Foiled Plot Doesn't Make Us Safer - MSNBC.com

My friend Jeff just sent me this article with the following thoughts:

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"Obviously, I think banning liquids, balms, creams, and even TOOTHPASTE from airliners is absolutely absurd.  (Reminds me of 5 years ago when TSA made me and thousands of others break off the little nail file on my nail clippers, because somehow I could gain control of a plane using the deadly force of….. Nail Clippers.)   Yes, I realize that this plot included using liquid explosives, but COME ON: toothpaste???  (I can see the headline:  "Toothpaste Terrorism!"  (I just coined that phrase, thank you very much, royalties are due if you re-use it.) 

Soon, we'll find out that if you take off your polyester shirt in the lavatory (leaving another shirt underneath it so you don't look undressed when you exit the lav), and stuff it between the plastic wall and the metal hull and light it on fire with an electric razor which you have short-circuited previously so it will spark (you plug this into the outlet in the lav to get your electricity), that you can create a serious fire, serious enough to damage control cables running to the tail, and thus cause the plane to crash.  You walk out of the lav, sit back down, and let the fire build.  Coming soon to an airport near you:  we'll all be flying in our underwear, with maybe airline-issued paper gowns like the ones they give you at the hospital.  Think it's far-fetched?  What's to stop a terrorist group from stashing explosive liquids in vials inserted into their body cavities, and then combining them onboard to create the very same bomb that London foiled earlier this week?  You see, there's really no end to the creativity of the people who want to cause death on a spectacular, mass scale.

WHAT IS MUCH MORE TROUBLING IS WHY all of this is happening, and how we can stop it.  The article above is an interesting counterpoint to the Bush nonsense about the "war on terror" and how we are battling "Islamic facists" who simply are bent on "destroying democracy…" and "the freedom we all love" blah blah blah.  WHY are they so bent on destroying democracy, and on killing you, me, our children, their children, and everybody else who is American????  Do they "hate freedom"? Of course not.  Do they hate America?  Absolutely.  (Big difference, George.)

What I thought was most poignant about this article was the part about why the ranks of would-be suicide bombers continues to grow.  What is causing legions and legions of people to think that the only way they can live their lives the way the want to is to kill every American they can find, and for all of them to be willing to die in the process?  Hmmm, something's amiss here…could it be that the Good Old US of A is actually partly to blame for the problems that we find ourselves ensnared in?"

I have heard that, because of the terror plots unfolding in the UK this week, France has raised its Terror Alert Level from "Run" to "Hide".

This is apparently very serious, as the only two levels above this are "Surrender" and "Collaborate."

I'll keep you posted . . .

Duration
Dollars
Deaths - US
Deaths - Iraqi (civilian and police)

Over the past few years surprisingly many Jews, Persians, Palestinians, and Syrians have come through either my lab or neighboring labs, enough so that I often get an earful about these issues, so much so that I get a little tired of seeing more of the story here....But anyway, back in 2002 one palestinian (2nd generation) undergraduate, who often used the lunch room to pray to the east (remember, state university, Ohio and federal taxpayer-funded) complaining all the time about Israel, Israel, Israel.  I asked her, "What's wrong with the Jews?"  She said, "I have no problem with the Jews, it's just the Israelis I have a problem with."

Now, when the whole Mel Gibson thing broke, I thought, "Mel, Mel, Mel, just say 'Israelis' instead of Jews and there would be no problems."

Scottie mentioned the Mel thing and that reminded me...I think some kind of declaration needs to be made to save some effort on everybody's part.  It is fair to criticize one country's policy without being call racist, even if that country is Israel.

All right, so, Israel.  Probably before trying to digest all those beautiful pearls Scottie wrote, I have to ask this:  Post WWII, what do you do with the Jews? 

We may not want to play monday morning quarterback on history, so let me ask a different question.  Is it breaking U.N. resolutions and Israeli policy in the occupied territories that is the problem, or is it simply unfair that Israel exists because it displaces Palestinians etc.?  I guess I'm wondering whether Israel "has a right to exist" or not (to the extent that countries have rights...what do you think I'm a linguist?)

