terror--the current lot of muslim extremists in the UK had major problems building a reliable, effective incendiary device.

Larry is joking, but Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters is not.

...indicate[s] that our years-long aggressive strategy of attacking AQ as an enemy at war rather than a criminal gang has paid off ... They used to excel at coordinated bombing attacks, but now their bombs misfire, and they're reduced to banzai attacks on concrete barricades.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. H.L. Mencken

I am upset that the media is focused on ONLY the bad news coming out of the UK. Why don't they focus on some of the more positives aspects of life in the UK. Can't they find a story about a new school being built? Just goes to show you the MSM really is on the side of the terrorists.

The need of [...] the left to deny the existence of real threats largely from a group or groups of Muslims is [...] scary.

Please show us the evidence of people on the left who DENY the existence of real threats from Islamist terrorists.

In case you didn't read Larry's post on NoQuarter, he included this:

Are there jihadist extremists in the world who are willing to kill innocents?  Absolutely.  Are they amenable to negotiation?  No.  I am not in the, "have you hugged a terrorist today" camp.  However, we need to stop equating their hatred with actual capability.

That's the kind of perspective we need, not the breathless, pantloading reporting we have seen. I don't know about you, but whatever the Glasgow airport guys wanted to do, I still find this picture of a driver (failed suicide bomber??) being hosed down by airport security really pretty amusing. A bit like the movie of Zarqawi when he couldn't figure out how to un-jam his kalashnikov. And the Fort Dix plot to invade the army base in a pizza delivery van.

Sometimes terrorists deserve to be laughed at. That doesn't mean denying the threat, it means keeping it in perspective.

Not what I heard from folks that lived it. The Chechen thing didn't blow up until Yeltsin and Putin.

OK...this is great: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=465481&in_page_id=1770&ct=5 ...in this news story in the Daily Mail, we learn all kinds of things about the recent terror in the UK:

 • "The suspected ringleader of the Al Qaeda car bombers is a brilliant neurologist working for the NHS, it was revealed today. Saudi Mohammed Asha, 26, was arrested with his 27-year-old wife, who was in traditional Muslim dress, on the M6 in Cheshire on Saturday night. "

• One of the two men who drove a blazing Jeep Cherokee into the terminal building at Glasgow airport on Saturday afternoon is also thought to be a doctor.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/06_03/ArrestMillar0107_468x393.jpg

• Meanwhile, links between an Islamist terror group responsible for a series of bloody bombings in Iraq and the London attacks last week have emerged today. According to reports, British intelligence had warned the Government that Iranian Kurds could be plotting a campaign of terror to coincide with the handover of power from Tony Blair to Gordon Brown.

• US sources today suggested radical Kurdish group Ansar al-Islam would have a motive for an attack on Britain, having been driven out of its northern Iraqi stronghold and into Iran after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

•

Anti-terrorist detectives swooped on five members of the gang across Britain after gathering crucial clues from phones found in the two London car bombs.

The phones were meant to trigger a blast when they were called. The bombers twice called the car outside the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Haymarket, and the one in Cockspur Street four times, but the bombs failed to detonate for technical reasons.

[DAMN DOCTOR-TERRORISTS CAN'T DO NOTHIN' RIGHT!!]

• The suspected ringleader of the plot is also a doctor, a Jordanian. Neurologist Dr Mohammed Asha, 26, and his burka-wearing wife, 27, were held in a dramatic operation as they drove on the M6 in Cheshire with their two-year-old son on Saturday.

[^^REMEMBER, IN THE FIRST PARAGRAPH HE WAS A SAUDI^^]

• He is believed to be linked to the two Mercedes packed with gas canisters, petrol and nails found in the West End on Friday.

[WHAT ELSE WOULD ANT SELF-RESPECTING DOCTOR-TERRORIST DRIVE?] 

•Dr Asha is also believed to have links to a two-bedroom, semi-detached house in the quiet commuter village of Houston, Renfrewshire, just outside Glasgow.

Two Asian men had recently moved into the house which was being searched by police yesterday.

