Wolf! Wolf! The Sky Is Falling!

[shereads]

Last week when Homeland Security raised our Terror Alert Color to Orange, it wasn't Ridge's typical, "Look out! Something bad could happen somewhere!"

No, this Orange Alert was a detailed, multiply-sourced, highly specific, butt-clenching national emergency. Even I fell for it, and I'd question my own eyes if BushCo announced that grass is green.

Live and learn.

Ridge Defends Heightened Terror Alert

'Preemptive Action' Necessary Even if Casing Done Prior to 9/11, Secretary Says

By Dan Eggen, Dana Priest and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, August 3, 2004; 4:38 PM


Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said today that the government needed to take "preemptive action" to warn the public that al Qaeda had been casing five U.S. financial institutions, even if the alleged surveillance was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.



At a news conference in New York, Ridge said several times that some computerized files from 2000 and 2001 documenting the al Qaeda surveillance were "updated" more recently than that. "I don't want anyone to disabuse themselves of the seriousness of this information simply because there are some reports that much of it is dated," Ridge said. "When you see this kind of detailed planning, you have to take preemptive action to prevent it from occurring," he added, according to a transcript of his remarks.

Asked what he would say to skeptical people who see a political motive in the terror alert, he replied: "I wish I could give them all Top Secret clearances and let them review the information that some of us have the responsibility to review. We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security."

Ridge's remarks came after numerous intelligence and law enforcement officials said that most of the al Qaeda surveillance of the five financial institutions that led to the latest terrorism alert was conducted before the 2001 attacks on the United States and that authorities are not sure whether the casing of the buildings has continued.

More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.

"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."

But other government officials said al Qaeda's history of devoting years of preparations and planning to its attacks meant the information was still relevant.

"We said at the beginning that the casings were done in 2000 and 2001, but were updated as recently as January of this year," said Fran Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, in an interview on NBC's "Today" show. "And, in fact, what we know about al Qaeda is that they case things and they do their homework well in advance and then update it before an attack."

One piece of information on one building, which intelligence officials would not name, appears to have been updated in a computer file as late as January 2004, according to a senior intelligence official. But officials could not say yesterday whether that piece of data was the result of active surveillance by al Qaeda or came instead from information about the buildings that is publicly available.

Many administration officials stressed yesterday that even three-year-old intelligence, when coupled with other information about al Qaeda's plans to attack the United States, justified the massive security response in the three cities. Police and other security teams have been assigned to provide extra protection for the surveilled buildings, identified as the International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters in Washington; the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup Center in New York; and the Prudential Financial building in Newark.

Intelligence officials said that the remarkably detailed information about the surveillance -- which included logs of pedestrian traffic and notes on the types of explosives that might work best against each target -- was evaluated in light of general intelligence reports received this summer indicating that al Qaeda hopes to strike a U.S. target before the November presidential elections.

Several officials also said that much of the information compiled by terrorist operatives about the buildings in Washington, New York and Newark was obtained through the Internet or other "open sources" available to the general public, including some floor plans.

The characterization of the age of the intelligence yesterday cast a new light on Ridge's announcement Sunday that the terrorism threat alert for the financial services sectors in the three cities had been raised. Ridge and other officials stressed Sunday the urgency of acting on the newly obtained information, but yesterday a range of officials made clear how dated much of the intelligence was.

One senior intelligence official said the information is still being evaluated.

A number of other buildings were mentioned in the seized computer files, but only in vague references, so officials decided not to issue alerts about them, an intelligence official said. They included the Bank of America building in San Francisco; the Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange buildings in New York, as well as two other sites in that city; and an undisclosed building in Washington and another in New Jersey.

"We chose not to release it because we decided they weren't anywhere near the same level of danger as the others," the official said.

President Bush and Vice President Cheney said in separate appearances yesterday that the new alert underscores the continuing threat posed by al Qaeda.At a news conference announcing his proposed intelligence reforms, Bush said the alert shows "there's an enemy which hates what we stand for."

 

[cantdog]

These guys would be such buffoons, but they wield genuine police powers.

It seems like a person ought to be able to just wake up, but the nightmare is made flesh.

 

[shereads]

These guys would be such buffoons, but they wield genuine police powers.

It seems like a person ought to be able to just wake up, but the nightmare is made flesh.