Because the central problem with Hamas and Hezbollah, is that they don't recognize Israel's "right to exist".  The Palestinian government is propped up with U.S. and Israeli funds.  Hamas wants to destroy Israel.  That's pretty clear.  Taking the high road for democracy is all well and good but Israel shouldn't fund it's own demise, and the U.S. doesn't have to chip in on that one either.  That's a big difference from running a coup.  Big difference.  That's dollar diplomacy, not CIA black ops.  W even said (astonishingly) he's willing to deal with Hezbollah as a political party if they disarm (a la Ireland).

I had a few thoughts today while returning from the DMV office in Lafayette.

    "What is liberty if it is accompanied with vast propaganda?"

    "What is democracy when governments pursue actions in direct opposition of the will of the people?"

    So let me hitch-hike on these ideas for a while, and hopefully I will have met Butch's criterion for being a blog member on his site ....

    GNN and CommonDreams reported the other day that 50% of Americans believe today that Iraq did, in fact, possess WMD's, thus justifying the 2003 US invasion and current occupation. Never mind that NO WMD's were found, the poll suggested that 50% of Americans believed that they were found there.

    One of the many arguments given to the American sheople pre-war was that Iraq had WMD's and intended to use them against the US. Well none were found. Another argument offered was that Saddam Hussein was in violation of UN resolutions, therefore the US had the unique right to invade the country and make him comply. This was an interesting argument because the measure went to the UN and the UN voted to pursue diplomatic means to resolve the problem, effectively vetoing the US's intentions of pre-emption. But the US invaded anyway. In retrospect, the US defied the will of the UN to punish Saddam Hussein for being in non-compliance with the UN .... Never mind that Israel has historically defied more UN resolutions than any other member country. Israel is still in defiance of UN 242, and this is a resolution which is almost 40 years old. A third argument meant to hammer the point home was the that US should free the oppressed Iraqi people from its ruthless dictator, and the US should establish a "free and democratic" Iraq.

    So let's look at some obvious questions to raise:

1. If the US is so supportive of installing the democratic ideal in the Middle East, why did the US government and its corrupt representatives decide to punish the Palestinian people for voting Hamas into power?

    So let's amend the US agenda : the US supports democracies if and only if it likes the outcome of democratic elections abroad. When the US does not support the outcome, it supports measures to disenfranchise and disempower those elected governments. The obvious case in point recently is with the Hamas rise to power in Palestine. Historically, there have been other examples of the US sounding the trumpets of democracy until a person or group comes to power with agendas not in complete alignment with the US's : e.g. the Arbenz-Guzman government of Guatemala in 1954, the Mossadegh government of Iran, before the 1953 coup by the CIA after Mossadegh decided to nationalize Iranian oil, which incidentally has much to do with the current propaganda concerning Iran.

The inescapable conclusion that reasonable people should arrive at is that if the US supports democracies, then it must also abide by the will of the respective peoples upon which it has imposed the democratic ideal.

2. Currently, 60% of Americans are opposed to the Iraq war, given the revelations of the last 18 months or so, namely that the intelligence was manipulated by the US government to pursue its geo-political strategies worldwide, that the Neo-Cons have wanted a war with Iraq since 1999, and have persuaded the government in charge, whether Clinton or Bush, to find reasons to pursue such a course of action. And yet even though a plurality of Americans do not support this invasion and occupation, there we are still. So the obvious point is that if democratically-elected governments do not respect the collective will of the people, should these governments be described as democratic?

3. Since the summer of 2002, which I will describe as the time of my political awakenings, I have been telling friends and colleagues of the underlying reasons for 9-11, and I have since witnessed that there have been no serious discussions by the mainstream media or the US government on how to rectify the situation, i.e. how to correct the root sources of the problem.

Here enters the monolithic power of propaganda, which certainly exists in most democratic countries but especially reigns in the US :  GNN recently reported that a high-ranking member of the 9-11 commission, Governor Tom Keane of NJ, said publicly that the findings of the 9-11 commission report pointed to the US-Israel alliance as the chief motor of Al-Queda aggression directed at the US. And the propaganda machine has effectively failed to report this, on purpose mind you, due to the agendas of the major media outlets.