[UH OH...A WORLD-WIDE CONSPIRACY EMERGES!]

• Mya Logan, 29, an IT support technician, said: "I saw a man washing a 4x4 vehicle outside the house two weeks ago.

"I can't remember the colour or the make, but it was a big 4x4. I saw the car a couple of times in recent weeks.

"The last time was a Saturday morning and I was on my way to work at 8am. It seemed strange to be washing the car so early, that's what caught my eye."

[GOTTA HAVE THAT CAR BOMB SPANKY CLEAN!!] 

America can not admit it's wrong...ever.

Then the revelation that America is occasionally wrong would hurt the politicians' close friends and campaign contributors who own the more and more centralized 'news' media. They would lose audience share and advertisers. Can't allow that to happen, can we?

However, I do not understand the insistence on the left to match the inanities of Bush and the right. How many people should be killed in a terrorist attack before it is worth your notice. Should we giggle because this doctor in Scotland didn't really know what he was doing?

And, as usual, when you get asked exactly *who* on the left is saying these things, exactly *who* on the left is "denying the existence of real threats," you won't respond.

Because, as usual, you are full of shit.

Actually, maybe you are right. I did read it in a comment from this guy SuperDEM1893 over at Democratic Underground one day.

So, never mind. You've convinced me. I take it all back.

I'm sorry to be pretty a much a dick with my comment here, Daniel. But I get sooooo tired of reading this crap from you, over and over again. Never anything to back up what you say, the same smears about "the Left" over and over and over.

You take a caricature of liberals, and you apply it to and offend every one of us who actually knows there are plenty of real threats out there, but is deeply horrified by the way our government has attacked people that did not attack us, and how, using their "War On Terror" bumper sticker strategy, they've tortured people in our name, or wiretapped our phones, or bankrupted our country's finances, or questioned the patriotism of anyone whose disagreed with their tactics.

And, yeah, we "giggle," because sometimes, when things are as bad as they are, you need a laugh, to get you through the despondent and desperate situation we really are in.

And, yeah, we "giggle," because the way the Bush Administration "fights" terrorism is, in a word, laughable.

So why don't you just give it a break? We're tired of hearing these smears from you. Or, at least, I am.

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

Personally, I don't think these incidents should be trivialized.  We can thank our lucky stars that these operations went awry - but thanking lucky stars doesn't strike me as a particularly secure position.  The Brits are saying Glasglow and London are related - but I don't think that implies al Qaeda (bin Laden's International Islamic Front IIF) hand.  They look more like local jahadi initiatives that were well-planned but technologically unsound.  That seems more threatening to me - certainly more difficult to mediate with law enforcement.  As for the "connection" two things come to mind:

1) The recent death of Taliban leader Dadullah at the hands of British, Canadian and German troops in Afghanistan.  His brother Mansoor has called for retaliation against the three European nations.

2) The knighting of Salman Rushdie, which curiously has caused the strongest response (demonstrations etc.) in Jammu/Kashmir and India, not Iran and other western asian areas as we would expect.  

That suggests to me that there are others in the UK and elsewhere who are fomenting over these issues and even planing strikes.  I'm struck by the potential lethality of the bombs - and the resemblance to Iraq style terrorism.  Whatever crackdown the Brits employ on the Pakistani community will have some blowback also - aggravating an already tense community and inadvertently encouraging more local jahadi retaliation.

Most of this comes from South Asia Analysis Group, which I always find to be extremely informative. 

Neoboho

...denying the existence of real threats....Actually, maybe you are right. I did read it in a comment from this guy SuperDEM1893 over at Democratic Underground one day....

How about right here on this thread? Did you notice this one by "OCPatriot" just a few comments down?

I must admit that as a user of what are known as "liberal" community blogs, when I see comments like that go unchallenged (or in other cases, rated highly or shown approval) at the same time that I see anything right-of-center regularly challengened and even discouraged, it is easy to presume some kind of tacit approval by the group at large. If a group generally accepts a label, and then doesn't challenge it's own wingnuts (or even shows sympathy towards their ideas,) but only attacks the opposition wingnuts, then some of what the wingnuts say is going to stick to the group. (This is actually related to the reason behind things like Clinton's "Sister Souljah" moment, for example; you have to speak up against the rantings, or it is going to be presumed you agree with them.)

breathless, pantloading reporting we have seen.