I think they know they're evil, and they don't care.
My friend thinks they know they're lying, but they don't think that makes them evil.

What's your take? Do they laugh at us, or do they think they're doing this for our own good?

Edited to add: I can't help but admire the depth of GWB's insight into the terrorist mind, and the clarity with which he explained it to the rest of us: "There is an enemy which hates what we stand for."

 

[cantdog]

The color coded mandrill shit is almost entirely done for consumption within the police and agent community. The various agencies, part of whose job it is to pay attention to that bumf, doubtless have had to come up with tiered responses.

For melon they do one thing, but for turnip they do another. Or whatever the colors are.

Some color shift, any color shift, is "good" because it reinforces the link between the ordinary, once-independent police agency and the central doo-doo factory.

Just as the public needs doses of fear now and then, the police agencies have to let themselves be jerked around by the color codes. It makes them accept it, at first. I'm sure the idea of loss of autonomy made them grumble at first, but it's getting more usual and unremarkable all the time.

The tiered responses show up in the news from time to time. More roadblocks, more outrages to Asians or heightened paranoia about vulnerable sites will trigger some incident which makes the wire services, and the police chief or marshal or whoever will tell us his men were simply responding to the orange alert or the yellow one.

When a newsman asks Ridge's spokesman what this portends for the bloke in the street, they don't have an answer. It's not for the use of the bloke in the street.

That's my take.

Each time they do this, the marionette agencies are more firmly tied to the central puppeteer office.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I’ll bet I know what Ridge is thinking. There’s been a lot of chatter on radical Moslem websites about the effects of the 3/11 Madrid subway bombings on the Spanish election (this is in the current New Yorker) and talk about whether similar bombings might do the same in the US election. This has spooked the US government, especially with the Republican convention set to start at the end of the month.

I’ve seen a few articles that say that Al Qaeda is pulling for Bush in the election because Bush’s actions have done so much to gain them recruits and strengthen their reputation and credibility in the Arab world. The invasion of Iraq was a godsend to Al Qaeda, as some of us have been saying all along.

Of course, if Al Qaeda really wants Bush re-elected, it would be in their interests to keep quiet and not try anything before the election, but you never know. Al Qaeda has become a ‘franchise’ operation no longer controlled by any one man or party, so there’s no telling what some rogue group might do in their name.

---dr.M.

 

[shereads]

[

When a newsman asks Ridge's spokesman what this portends for the bloke in the street, they don't have an answer. It's not for the use of the bloke in the street.

That's my take.

Each time they do this, the marionette agencies are more firmly tied to the central puppeteer office.

That makes sense, absolutely. But if the only purpose is to create the police state, they could do it behind-the-scenes and rely on an occasional "leak" to keep us nervous. There's an element of theater here that has kept the public off-balance, and of course distracted from other issues. As Michael Moore pointed out in F9/11, tyranny takes hold when people consent to the elimination of privacy and other freedoms. We wouldn't have let it happen to the extent it already has, if 9/11 had been one tragic event that we eventually got over. But we've been kept in an unrelenting state of fear and uncertainty since that day. Even the distrust some of us feel will ultimately change our lives. I've never been afraid of my own government, and it would never have occured to me to doubt the veracity of a national emergecy, until the build-up to war revealed what these people are about.

You may recall, there have also been some fortuitously timed terror alerts that pushed other breaking news off of the front pages: the outing of Wilson's wife; the news that Cheney might be questioned as part of a Halliburton investigation.

The vaguely worded threats that Ridge typically issues are good for making us suspect every stranger of conspiring to kill us. And they not only keep us off-balance, they make our lives surreal. (Ridge or Ashcroft tells us the holidays are dangerous in a non-specific way, and on the same day Bush encourages us to shop and travel and enjoy our normal lives.) But those alerts lack the exciting visuals of this most recent one. Closing the Statue of Liberty, small armies of police at financial institutions. All based on 3-year-old information that turned up in an arrest that happened to coincide with the slight afterglow from the Democratic convention.

I feel like a puppet whose strings are being pulled by a criminal, and a stupid one at that.

But my original question wasn't intended to be about why Bushco might be manipulating us. I meant to ask, for those who agree that they are manipulating us, how the perpetrators themseves might feel about it.