And now take the current Lebanon crisis : The US could have stopped the Israeli agression against Lebanon literally after day one. But they did not.

Forget about the law that prohibits countries receiving US military aid from using US weapons for offensive measures, which is what Israel precisely did, let's just examine the role of propaganda in this affair.

Here are the facts.

2 Isareli soldiers were captured on Lebanese soil (an overlooked fact if you watch CNN), and Hezbollah said immediately that they wanted to exchange prisoners. Israel currently holds 9,000 prisoners (Palestinian and Lebanese), 1000 of which are being held without any charge or access to a court, prisoners labeled "administrative detainees". Before any rockets were fired by Hezbollah into Haifa or Israel proper, Israel called the "kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers an "act of war" even though Israel routinely does the same in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere. Israel immediately bombed the Beirut airport. After more bombings by the IDF of Lebanon then and only then did Hezbollah resort to sending rockets into Israel. Israel bombed bridges, schools, hospitals, orphanages, apartment complexes, and a well-known UN compound, and it claimed while doing so that all were "Hezbollah strongholds" . Joke.

Yet if a disinterested observer had wandered into the conflict mid-stream they would have witnessed the actions on the Israeli side as "self-defense", which is what the Israeli and US presses suggested; a suggestion, mind you, that is not consistent with the facts ....

So how did Hezbollah come to be in existence in the first place?
Good question ...

Israel illegally invaded Lebanon in 1982, and illegally occupied that country until 2000. Hezbollah was a grass-roots resistance movement that grew from Israel's illegal and non-UN-mandated actions. In fact, this author can produce a multitude of UN resolutions concerning the Lebanon invasion of 1982 that Israel defied and never complied with.
Yet the presses rolled on during the month-long conflict, and Israeli ambassadors and spokespeople told cameras about UN 1559, which called on Hezbollah to disarm.  Why do I bring this up?
Well if Israel wishes to invoke the UN 1559 resolution, which has a favorable conclusion with respect to the Israeli agenda, then Israel should be equally willing to abide by UN 242, UN 139, and others : see below:

http://www.mediamonitors.net/michaelsladah&suleimaniajlouni1.html#israelsdefiedresolutions

just cut and paste the above link and read with horror and shock !

And Israel quotes UN 1559 when it defies and has defied more UN resolutions than Hezbollah and Iran and Iraq combined ....

And now I mention Walt and Mearsheimer's landmark expose of AIPAC in its famous paper. For those unaware of the 2 professors (where have you been), they are not fringe, they are not wackos, but mainstream academics from Harvard and the University of Chicago who questioned if the US-Israel alliance really does have the US best interest at heart. This duo was quickly maligned by the power apparatus as being anti-semitic, but upon closer inspection, those charges are completely unfounded and simply a smokescreen.

I have become quite knowledgable about the inner workings of AIPAC and if someone on the blogsite has a question, please feel free to send it to me.

Enter the spin and propaganda ...

Yes it's true that Mel Gibson is an anti-semite.
No it's not true that any conscience-minded reader who criticizes Israeli policy in the OT or its master US's approval orders is also anti-semitic.
This point has been argued by the likes of Noam Chomsky (Jewish), Norman Finkelstein (Jewish), Uri Avnery (Israeli former member of the Knesset), Michael Lerner (Rabbi), Gideon Levy(Israeli), etc etc etc

I can produce a plethera of Jewish academic voices who criticize Israeli policy and the US's unconditional support thereof, and it is clear that those policies should be criticized based on their merits.

So the US has become even more threatened, and that is due in large part to its policy of letting Israel do whatever it wants. And now US citizens are spied on by its government. Its government is controlled by special interest groups at the exterior, and small think-tanks, which are frequently run by pro-Israel idealogues and Israel apologists, at the interior. The same think-tanks arranged for the Iraq war, even when Dick Clarke and George Tenet said confidently that 9-11 was perpetrated by Al-Queda and not Iraq. Yet through it all, it seems that Wolfowitz and Perle and Feith and Abrams and Cheney and Rumsfeld will still get away with all their lies and deceit and vast propaganda.