Got any examples of that? I've mostly seen "the gang who couldn't shoot straight" type slant, such as that which a commenter on this thread noted here, plus a lot of "Brits carry on as usual, just more alert." I was actually surprised me how soon after the incident Homeland Security here in the U.S. decided to announce that they were not raising the color code threat level and how "the media" transmitted that right away. Sure you're not imagining it?

Your working Daily Mail link should be 'Terror ringleader' is brilliant NHS doctor.

When you entered the URL directly in your comment without embedding it, the comment editor inserted an invisible 'word wrap' symbol which invalidates the URL. If you copy the URL from your comment to 'Word', it does not become a live link. But you can delete the space between the two parts of the URL in the Word copy, go to the end of the URL and hit enter, and it does become a live URL.

Of course, what I did first was go to the Daily Herald (by erasing everything in the URL after the .com/ ), then I located the story, since it is one of today's stories and compared the two URLs. That's the harder way.

The 'tag tips' link shows how to embed a URL, and is found at the bottom of the comment editing block if you click on "More information about formatting options". Embedding a URL is the very top tag tip.

More than you EVER wanted to know, isn't it? [Grin]

By the way, the story is a great catch. Thanks for posting it.

My personal model for terrorism, which may agree with your observation that we will have occasional McVeighs, is to treat terrorism not either with a strict military or law enforcement model, but with a public health model. Let me try an example: in my experience, people tend to freak out when [bubonic, although that's not the only type] plague, the disease caused by Yersinia pestis, is even hinted at. To put this in a little perpective from a the Centers for Disease Control,

In the United States, the last urban plague epidemic occurred in Los Angeles in 1924-25. Since then, human plague in the United States has occurred as mostly scattered cases in rural areas (an average of 10 to 15 persons each year). Globally, the World Health Organization reports 1,000 to 3,000 cases of plague every year.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

If at the airport someone was stopped carrying a boxcutter would you dismiss this and a minor incident?

Yes.

Wasn't that pretty much the lone weapon of the 9/11 murderers?

Yes.

The weapons that the hijackers used are irrelevant. 9/11 did not happen because hijackers got weapons onto planes. 9/11 was an exploitation of the protocol for dealing with hijackers--get the plane landed, and then start negotiating. That protocol changed unofficially, but permanently, on that day over a field in Pennsylvania. Now crew and passengers will not permit hijackings to happen. It's easy to think of weapons that could be improvised, and the presence of air marshalls also can be exploited to get hold of a weapon that otherwise would not be in passenger section of a plane.

The point Larry, and others, is making, is that there are different levels of threat, and that effective security requires accurate threat assessment. It is a serious mistake to gauge threats by ethnic backgroud or claimed political affiliation rather than by actual capability. In fact, it is counterproductive. Anti-abortion terrorists are a bigger threat in the US than jihadists, but the news coverage acts as if the reverse were true.

And that's where our problem lies. A bonfire attracts more CNN attention than an actual bombed defused outside an abortion clinic in Austin. The right wing militias have not gone away. But they do not get the advertising support from the president, nor the narrative plot line that tv supplies. So they don't get covered. (You should watch the CNN clips interviewing their British security expert deriding these people--the audible gasp from the interviewer is funny. The interviewee was going off the script.)

They look more like local jahadi initiatives

Just a nitpick on the use of "local," which might not turn out to be a nitpick precisely because it might not be so much old-fashioned generic al Qaeda here.

First, the suspects arrested are supposedly not British citizens this time, and the Brits are strongly stating that it's "not homegrown." Second, maybe more interesting, one is supposedly an Iraqi, a doctor (see Rick B's link above on the NHS-neurologist story.)