I was talking to a friend after one of the lies was revealed (I've lost count of which one, something to do with the WMD lies) and I said "how can these people sleep at night, knowing lives have been lost because of them?" He disagreed that they feel responsible at all. He thinks they are mostly well-meaning zealots and ideologues, who think they're dosing Americans with nasty medicine for our own good. Even Cheney.

I think Ashcroft is on a mission of zeal to save America's soul, and that GWB has been led to believe he's doing the right thing and is clinging to that. Cheney, though, can hardly think that his ties with Halliburton and the no-bid contracts are accomplishing great things for America. I think he holds us all in contempt, GWB included.

What do you think they think of themselves?

Is there a zealot's moral imperitave on the part of someone like Bush or Ashcroft, to achieve a "greater good" at whatever cost? Or is this mostly self-serving, and fueled by contempt for the public, which is what I sense from Cheney?

 

[shereads]

I’ll bet I know what Ridge is thinking. There’s been a lot of chatter on radical Moslem websites about the effects of the 3/11 Madrid subway bombings on the Spanish election (this is in the current New Yorker) and talk about whether similar bombings might do the same in the US election. This has spooked the US government, especially with the Republican convention set to start at the end of the month.

I’ve seen a few articles that say that Al Qaeda is pulling for Bush in the election because Bush’s actions have done so much to gain them recruits and strengthen their reputation and credibility in the Arab world. The invasion of Iraq was a godsend to Al Qaeda, as some of us have been saying all along.

Of course, if Al Qaeda really wants Bush re-elected, it would be in their interests to keep quiet and not try anything before the election, but you never know. Al Qaeda has become a ‘franchise’ operation no longer controlled by any one man or party, so there’s no telling what some rogue group might do in their name.

---dr.M.

This explains why the keynote speaker is a Mullah.



I think an Al Queda attack would have the opposite effect on the U.S. election. In Spain, there was an existing resentment of their involvement with us in Iraq, and an attack on their own soil confirmed what a lot of people already believed - that they shouldn't have involved themselves. Here, the more likely result would be that we'd circle the wagons, and Bush would go into the election with a temporarily re-united country behind him.

 

[Edward Teach]

Hey, Tom. Check out that telegraph traffic.

I think there are some suspicious 1941 messages having to do with our naval base at Pearl Harbor.

RED ALERT - RED ALERT

Hide GWB and put Cheney in charge.

Ed

 

[shereads]

Re: Hey, Tom. Check out that telegraph traffic.

I think there are some suspicious 1941 messages having to do with our naval base at Pearl Harbor.

RED ALERT - RED ALERT

Hide GWB and put Cheney in charge.

Ed

Nobody hid him on 9/11, Teach. Ever wonder why his security detail kept watching TV in the other room and let him stay in his published location in that school room while they rushed Cheney to the White House basement?

The "bullseye" painted on the roof of that school room...Was it really an art project by the children, as we're told?

And what about the "I'm with stupid" necktie that Cheney wears when they appear together in public?

 

[Edward Teach]

I think they know they're evil, and they don't care.
My friend thinks they know they're lying, but they don't think that makes them evil.

What's your take? Do they laugh at us, or do they think they're doing this for our own good?

Edited to add: I can't help but admire the depth of GWB's insight into the terrorist mind, and the clarity with which he explained it to the rest of us: "There is an enemy which hates what we stand for."

I agree with your friend, Sher. They think that the end justifies the means. They truly believe that they are right and that to me is the scariest thing about it.

Some I know working in the Republican Party even call it "the cause." And by "the cause," they mean all of it - all the right wing claptrap. It is as if they have been brainwashed. Hell, I guess they have, even if it is self-inflicted.

They have learned that the public can be convinced of most anything if they are told it often enough.

They have also learned to control the media.

They are good at this stuff. Make no mistake about it.

Ed

 

[Edward Teach]

A few months ago, Noam Chomsky, speaking I believe at a UN conference, predicted that something big would happen near election time, like the capture of bin Laden. He pointed out that everyone knows where he is, they simply need to go in and get him.

Knowing what this crowd is up to is one thing - stopping them is quite another.

Ed

 

[Edward Teach]

Re: Re: Hey, Tom. Check out that telegraph traffic.

Nobody hid him on 9/11, Teach. Ever wonder why his security detail kept watching TV in the other room and let him stay in his published location in that school room while they rushed Cheney to the White House basement?

The "bullseye" painted on the roof of that school room...Was it really an art project by the children, as we're told?

