HOW I WON THE WAR ON DINGBATS®
Mar. 7th, 2008 11:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
defrogLike most of you, when I want detailed hard-hitting, analytical news coverage of the War On Terrorism, I turn to Rolling Stone magazine.
Last month they published an investigative piece on the Joint Terrorism Task Forces that the FBI set up to coordinate the work of federal agencies and local cops to fight teh terrorisms. 619 arrests so far, and Team Bush says that each and every one of them have totally saved America from another 9/11.
Only [and you saw this coming all the way up Main Street] that’s not entirely true:
In other words, the Big Strategy for defeating al Qaeda seems to be the equivalent of taking down a drug kingpin by busting high school seniors selling nickel bags of pot to each other behind the portables (or whatever the hell the kids do during recess in 2008).
To be fair, the FBI’s excuse for all this is that in fact they routinely arrest genuinely dangerous terrorists all the time and stop very real and dangerous plots, only they can’t make those public. See, if they did, they’d “tip their hand”. Cos at the moment, dangerous terrorists are so dangerous that they have absolutely no idea the FBI is trying to catch them.
Ooh, poor lambs. It ain't easy bein' in the FBIs.
None of this is strictly new information, but helpfully (and more crucially), RS has also compiled a very impressive list of high-profile arrests detailing how dangerous the FBI claimed the perps were, how dangerous they actually turned out to be, and – by the most amazing coincidence – what other story got conveniently bumped from the front page.
You start noticing a pattern by the end. Which goes something like this: Team Bush is winning the War On Terrorisms® by arresting the least dangerous people they can find and playing the Fear Card to make them seem as dangerous as possible in the name of puffing up their terror-cred and distracting the public from embarrassing headlines.
Or is that too cynical? Maybe. But considering all those privacy violations the FBI has been racking up in the name of protecting you from relatively harmless dingbats, somehow I feel entitled.
Grave danger,
This is dF
Last month they published an investigative piece on the Joint Terrorism Task Forces that the FBI set up to coordinate the work of federal agencies and local cops to fight teh terrorisms. 619 arrests so far, and Team Bush says that each and every one of them have totally saved America from another 9/11.
Only [and you saw this coming all the way up Main Street] that’s not entirely true:
[A] closer inspection of the cases brought by JTTFs reveals that most of the prosecutions had one thing in common: The defendants posed little if any demonstrable threat to anyone or anything. According to a study by the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, only ten percent of the 619 "terrorist" cases brought by the federal government have resulted in convictions on "terrorism-related" charges -- a category so broad as to be meaningless. In the past year, none of the convictions involved jihadist terror plots targeting America.
In other words, the Big Strategy for defeating al Qaeda seems to be the equivalent of taking down a drug kingpin by busting high school seniors selling nickel bags of pot to each other behind the portables (or whatever the hell the kids do during recess in 2008).
To be fair, the FBI’s excuse for all this is that in fact they routinely arrest genuinely dangerous terrorists all the time and stop very real and dangerous plots, only they can’t make those public. See, if they did, they’d “tip their hand”. Cos at the moment, dangerous terrorists are so dangerous that they have absolutely no idea the FBI is trying to catch them.
Ooh, poor lambs. It ain't easy bein' in the FBIs.
None of this is strictly new information, but helpfully (and more crucially), RS has also compiled a very impressive list of high-profile arrests detailing how dangerous the FBI claimed the perps were, how dangerous they actually turned out to be, and – by the most amazing coincidence – what other story got conveniently bumped from the front page.
You start noticing a pattern by the end. Which goes something like this: Team Bush is winning the War On Terrorisms® by arresting the least dangerous people they can find and playing the Fear Card to make them seem as dangerous as possible in the name of puffing up their terror-cred and distracting the public from embarrassing headlines.
Or is that too cynical? Maybe. But considering all those privacy violations the FBI has been racking up in the name of protecting you from relatively harmless dingbats, somehow I feel entitled.
Grave danger,
This is dF