On one British news website with comments, when the Iraqi part broke, I saw quite a bit of interesting commentary on the latter on the order of "we have to get the f*k out of Iraq" and "our asylum immigration policy is too loose, we have to stop letting so many of these Iraqi and other suspicious refugees in."

You know who else is giggling? UK police enforcement.

From the current TPM front page:

"So incompetent as to be almost laughable." That's how former Scotland Yard detective John O'Connor described the botched UK bombings this morning on CNN.

He's probably "on the left." Right?

"Thank God George Bush is our president." -Rudy Giuliani

I agree with Daniel here.

Is it true that the media - abetted perhaps by an easily bored, distracted and bad-news-averse US public - are doing a poor job in covering the more significant levels of death, destruction and chaos in Iraq? Absolutely.

However, I really don't think it is fair to blame the media for getting all over this story, or blame British and American audiences for being very interested in it. Even a bungled suicide carbombing at an airport like Glasgow is a major event. It raises a lot of important questions for which viewers want answers, and which require ample coverage time to address: Do the perpetrators have confederates who haven't been caught? If so, are there a lot of confederates or a few? Are they capable of striking more successfully next time, or are they all inept? Is this likely the beginning of a wave of events, or is it an isolated incident? What drove the perpetrators to do it. How will this affect airport security and travel at my own airport? etc.

And of course, not too long ago Britain experienced a coordinated terrorist attack by militant Islamists in which there actually was significant destruction, injury and loss of life. So the story has a further context which justifies the high level of attention.

British news consumers, and US news consumers, are naturally going to be much more concerned about acts of violence that might signal a direct threat to themselves than they will be about much worse acts of violence that occur far from home. Maybe this is selfish or whatever, but it's human nature, and it's what drives the coverage.

Also when nothing changes in an ongoing situation, then it is not going to get a lot of coverage. Since UK airports do not have terrorist attacks every day, when one occurs it is going to be big news. But scores of people die in Iraq every day, as they have been for months, so when another few score die today it is not news. That may sound harsh, but I think this is just how human curiosity and interest work.

CNN, early on, was bad.

But point taken, bad generalization on my part. Some of the more recent coverage has been sensible, and I clearly I did not watch every channel, every minute.

Yes, there are a lot of those people. They include Eric Rudolph and Paul Hill, both 'Christian' anti-abortionist terrorists (see Digby) as well as Timothy McVeigh, who represents people with ideas of whom we were never allowed to learn the names or purposes.

One purpose of focusing on Islamic Jihadists is, I have no doubt, to direct the attention of the American public aways from our own home grown terrorists
*******************************************
Obviously - there are so many domestic terrorist bombs going off all the time.

I figured all along that Kashmir would be a good place for OBL to hide.

And I would think recruiting some Indians to search for Osama, telling them about the bounty in case they don't already know about it, might work.

Easier said than done finding someone like that of course. He probably walked out of Afghanistan wearing a blue head to toe burka for instance.

I can't speak to the resources, but the bomb itself was not especially sophisticated and the technology well known -- while he didn't use true ANFO but something more potent, ANFO is widely used in mining & quarrying. Semiliquid explosives have some practical advantages over solids for those applications.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I'm amazed that so many of you think that there is too much coverage of the British non-bombings in the news. I'm just the opposite. I hunger for more details. Who ARE these people? Where did they get their supplies? How well-connected are they? Are the plots connected?

Then there is the whole doctor thing. What's that? If I were a Pakistani doctor in Liverpool right now I'd be pretty nervous. In fact, I'd be pretty nervous if I were a Sikh doctor in Milwaukee.

Fact is, we don't know much about the limits of moslem extremist terrorism. Is it a few scattered attacks a year that mostly sputter out but at worst kill a few hundred or a few thousand people? Or will major cities be destroyed. We really just don't know.

Yes, Chertoff did say that this group didn't appear to be a threat here and has "played down" reports of an imminent al Qaida attack, though we must be vigilant. The airport security level was not raised because it has been at orange for some time (it could hardly be raised to red on this).