Sadly, 50% of Americans will tomorrow still believe that Iraq had WMD's, even though reality cannot comply with the outcome of that poll.

So where are we now?

As I think back over my first weekend in Jakarta, I have a couple of observations that I'd like to put down here.

I was struck by the level of security here. In America, the citizenry would be up in ARMS if we instituted the same level of checks and counter checks that they have here. Every hotel that I've been to (and that's where most of the bars/restaurants are) literally have a checkpoint where your car is stopped and armed guards come, look inside the glove box, the trunk, under the car with mirrors and profile the passengers. If the passengers are bule (white people), we are typically admitted without a fuss. I am told that if they are dressed in traditional Indonesian or muslim garb, they may be asked to step out and endure a pat-down.

After negotiating the security checkpoint, you are allowed to proceed to the entrance where you pay your cabbie the 20,000 rupiah or so that the ride costs (around $2 USD) and then pass through a metal detector and your lady has her purse examined. After that, you are home free and can enter the establishment. This is done not only at hotels, but also at the shopping malls and many restaurants.

I asked myself - what if this were America? I still feel somewhat violated when I am patted down at a baseball or football game. I am somewhat outraged at the car blockades around the Capitol and White House. I can't help but feel sometimes that the terror "alerts" are timed politically. Yet here, the threat is real - and no one seems to mind the extra security. In fact, if anything, the ex-pats I've run into will only frequent places with the extra security for safety.

Very interesting.

For more, visit www.dcoffline.com

Also, many of you have asked me for pictures. I am putting pictures up this afternoon on my Ringo site. If you are connected to me, you will get an automatic update. If not, reply to this post and request to be added to my network. I'll do my best to process the requests quickly.

News Analysis: 'Islamic fascists'? Bush sees a war of ideology - Americas - International Herald Tribune

Every morning here in Jakarta, I wake up and head up to the 18th floor to eat breakfast, drink some excellent coffee and read the International Herald Tribute - a fascinating paper out of London that you can find online at www.iht.com. One of the articles today that cought my attention I have linked to above.

A critical debate in the United States today - among political candidates and among national security experts - is whether five years of war declarations and war-making have helped to make the country more secure. Or, even in the absence of a major attack on the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, has this strategy created greater danger by providing terror groups with exactly what they crave: the sense that they are a unified army of jihadists? And has the strategy radicalized large swaths of the Muslim world in ways that were not imaginable as recently as 2003?

For more, visit www.dcoffline.com.

I read the whole debate before I say anything on the previous post.  I don't want to enrage anybody, but a story just came out today which discusses the conflict between business and religion, and law each supports.  Wal-mart and co. are pushing for more and more alcohol in it's stores, including political campaigning in dry counties throughout the south.  It is increasingly difficult to talk about any religious beliefs in any sphere without bumping into government regulation and control.  Here in Ohio there has been a long sustained push for gambling, you know, to help the children.  The only groups organized enough to fight gambling (i.e. a calculated extraction of cash from typically the poor that goes straight to big business with a cut to the state) are the churches.  If Christians, etc. are model citizens but sit on their hands politically, they may find family members in debt and broke, and that affects them personally too.

That being said it is tacky to have jets flying and an American flag in a church.

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/08/10/cheney-ct/

Cheney reaches new depths of lunacy as he outlines why Lieberman's loss Tuesday actually helps the terrorists.

Is it me, or is his fear-mongering actually becoming transparent? Is he saying the democrat voters of Connecticut should be ashamed of themselves for helping the terrorists?

I guess the new mantra is "Vote for Bush policies or DIE."

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E

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Underage_Sex_Pact.html

Fear you'll lose your boyfriend while recuperating from surgery? Do you (a) play upon his sympathy, (b) have doctors give your scars sexy dressings, or (c) arrange for your 15-year-old daughter to have sex with him for a couple months?

Life's all about the tough choices, I guess . . .

I'm going to have to give this woman the Dumbass award of the day.

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E