Has Anyone Here Tied The Embassy Closings To The NSA Spying?....

[global1]

I was thinking that it was like a coincidence that after all the furor about the monitoring of our telephone calls and internet surfing - that closing the embassies was a way of justifying the spying that is going on around us.

I can hear a backroom discussion going on like this: "Let's say the threat is reminiscent of 9/11 and then maybe then Americans will rally behind our spying on them."

I guess my tinfoil hat is on too tight today. Sorry!!!

[russspeakeasy]

1. Your hat and mine, are perfectly fitted.

This stunk from the day it was "announced". but if nothing happens.......?

[Downwinder]

9. If nothing happens they can say they prevented an attack.

Scared the pink elephants away.

[russspeakeasy]

10. Yup !

[kardonb]

39. happlens .

and if "something " happens , will you clap your hands and be happy , downwinder ?

[Downwinder]

48. No, I will still check for terrorists

in blue uniforms with guns when I go out the door. I found that the demonstrations in Brazil (with State Department warnings) were not as hazardous as the army check points (without State Department warnings) in Argentina.

[TxGrandpa]

25. Too much of a coincidence...

..especially with the flap over the Snowden disclosures. Additionally why all the publicity? Is it to scare them off.

And like one poster said, it brings to mind the Bush era color coded alerts when the public gets too complacent and having second thoughts about governmental actions.

I was thinking this way while watching the news today.

[truedelphi]

42. Oh gosh, and now another

Obama is like George Bush comparison.

You can't compare the two. When Dubya did something sinister, the public was outraged. But when Obama does the same type of thing, the public now applauds!

[dkf]

2. I am with you. Just a tad bit convenient.

I guess our fear level is a little too low for their liking.

[IDemo]

3. Yep

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023396725

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023402240

But it's been brought to my attention that suggesting a connection is incorrect and that we should salute our packet-sniffin' men and wimmin in the good ol' NSA.

[Sherman A1]

4. Does seem just a bit curious

now doesn't it....

[Cali_Democrat]

5. Ya...because these kinds of warnings were never issued before the recent NSA revelations

Perhaps your tin foil hat is on too tight.

[AgingAmerican]

59. True

They were issued all the time under the previous administration.

[dipsydoodle]

6. Only as a distraction

and a lame one at that.

[reformist2]

7. I'll say this much: if anyone claims this as justification to violate the 4th amendment...

...call them out on their BS!

[GoneFishin]

8. You are right on target. They are desperate to maintain the status quo. n/t

[Cha]

11. Or the terror threat could be real and your little tinfoiled head needs to be

given a break today.


"What's behind timing of terror threat"

Editor's note: Peter Bergen is CNN's national security analyst, a director at the New America Foundation and the author of "Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden -- From 9/11 to Abbottabad." Bailey Cahall is a research associate at the New America Foundation.

(CNN) -- On Friday the U.S. State Department issued a worldwide travel alert because of an unspecified al Qaeda threat. The location of that threat, the department said in a bulletin, is "particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, and possibly occurring in or emanating from the Arabian Peninsula." As a result, an unprecedented 21 embassies and consulates in 17 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia will close on Sunday.

Sunday is also the 27th day of Ramadan and a particularly holy day for the world's Muslims as it is the "Night of Power," when the first verses of the Koran were revealed to the Prophet Mohammed.

It is also seen by al Qaeda's would-be martyrs as a particularly auspicious day to die.

On the Night of Power in 2000, which that year fell on January 3, al Qaeda militants attempted to launch a suicide attack against the American warship USS The Sullivans off the coast of Yemen with a bomb-filled boat.

snip//

The U.S. embassies in Baghdad, Iraq, and Tripoli, Libya, are among the facilities that will be closed on Sunday.

More..
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/02/opinion/bergen-terror-embassy/index.html?sr=sharebar_twitter

[Number23]

21. Interpol, which has nothing to do with the US, has issued a similar warning

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/interpol-makes-warning-linked-prison-breaks-19860820

In the past month, there have been prison breaks in Beghazi, Pakistan, and Iraq. Many of the escapees are linked to Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But for the un-informed that unfortunately dwell so prominently in this forum, this is all some attempt to minimize Snowden by the White House. This is easily the 5th OP on this stupid subject I've seen in the last 3 days. Between this and the president was "immature" to not meet with Putin at the G20 despite Russia's decision to grant temporary asylum to Snowden which ANY country would consider a slap in the face because it was, it says so much about the quality of the posters that post here.

[Cha]

24. I'll take President Obama's maturity over anybody's

who's blathering about him being "immature".

I'll take President Obama's maturity on Gay people being allowed to be married over Putin's law against Gay People except apparently for the Olympics where he would stand to lose money.

These guys issuing warnings are not playing.. they actually want to keep us safe. thankfully it's not up to the tinfoil hats in the peanut gallery.

[elehhhhna]

34. Poot's not thumbing it at Obama --

He's thumbing it against our shadow overlords -- yanno, the same asshats he's dealt with for 20 years at least, and will deal with for the next 20. IMHO.