Also, the media has to walk a fine line now. They have to deal with terror fatigue and skepticism, kind of like Paris Hilton stories. And they could hardly twist this story into an imminent threat to the U.S. They have been burned several times by inflating some small group of lunatic wannabes into the great terror attack.

Still, Joe Lieberman called for better "tools," specifically warrantless eavesdropping, for fighting terrorists like those in Britain, falsely insinuating that spying by the Brits foiled these attacks. He was basically saying get off the president's back on the illegal NSA spying program.

Chertoff agreed: I’m concerned about losing the tools that I can tell you we use every single day to catch the kind of plotting which we’ve just seen, obviously, give rise to the attempted bombings in London.

They'll get their mileage out of this.

I saw a PBS documentary the other night about the Patty Hearst case, and what occurred to me over and over again about the Symbionese Liberation Army was that they were so out of touch with reality. At one point -- 1968 -- left radicalism was at its height. By 1973, this synthetic prison gang and their senseless actions was the organization in full: a bunch of incompetents with next to no support. They did get the food deliveries out of the Hearsts, but they blew all their possible support by regarding the average bank customer as "pigs," and posing with clownish slogans like "Death to the fascist insects that prey on the life of the people." Or more or less. Radicals? They couldn't run a commune in Oregon.

And it was a real sign of the decline of '60s radicalism. I thought about history appearing once as tragedy, and then as comedy.

And I think this may also be relevant to our current jihadists who couldn't bomb straight.

Perhaps omitting "young", the presence of Ann Coulter is act of terror. I have to think more about Paris Hilton.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Larry makes the point that these particular terrorists where incompetents. On TV Larry made the point that was also true in the 1990s that acts of terrorists killed fewer people than died in bathtubs in the United States. Thus the elder Bush and then the Clinton Administrations raised the level of focus on terror but put many other interests on top of it. One result was that as the CIA apparently knew someone slipped through and thus 9/11 resulted killing 3,000 Americans. Part of the problem of course was that Clinton was aware of the CIA's record of incompetence for over 30 years and did not pay as much attention to them as he might.

As best I can tell from Jay and CSCS there is a desire to wish away the threats, though not completely, from the Muslims. I gather from them unless they end up killing people, thus establishing their competence, it does not count as serious. It is as scary as Bush's view and shares with Bush an ideological non-factual basis.

The British had experience with the IRA bombing campaign and the Blitz before. Americans have not had that experience. The British in someways already start with fewer rights than Americans. A day after the bombings the British are already making arrests.

Larry's point that Americans should not be, as was done with the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese the McCarthy Era, stampeded or allow themselves into being stampeded into sacrificing our rights is exactly correct. Bush has used fear to take away the rights of Americans. If we ever have another attack my guess we will long for the days of the Patriot Act unless we have a President and other leaders who acknowledge the real dangers but urge fighting both terrorism and fear. The denial by both left and right is appalling.

I may be wrong that UK cops may believe it was laughable but they are still making arrests and looking to make more and do you think they are sorry it did not succeed? Do you think they believe only if it succeeded it would make it a serious problem?

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Yes, and I saw a while ago that another doctor was Jordanian.  These are the guys linked to the autos, right?

I think SAAG.org was using "local" to distinguish it from a coordinated al Qaeda plot - meaninging the plans originated in London and Glasglow, not Warzistan. 

Neoboho

Larry, I support you 100%. In fact, I don't take the terror news seriously until I check your comments. Never mind the minority of hot heads out there who insist in being frightened. It's a necessary state to tolerate the garbage that's handed out by the Bushistas on a daily basis.

Why are we not hearing about Iraq? Why is some 1/2 ass, no outcome plot in London more important that our soldiers who are fighting against unbelievable odds in Iraq? If the doc did it, lock him up but lets keep our eye on the ball - out of Iraq now, the Iraqis want us out, it's it our obligation to leave?

You're the best!!!

On edit: Isn't it an act of terror for a president to order an action that results in the deaths of 600,000 civilians?

When corporate America took over the media they gave us manufactured news. Now they control the voting machines and we have manufactured elections. www.electionfraudnews.com

I am not sure why you need to demand "who" when it is a daily part of most posts at TPMCafe to deny there is a threat to the U.S. the to the West or to Israel.