And what about the "I'm with stupid" necktie that Cheney wears when they appear together in public?

Well, I was referring to them putting his little hiney on AF 1 and flying him around all day while Cheney notified the military, ordered civilian planes shot down and a few things like that.

I wonder if Monica made him that tie?

Ed

 

[Guest]

To quote from Robin Williams -

(in your best Elmer Fudd voice)

"Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting tewwoists. Heh heh heh heh."



or as Tom Ridge (but sounding like Richard Nixon) -

"I don't know where.

I don't know when.

I don't know how.

But something's going to happen."



So ridiculous. Reminds me of Animal House and Delta Tau Chi being on "double secret probation."

When even CNN Headline News talks about the timing as being politically motivated????

 

[Somme]

Three years old...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0408/S00043.htm

 

[Clare Quilty]

I’ll bet I know what Ridge is thinking. There’s been a lot of chatter on radical Moslem websites about the effects of the 3/11 Madrid subway bombings on the Spanish election (this is in the current New Yorker) and talk about whether similar bombings might do the same in the US election. This has spooked the US government, especially with the Republican convention set to start at the end of the month...

I don't think their motives are that honest. I'm inclined to believe the whole thing is a political ploy to lessen a Kerry post-covention bounce in the Polls. It's the politics of fear pure and simple. I wouldn't be surprized if the Bush administration was to call red alerts on Nov. 2nd in states he's likely to lose. One thing you almost have to admire about this group of scoundrels. They have the gall to do anything and they don't really care who knows it.

 

[Edward Teach]

Re: Three years old...

http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0408/S00043.htm

Excerpt from Somme's link:

As reported on the Bloomberg newswire, Laura Bush and the daughters Barbara and Jenna Bush held a photo-op at the Citigroup Center in New York City on Monday, the first day of Ridge's new Orange alert. This was one of the target buildings, according to Ridge. George W. Bush sent his entire family to the very place that was supposedly about to be blown to smithereens?

Ed

 

[shereads]

Re: To quote from Robin Williams -

(in your best Elmer Fudd voice)

"Be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting tewwoists. Heh heh heh heh."

Heehee!

(and in your Daffy Duck voice)

"You're des-s-spic-able!"

So ridiculous. Reminds me of Animal House and Delta Tau Chi being on "double secret probation."

When even CNN Headline News talks about the timing as being politically motivated????

How tragic is this, honestly? That we can harbor doubts when the people entrusted with our safety issue a warning of this magnitude? It took a lot to bring us to this point. One or two blatant contradictions wouldn't have done it.

If I had to choose a personal tipping point - the moment when I knew I would never be able to take anything Bush/Cheney said at face value - it was when Rumsfeld snapped at the press, "You must be reading too much. Nobody ever said anything about nuclear weapons in connection with Iraq."

To lie when you know your audience knows better - and that your lie can be proven as easily as playing back a videotape - demonstrates a mindset that embraces lying fully, and understands its power.

If you say something often enough, it's true. It's the core of Karl Rove's philosophy, and it works. But not forever, and not on everyone.

And now we're in danger because we don't know whether to believe we're in danger. It's criminal.

 

[shereads]

Re: Re: Three years old...

Excerpt from Somme's link:

As reported on the Bloomberg newswire, Laura Bush and the daughters Barbara and Jenna Bush held a photo-op at the Citigroup Center in New York City on Monday, the first day of Ridge's new Orange alert. This was one of the target buildings, according to Ridge. George W. Bush sent his entire family to the very place that was supposedly about to be blown to smithereens?

Ed

You have to admire that kind of personal commitment. It's the moral opposite of insider trading: insider suicide.

 

[Black Tulip]

Sorry, I have not read all posts completely. Just had to react because the original post from She is a bit frightening. It's not just happening with you guys, seems this is a spreading disease.

Picture this: the Netherlands, about four weeks ago. Out of the blue newsprograms are telling us there's a terrorist alert.
A what? Did we have those? We didn't know that.
Airports, major dykes and canals, Rotterdam harbor, well you lot probably know better how that works.

The responsible minister says there is a letter from Al Queda threatening with an attack on us because of our troops in Iraq.
Then some journalist finds out there is no letter.
No says the minister, there's a video-tape.
Journalist: no, there is no threat on the tape.
The minister: sorry, I mixed the two of them up.
Journalists (a bunch of them by now): the letter was delivered to the UN, nothing specific about the Netherlands. The tape was fake.