Obama's just our current spokesmodel.

[Progressive dog]

52. "Shadow overlords", we should just

let Poot run the US too. Poot will fix them there shadow overlords. Maybe he can take care of us like he did Chechnya. Just think of all the money we'll save on elections.

[elehhhhna]

62. Was I praising Pootie there?

No. I think he's scarier than Cheney, ffs.

You imagined that.

[Progressive dog]

63. I confused your praise for Pootie with

praise for Pootie.

He's thumbing it against our shadow overlords

Of course you may have meant you are in favor of "our shadow overlords".

[elehhhhna]

66. try to comprehend: it's my opinion

it was not a value judgment on the right wrong etc. of it, Poots, or our shadow overlords.

[Progressive dog]

67. I got that it is your opinion which

you then denied. Try to comprehend what you say, I understand that you side with Pootie against the "shadow overlords."

[wtmusic]

51. Interpol has nothing to do with the U.S.? Please.

Their warning came one day after ours. An extraordinary coinky-dink.

[Number23]

53. They are not an arm of the US government or take orders from us

Apparently I needed to clarify that point for some reason.

Their warning came one day after ours. An extraordinary coinky-dink.

Omg, you're right. As did warnings from other embassies. You don't suppose these people actually TALK to each other or anything??!

[Recursion]

12. OFFS. This is worthy of Darrel Issa

This administration does not play politics with embassy security. You should be ashamed of yourself.

[DeeDeeNY]

19. +1

[Douglas Carpenter]

38. having bad thoughts about the motives of our leaders is a terrible sin

[jwirr]

13. My thought also.

[GP6971]

14. My BS meter

Was in overdrive since the beginning

[longship]

15. There are always curious coincidences.

World events are a messy affair. There always will be coincidences that seem to be connected although they are not.

Finding an apparent connection is not in itself a big deal. That's what the human brain does, and it seems to do it very well. We see patterns everywhere in nearly everything. When our ancestors lived on the velt one learned that a rustle in the grass could mean either something innocuous but it could also mean a lion. The person who didn't make that connection was likely eaten.

But the claim that a coincidence is causative merely because of the coincidence is called post hoc ergo propter hoc which is a logical fallacy.

Just because two events are ordered, doesn't mean that the one is the cause of the other.

For this reason, and without any confirming information, I reject the hypothesis of the OP.

[Recursion]

17. "Before I took statistics, I always thought correlation meant causation"

"Cool. Sounds like the class taught you something important."
"Maybe."

[Iggo]

16. Pretty much everyone right from the get go.

We danced this dance before with the Bushies and their Color Charts Of Mass Destruction.

[niyad]

18. quite a few of us

[cheapdate]

20. There was a major prison break in Libya, and I believe in Iraq as well.

Hundreds of presumably dangerous extremists escaped. I'd guess the travel and diplomatic warnings are closely related to these prison breaks?

[DeSwiss]

22. Everything is connected to everything.

- Once we figure this out, I think we'll have fewer problems.....

[chowder66]

23. So I guess we shouldn't alert anyone then.

Maybe al qaeda might think this time is ripe with everyone disbelieving the U.S. and all. See I just did it too!!!
NSA > Cynicism > Complacency > Unsuspecting Target


So let's not give people the info to decide their own level of action to take… let's just strip it all away because you know, if the government isn't transparent then you shouldn't believe anything it has to say thus you don't need to know any details at all.


(My response is not really personal to you, it speaks to a wide range of reactions about alerting human beings and the cynicism that seems to go along with it in some cases)

A friendly tip: If you find a need to ask if the tin foil hat is too tight, maybe you shouldn't pick up a tin foil hat in the first place.

[Shankapotomus]

26. I would think it has more to do with

the Department of State not getting caught with their pants down, less Republicans try to take advantage of another Benghazi.

[Turbineguy]

27. And my Wife

announced we're having meatloaf! Coincidence? I doubt it. She's involved with "them".

[greatauntoftriplets]

32. I forget...

Is the meatloaf a higher level of warning than the Swiss steak? Or is it the other way around?

[BlueStreak]

28. I did. SOme of our authoritarian forum-mates didn't like that very much.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023396052

[alcibiades_mystery]

45. Which posters in that thread are authoritarians?

[BlueStreak]

46. The gentle readers can be the judge of that.

Those who defend the unconstitutional construction of this massive domestic spying apparatus -- and turn a blind eye to transparently bogus attempts by this administration to divert our attention away from those core issues -- are, by definition authoritarians, it seems to me. It really isn't hard to identify.

[BlueStreak]

56. Just for the record, I have never alerted on any post, even when baited.

[Douglas Carpenter]

29. There simply is no way of knowing. President Obama would not necessarily know about it either if the

intelligence services issued a questionable alert. It doesn't necessarily require some big conspiracy or even a conscious act of deception. It just takes the judgment call of some senior intelligence analysts who may or may not be self-aware that they are being partly motivated by the desire to inspire the public to grant the intelligence services the leeway that they surely feel they need.

