“He was in a trance”

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

In yet another example of unbelievable douchebaggery, our favorite Senator Joe Lieberman has decided, based on some guy trying to set his underwear on fire on a flight to Detroit, that we need to go to war with Yemen.

“Somebody in our government said to me in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, Iraq was yesterday’s war,” Lieberman explained. “Afghanistan is today’s war. If we don’t act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow’s war. That’s the danger we face.”

Senator Arlen Specter (D-PA), also appearing on the program, seemed to agree, calling an attack against Yemen “something we should consider.”

What these two double-douchebags fail to mention is that we’ve already attacked Yemen.

Do they really think we’re that stupid?   I guess if you’re appearing on Fox, you can assume your audience IS that stupid, but c’mon.    Just a few days ago we sent Tomahawk missiles into Yemen, slaughtering dozens of civilians.  We also signed off on Saudi air strikes that had the same result — a slaughtering of civilians.

So yeah, let’s just ignore that for the time being, and maybe we can somehow retroactively justify something we’ve actually already done, based on some extremely flimsy evidence about this guy who tried to set his nutsack on fire on an airplane.   Flimsy evidence?  How can that be?   Why would CNN be reporting on this 24/7 with it’s “Fear! Fear! Fear!” tactics if the evidence was flimy?   Yemen is the enemy damnit!    I heard it on TV!

Well, check this out from Chris Floyd:

Wow, that didn’t take long at all. Scant days after the American war machine took the cloaking device off its direct military involvement in Yemen, we have an alleged attempted terrorist attack by an alleged attempted terrorist who, just scant hours after his capture, has allegedly confessed to getting his alleged attempted terrorist material from … wait for it … Yemen!

Yemen-trained terrorists on the loose in American airplanes! At Christmas! Great googily moogily! It’s a good thing our boys are on the case over there right now, pounding the holy hell outta some of them Al Qaeder ragheads! And to think, a few pipsqueaky fifth columnists had been starting to wonder why we were killing dozens of innocent civilians on behalf of an authoritarian regime embroiled in a three-way civil war on the other side of the world.

(snip)

And it must be true, right? I mean, just look at how well-sourced the NYT story is. “A law enforcement official” — Police captain? State trooper? G-Man? Traffic cop? — said that the alleged attempted terrorist said he’d got his “explosive chemicals” from Yemen. (Elsewhere in the paper, other unnamed officials told NYT reporters that the alleged material strapped to the alleged attempted terrorist was “incendiary,” not explosive. But who cares? “Bomb, Terror, Yemen!”)

Of course, the NYT noted that “authorities have not independently corroborated the Yemen connection claimed by the suspect” (nor, they could have added, have they independently corroborated that the claim was actually made), but still, the completely anonymous “law enforcement official” said that the suspect’s claim “was plausible,” and even added: “I see no reason to discount it.”

Well, it doesn’t get more solid than that, does it? They nailed that story down so tight you couldn’t pry it open with God’s own crowbar. An anonymous source confirmed the plausibility of his own claim.   Man, that’s ironclad. It’s certainly good enough to light up the media firmament with headlines linking “terror in the Heartland” with the empire’s newest killing field in a volatile foreign land.

So yeah, with that kind of evidence, let’s go bomb a new country!   Oh, wait, we already have.   Shhh!

Floyd’s point is that this is yet another case, just like in Iraq, where the facts will be fixed to fit the policy.    The really brazen and bizarre thing here is that we already attacked them.  

In any case, whatever facts about the case — or rather, shards and splinters of filtered information — that are allowed to emerge from the depths of the security apparat, you can be absolutely sure that, as always, the “facts will be fixed around the policy.”

And what is that policy? Why, endless war, of course! The American war machine (which now dominates most of “civilian” society as well) is like a shark: it must keep moving, and feeding, or die. “Terror, Bomb, Yemen!”

This whole thing also begs the question — why was this guy allowed to get on the plane?  Why wasn’t he on the no-fly list?   His own father tried to warn the U.S.   He was actually on the terrorist watch list, but was conveniently not on the “no fly” list.   Does that make any sense whatsoever?   I’m sure it will be attributed to yet another bout of convenient “incompetence” on the part of some fall guy agency.   The result will be even more erosion of our civil liberties and a justification for Patriot Act The Third, or whatever number they’re up to now.

These inconvenient facts are not lost upon certain people, notably not employees of, say, CNN.   This article, for instance, is from England:  

The revelation of Abdulmutallab’s background has confounded terror experts. Dr Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College said that the attempted bombing “didn’t square”.

“On the one hand, it seems he’s been on the terror watch list but not on the no-fly list,” he said. “That doesn’t square because the American Department for Homeland Security has pretty stringent data-mining capability. I don’t understand how he had a valid visa if he was known on the terror watch list.

Also from this article is a mention of the odd behavior of the suspect, from the man who dealt with him during the crisis:

Mr Schuringa said of the suspect: “He was shaking. He didn’t resist anything. It’s just hard to believe that he was trying to blow up this plane. He was in a trance. He was very afraid.”

In a trance?   It wouldn’t be the first time a perpetrator of a paradigm-shaking crime had been in a trance.    Doesn’t this strike anyone else as odd, and suspicious?  

But no, the propaganda “news” networks have been on their round the clock brainwashing cycle, with their repetetive chants of whatever the Powers That Be have told them to say.   And this is being engraved into the consciousness of Americans as “the truth”, even if it isn’t.   It doesn’t matter.  The truth is whatever they tell us it is, whatever you see on your TV.  

Glenn Greenwald’s been writing about this as well, and this article is a must-read.    Did you know this?

America’s commitment to maintaining Israel’s qualitative military edge was codified directly into U.S. law via 2008 legislation backed by AIPAC. This legislation requires the president to report to Congress periodically on actions taken by the administration to ensure Israel’s advantage.

I don’t think most people have any idea that we passed a freaking law, as Greenwald puts it, “making it a legal requirement for America to maintain “Israel’s qualitative military edge,” and — even more amazingly — that the President of the U.S. is required to report regularly to the U.S. Congress on the steps he’s taking to ensure Israel’s superiority. “

What does this have to do with terror attacks, and Yemen, and “endless war?”   Plenty.

Whatever else is true, and even if one believes it’s justified to lob cruise missiles into more countries where we claim “suspected Al Qaeda sites” are located, one thing seems clear:  all of the causes widely recognized as having led to 9/11 — excessive American interference in the Muslim world, our alliance with their most oppressive leaders, our responsibility for Israel’s military conflicts with its Muslim neighbors, and our own military attacks on Muslims — seem stronger than ever.  As we take more actions of this sort, we will create more Terrorists, which will in turn cause us to take more actions of this sort in a never-ending, self-perpetuating cycle.  The U.S. military, and the intelligence community, and its partners in the private contractor world will certainly remain busy, empowered, and well-funded in the extreme.

And that’s the whole point, right?   Endless war, of a low-level sort, ramped up just enough to keep the Military Contractors with lucrative long term contracts for the rest of their lives.    You and I would call it “job security”.