Weakend: Really, Terrorists?

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Good grief. The media has been all abuzz about the suspicious packages found on planes yesterday. Around the DC area there’s also been a string of random gunshots at military spots like the Pentagon and a recruiting center. No one has been hurt, but there’s a suspicion (read: the media creating fear) that something might happen at a Marine Marathon this weekend. DC has also been blessed by the entrapment of an idiot wannabe terrorist who took pictures of the metro rail stations in town.

There is not a better time for Stephen Colbert to try and keep fear alive. It’s almost as if he engineered all these things right before the election on Tuesday culminating in the rally today. Thankfully Jon Stewart is also in town to restore some sanity, and I hope he succeeds.

The events of the last week are actually a perfect example of keeping the fear alive. The media loves to have you terrified of flying, going to work, or even leaving your house. They got all that glory this week. Adding in all the extra election coverage you can practically hear the news media collectively moan in pleasure.

Restoring sanity is actually a big deal here. Since 9/11 we’ve all kept the possibilities of a terrorist attack in the back of our heads. But sane people know it’s safer to travel today than it ever has been. And the truth of the matter regarding all the suspicious packages is that the only takeaway to be had from the news was that the system works. It caught these things before they could have done any harm, and my understanding is a number of them weren’t even capable of causing harm.

I’ve ignored most of the news coverage on all the recent fear hype. I’ll wait a few weeks for a real analysis of what happened, where it came from, and if there were any gaps in the system how they’re being plugged. But from what I can understand we’ve had international cooperation, a security system that protected everyone, and we’re all safer today than we were yesterday.

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Thor

Maybe I’ve just grown too cynical, but a “terrorist alert” just a few days prior to the US elections should always raise a few questions, and especially after seeing how enthusiastically media has been pumping the “DANGER DANGER” angle. Let’s be a little bit rational: if you were a terrorist and wanted to send a bomb through mail, you would NOT send it from Yemen and addressing it to a Jewish place of worship in Chicago. That is not even addressed in “Terrorism 101″ on the basis of common sense. And the idea that they were supposed to be triggered to explode in the air, when you’d have no idea of where it would occur (the case of too many variables) further adds to the lunacy (not to mention the limited impact of bringing down a UPS/FedEx plane on the perceived level of threat amongst the populace, thus removing your main reason for the action in the first place) . Either the terrorists are clearly incapable of making a single, successful plan to inflict damage due to their level of retardation (in which case the removal of civil liberties and expense of running a global war on terror becomes a completely different discussion) or we are being fed a story to “keep the fear alive”. And if so, maybe it is just Colbert that’s up to a new range of tricks (sarcasm intended)?
teeeef

ugh, and also.. it bugged me because if there actually ever was anything to this, why tell anyone? i totally get the whole media circus deal, but perhaps we should keep things of this nature out of the media. if the systems in place can detect trace amounts of certain chemicals super effectively, that is great, let’s not advertise our capabilities to would-be-terrorists. let’s instead not tell them how theoretically great our capabilities are, let them send something real, and actually catch them.

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Weakend: Really, Terrorists?

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