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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCharles Pierce--The FBI's July 4th Terror Arrests: Bollocks
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a36323/fourth-of-july-terror-plot-foiled/Why are they going out of their way to tell us that nothing happened?
I hate to be this cynical, but I've now lived through damned near 15 years of this stuff, so I'm not buying the rap wholesale any more. My government, and the people working in it, have found fear far too useful.
Bollocks. Coming hard on the heels of the news that, during the unrest in Baltimore, law-enforcement engaged in a fairly thorough disinformation campaign, I'm going to need a lot more than than Comey's word on this.
I hate to be this cynical, but I've now lived through damned near 15 years of this stuff, so I'm not buying the rap wholesale any more. My government, and the people working in it, have found fear far too useful.
"'I do believe our work disrupted efforts to kill people, likely in connection with July 4,' Comey told reporters at FBI headquarters in Washington. Comey's comments are a public confirmation made by other law enforcement that several people were arrested in the past month over concerns that they might have been inspired by ISIS to carry out attacks either during the holiday or during the Muslim holy period of Ramadan."
Bollocks. Coming hard on the heels of the news that, during the unrest in Baltimore, law-enforcement engaged in a fairly thorough disinformation campaign, I'm going to need a lot more than than Comey's word on this.
"'The FBI has arrested around a dozen people in the past four weeks,' Comey said. 'We made the arrests to thwart what we thought they were up to,' he added. 'Some of them were focused on the Fourth of July, and that's as specific as I can get.' He declined to say how many of those arrested were planning to carry out attacks or to describe the nature of what they were planning."Show me the evidence. Bring them all to trial. Until then, what is the point in telling us anything at all? If the attacks were thwarted, we really don't have to know about them, do we? Unless, of course, your point in releasing this information is to keep the fear level high enough so that you can aggrandize your own power a little more.
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Charles Pierce--The FBI's July 4th Terror Arrests: Bollocks (Original Post)
HomerRamone
Jul 2015
OP
Bingo. "Unless, of course, your point .... is to ... aggrandize your own power a little more".
GoneFishin
Jul 2015
#3
Justifying your job to get more money into your budget. Sounds like the plan...n/t
monmouth4
Jul 2015
#4
KG
(28,752 posts)1. fear factory going full steam, matters not who's in the WH
Response to KG (Reply #1)
1000words This message was self-deleted by its author.
GoneFishin
(5,217 posts)3. Bingo. "Unless, of course, your point .... is to ... aggrandize your own power a little more".
monmouth4
(9,709 posts)4. Justifying your job to get more money into your budget. Sounds like the plan...n/t
Scuba
(53,475 posts)5. The National Fear Meter is now set on "Puce."
LiberalElite
(14,691 posts)6. Reminds me of an old elephant joke
I think it goes like this:
A man is walking in a park and sees another man with an "elephant gun".
Man #1 to Man #2: why do you have that elephant gun?
#2: To kill the elephants.
#1 There are no elephants here.
#2 See? It works.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)7. That FBI issue keeps popping up, yet no mention on the tee vee.
How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing 'Terrorists' - and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook
By Rick Perlstein
Rolling Stone, May 15, 2012
This past October, at an Occupy encampment in Cleveland, Ohio, "suspicious males with walkie-talkies around their necks" and "scarves or towels around their heads" were heard grumbling at the protesters' unwillingness to act violently. At meetings a few months later, one of them, a 26-year-old with a black Mohawk known as "Cyco," explained to his anarchist colleagues how "you can make plastic explosives with bleach," and the group of five men fantasized about what they might blow up. Cyco suggested a small bridge. One of the others thought theyd have a better chance of not hurting people if they blew up a cargo ship. A third, however, argued for a big bridge "Gotta slow the traffic that's going to make them money" and won. He then led them to a connection who sold them C-4 explosives for $450. Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohios Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them.
Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldnt have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did.
The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. One of the Cleveland arrestees, Connor Stevens, complained to his sister of feeling "very pressured" by the guy who turned out to be an informant and was recorded in 2011 rejecting property destruction: "We're in it for the long haul and those kind of tactics just don't cut it," he said. "And it's actually harder to be non-violent than it is to do stuff like that." Though when Cleveland's NEWS Channel 5 broadcast that footage, they headlined it "Accused Bomb Plot Suspect Caught on Camera Talking Violence."
In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage. ("They teach you how to make all this stuff out of simple household items," one of the kids says on a recording quoted in the FBI affidavit about a book he has just discovered, The Anarchist Cookbook. Someone asks him how much it says explosives cost. "I'm not sure," he responds, "I just downloaded it last night." Its a perfect example of how post-9/11 fear made law enforcement tactics seem acceptable that were previously beyond the pale. Previously, however, the targets have been Muslims; now theyre white kids from Ohio. And maybe you could argue that this is acceptable, if the feds were actually acting out of a good-faith assessment of what threats are imminent and which are not. But that's not what they're doing at all. Instead, they are arrogating to themselves a downright Orwellian power the power to deploy the might of the State to shape a fundamental narrative about which ideas Americans must be most scared of, and which ones they should not fear much at all, independent of the relative objective dangerousness of the people who hold those ideas.
SNIP...
Not everything is the same since the 1970s, of course. The media has changed: Newsday editorialized in 1972 of the Camden case, "We have come to expect such tactics from totalitarian nations that have no respect for individual rights permitting dissent. They have no place in American and those who advocate them have no place in this government." You dont see that sort of language much any more. Indeed, Newsday appears not to have covered the arrest and trial of Hemant Lakhami at all. "Such tactics" are just not a very big deal any more.
CONTINUED w/links...
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515
PS: While Corporate Owned Media never mention that in all their coverage of the Global War on Terrrra, thank goodness for DU and HomerRamone!
malaise
(269,157 posts)8. Well if people are terrified all the time
the scumbags can do all sorts of evil deeds in secret - like changing boundaries, passing laws, stealing pensions, destroying unions and looting state and federal budgets.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)9. Don't forget TPP!
Meanwhile Pete Peterson the Presidents' Friend will help watch Social Security.
The 1% are having the feast of their lives. People will fight back.