Cargo Cult: Questions on the
Latest Terrorist Threat
by Chris Floyd
First we were told that the recently intercepted
package bombs sent, we are told, from Yemen, were targeted at synagogues
in Chicago. Now we are being told
that they were intended to blow up the cargo planes themselves. We are
also told that the bombs' design shows the mark of a "highly
sophisticated" operation by extremist Islamists, most likely al Qaeda.
All of which prompts one question. If you were indeed a "highly
sophisticated" Islamist extremist operation wishing to blow up cargo
planes bound for the United States with package bombs, would you really
a) mail those bombs from Yemen, a country currently under intense
counter-terrorism scrutiny by the United States, and b) address these
packages, from Yemen, to Jewish institutions -- in Barack Obama's home
city?
Either a) or b) alone would be enough to set alarm bells clanging
all through the thick mesh of security systems that now overlay modern
life.
Put them together, and what you have is either
a) the mark of a
very unsophisticated, cack-handed, two-bit operation whose sporadic and
isolated threats hardly justify a world-wide, never-ending,
mass-killing, liberty-gutting, multi-trilliondollar war, or
b) the mark
of a highly sophisticated organization that wished to ensure maximum
publicity for this attempted terrorist attack -- and even more publicity
for its heroic thwarting ... especially on the eve of a national
election, and after weeks of leaks and bad press about atrocities and
corruption that call the whole Terror War ethos into question.
Points perhaps worth pondering in the coming weeks as we watch the
ever-more profitable security mesh seize on this incident to call for
ever-greater funding, and ever-greater measures of control over our
lives.
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