WTF???

General take is the folks in The Hague (similar to your Washington, DC) wanted to give the impression of being on top of things, alert, taking care of us.
Making sure they can't be blamed if something does go wrong.
Assholes.

There's nothing to worry about, you can go to sleep safely.
(That's what the prime-minister said on the evening before Germany invaded the country at the start of WWII.) LOL

 

[Guest]

I was just reading that when the 'enigma machine' was decoded and the first message showed what English village (or city, I can't recall now) was going to be bombed, Churchill ordered no evacuation because it would let the Germans know that the code had been cracked. Two thousand people died without that warning.

I give not one fucking bit of attention to our terror alerts. Even if the highest color or whatthefuck were announced about my city I would not budge. I hate this state of mental siege, I hate this immoral culture based on nothing but wealth and power. I hate getting this disturbed.

I must stop now. Perdita

 

[shereads]

The responsible minister says there is a letter from Al Queda threatening with an attack on us because of our troops in Iraq.
Then some journalist finds out there is no letter.
No says the minister, there's a video-tape.
Journalist: no, there is no threat on the tape.
The minister: sorry, I mixed the two of them up.
Journalists (a bunch of them by now): the letter was delivered to the UN, nothing specific about the Netherlands. The tape was fake.

Hmm. There's a way to put a Bushesque spin on this. Ari Fleisher, GWB's former press secretary, did a fancy job of it when the search for WMD was entering a second embarrassing week.

It went something like this:

"To those who say there are no weapons of mass destruction, I think those people have the responsibility to tell us where they are."

Don't try to make sense of it; your head will implode. Just take comfort in the expression of firm resolve.

Weaklings would have been cowering in shame. But not our boys! "You want to see the weapons? Find them yourselves!"

Thank you for sharing, Tulip. I shouldn't feel relieved that other countries are also infested with the cover-your-ass virus, but I am. If it were really just us, I'd feel awful.

 

[shereads]

I give not one fucking bit of attention to our terror alerts.

I understand. Unfortunately, Ridge has finally figured it out, too.

Wouldn't it be a lovely world if, four years ago, when all those intelligence reports and competing agencies' priorites and agendas were floating around the White House, just one person had said, "Let's call the FAA and tell them to initiate in-flight security measures like the addition of deadbolt locks to cockpits. Just in case. Maybe pilots should be ordered not to open the cockpit during the flight, even if there's a threat to the passengers."

There. That would have been mildly annoying and cost some controversy and a few thousand dollars in hardware. In return, it would have cost Al Queda years of planning and flying lessons, and at the least they woud have had to come up with something that hadn't already been thought of by Richard Clarke and others.

When I feel particularly angry and sad and frustrated, I think of Clarke. He had dedicated himself to making someone, anyone, listen and act, no matter that it earned him the enmity of his coworkers and that they laughed about his obsession with Bin Laden.

How must he have felt on the morning of 9/11?

And on the day after, when the people he'd been warning all expressed their shock and surprise?

That it would have been so simple to stop at least this particular variation of terror - that the information was there, along with the suspicion that commercial airlines might be the tool - makes it all the more infuriating that we were given the Patriot Act. By its very existence, it blames terror on the fact that we insisted on our freedoms under the Constitution.

 

[shereads]

Thank God for David Letterman

"New York City has been on high-level terror alert based on four-year-old intelligence. I can't wait until 2008 when we'll find out what's going on now."

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Next up: The Five Minute Hate.


Stay tuned and buy new and improved Hallburton duct tape. Now with half the carbs!

 

[Guest]

Jon Stewart -

I adore his irreverant nonsense (and the fact that even though he is quite intelligent he passed himself off as a dancing monkey - his words - at the Democratic convention).

Tonight he discussed how all Cheney campaign speech audience members had to sign a loyalty oath before they could attend the speech. I do herby swear to endorse the re-election of George W. Bush for the United States. The typos aren't mine, by the way - those are word for word from the form attendees had to sign.

I suppose this is to prevent any hecklers? Dickheads.

And She - this is for you - Bill Clinton will be on Jon Stewart on Monday, August 9th - Comedy Channel, 10 p.m. Central.

I loved his speech at the convention and I am looking forward to this - delightful fun!