[AverageJoe90]

30. I'm sorry, but I just don't see any possible connections here.

The closings very well could be a false alarm.....that might be true.....but what if we hadn't and if an attack had occurred today? I dunno about you but I'd think we'd suffer even more in the long run, because then the Goppers could pull out the Benghazi B.S. all over again.

[moondust]

31. The timing is fishy.

Reminiscent of the Bush admin using terror alerts to try to blow an "undesirable" story out of the headlines.

[Catherina]

33. "Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now

Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the N.S.A.'s data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/world/middleeast/qaeda-messages-prompt-us-terror-warning.html?hp&_r=0

[Number23]

36. lol You're not the only one that can cherry pick

Security analysts said Friday that in the aftermath of the furor over the Obama administration’s handling of the attack last year on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department is now more likely to publicize threat warnings when deemed credible, both to alert the public and to help deter any imminent attacks.

“A decision to close this many embassies and issue a global travel warning for a month suggests the threat is real, advanced and imminent but the intelligence is incomplete on where,” said Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. case officer and a Brookings Institution scholar.

..."After the attack in Benghazi, the military’s Africa Command bolstered its quick-reaction forces in Djibouti and created new Marine Corps reaction forces in Morón, Spain, and at the naval air station in Sigonella in Italy that can respond to a crisis within a few hours.

From your same link.

[Douglas Carpenter]

41. it's not necessarily mutually exclusive you know

There are always threats and rumors. I worked in the Middle East for decades and I can barely remember when there was not some alert in the air. So it is quite possible that there was a certain amount of chatter as there frequently is - enough to raise concern - enough to inspire memories of how much criticism they were under because of the Benghazi affair - against the backdrop of the intelligence analysts who make these decisions being well aware that their agencies are under fire both for not doing enough and for questionable surveillance activities - Thus a more aggressive response both to prove their worth and cover themselves. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is simply recognizing how things in bureaucracies sometimes work.

[Number23]

44. I'm not the one attempting to portray this as some sort of "conspiracy." Your response was to

the wrong person.

[sabrina 1]

40. Well, that sounds like an admission. It's too bad that that government has so little credibility

that the question even has to be asked.

[Zorra]

35. They lie to us and hide stuff from us all the time so it would be stupid not to be suspicious. nt

[Snotcicles]

37. At least they didn't assign a threat level color code. nt

[alcibiades_mystery]

43. Oh FFS

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

47. All that's missing is Colin Powell and WMDs in Iraq.

[forestpath]

57. +1

[treestar]

50. Many times

The ODS crazed find it a very suspicious coincidence.

[darkangel218]

54. Its all too obvious, me thinks. nt

[Douglas Carpenter]

55. prominent Republican Senate defenders of NSA surveillance certainly have

Intelligence committee members in Washington who had been briefed on the alert said it was the most serious they had seen for years and repeatedly cited the threat during Sunday's political talk shows as a reason to resist growing calls in Congress for reform of the NSA's sweeping powers.

"There has been an awful lot of [terrorist] chatter, which is very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11," said the Republican senator Saxby Chambliss on NBC's Meet the Press. "As we come to the end of Ramadan, which is always an interesting time for terrorists, and the upcoming 9/11 anniversary, this is the most serious threat that I have seen in the last several years."

Chambliss, who was briefed by the vice president, Joe Biden, last week, said he believed the intelligence had been gathered by the NSA using foreign surveillance powers granted under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

"This is a good indication of why they [the surveillance powers] are so important," he said.

His defence of the NSA was echoed by another Republican, Lindsey Graham. Asked by CNN host Candy Crowley whether Americans were right to be frightened, senator Graham said: "It is scary … the NSA programme is proving its worth yet again."


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/04/nsa-us-embassy-closures-terrorist-threat

[Scurrilous]

58. LOL

Like the terrorists give a @#$%.

"Oh we better not attack the US...there's controversy afoot!"

[BlueStreak]

60. Like the terrorists aren't smart enough to change their Outlook calendar or GPS coordinates?

This is what seems so preposterous about the arguments coming from the likes of Obama and the others protecting the security state.

Real terrorists already know how to fly under the radar and do so successfully most of the time. They know how to use proxies. They know how to use skype. They know how to use prepaid phones. It isn't rocket science.

Real terrorists are flexible. If we send them a telegram that we're going to protect 23 embassies for the next 27 days, they will either wait 28 days or they will find a different target.

These terrorists are really a patient lot with a long-term view.

Osama has been dead for 27 months, and he is still winning.

[GiaGiovanni]

61. Tin foil seems to be the only way to go these days

[99Forever]

64. The only people doing that...

.. are with those functional brains that don't have their heads up their ass.

[bullwinkle428]

65. I guess Rachel Maddow is now the Queen of Tinfoil, as she speculated on this

during last night's show.

She presented polling evidence which showed that support for NSA-type surveillance programs nearly DOUBLED when the question asked included words to the effect of "to prevent acts of terror".