I need to demand "who" because it's not true.

Indulge me. Point me to one person here who denies the threat of terrorism.

Is Paris out of jail yet? I can't follow the freakin story because of the Wrestler who killed his mentally impared son and wife due to steroids. How can I keep up with what sort of food Paris might eat now? Why can't we find out about her? Where is the media? I need my fix.
Ok, back to American Idol.

The British are handling it as a criminal event, no one is threatening "invasion" or destruction of "then frickin' moose-slims' . . . no sanctions or "code red" . . . no threat to invade Mexico (they was "brown" - even the "burnt" one, so what's the difference?)

And our Home Land Reich-mister wants MORE uncontrolled spying on Political, oops Radical Groups . . . sheeet, not one bit of wiretaps, monitoring, spying, infiltratin' has caught any "plotter" . . and don't give me that 'haven't been hit so we must be doing a GREAT" bullshit.
Reminds me of that old junior high joke where Rufus walks up to Dufus:
"What the hell you standing on a corner clappin' for?"
"Hell, I'm keeping the lions away!"
"Dufus you ignat fool they ain't no lions around here for 2,000 miles!"
"SEE it's workin'!"

So I guess we must be "winnin'"

Although I don't personally agree with the conclusions drawn by the poster you were responding to, sure, there have been acts of domestic terrorism lately.

For example, there was the bomb found by law enforcement in time, the car + accelerant driven into the side of a building, and an arson case being investigated as terrorism by the feds, all within the last year.

~

Sheesh ... what "reading comprehension skillz" are you referring to?

I haven't located them yet.

~OGD~

Howard, I more or less think the problem is simply that Daniel hears whatever it is he wants to hear. It's a sign of a closed mind.

How else would you explain that, when I say, "there are plenty of real threats out there," he then responds with, "As best I can tell from Jay and CSCS there is a desire to wish away the threats"?

Virtually everyone of your posts have been a denial of the seriousness of the terrorist threats. Josh Marshall has posted what seemed to me ridiculous denial about the threats faced particular by the West simply because the would be mass murderers have been amateurs. Read the responses up and down Larry Johnson's post. His point seems to be not to give in to fear, a point made by Bloomberg, not that threats. The bombings not only of 9/11 and the U.S. Embassies in Africa belie that but so do the bombings in Bali, Spain, England and India.

By the way just because there are real threats does not make Bush any more right in sacrificing American rights and values. Guantanamo, finding the Geneva Conventions "quant" aren't justifiable. To use Roosevelt's great phrase "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."
Fearmongerng like unilateral surrender to those who use terror should be seen as equally unAmerican.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

So tell me about all the domestic terrorist bombs that have gone off lately.

...and your point would be?

Look, as far as I'm concerned the terrorist menace is a replacement for the soviet threat, which was always less than advertised. It's a useful ploy to aid the aims and wants of the MIC, the Israeli lobby, and the blood sucking oil barons.

Most of the damned terrorists were originally trained by US, British, and Israeli intelligence, or so called rogue agents of the foresaid and if you don't believe those folks left stay behind agents in place you know nothing about the intelligence game or it's current authors. I don't believe in fortuitous circumstances that aid the wants and needs of the uber rich and powerful. You can if you like, but they already have enough useful idiots...

Howard, good point.

Last night's news claimed a connection between these incompetent 'terrorists' attacking in Great Britain and al Qaeda in Iraq, at least one who allegedly learned bomb making there. If we compare the sophistication of the attacks in Iraq and what happened in GB, I think this connection to al Qaeda/Iraq is pure bullshit.

Thanks to a compliant news media, Bush types have been able to replace the boogie man in children's dreams with al Qaeda.

Hopefully, for their patients, these bozos were better doctors than they were bomb makers.

Thanks for the links. I may have to start reading Friedman again.

Sure, if you're stuck in the airport. Not if you have anything better to do.

He's either the Master of the Obvious, or wrong, depending on the day.