Month: August 2006

LIQUID BOMBS ARE OLD NEWS. LIQUID BOMBS ASSEMBLED ON AIRPLANES ARE OLD NEWS. They haven’t had much success. One went off over 12 years ago, on Philippine Airlines Flight 434. It killed an innocent businessman on his way home, and blew a hole through the cabin floor of the airplane, but did not cause the jet to crash. The alleged bomb maker was Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted of the first bombing of the World Trade Center, carried out 11 months before the airplane attack. Mr. Yousef was reportedly dissatisfied with the performance of his bomb, which he mixed in the airplane lavatory and hid in the underseat pocket that holds the life jacket. He vowed to make the next bombs “10 times more powerful” but apparently never figured out how to do so. Getting a pint or so of chemicals onto an airplane isn’t hard, and never will be. Pouring two shampoo bottles together in the lavatory can be done discretely. Up the quantity to a gallon or two and things become a bit more obvious. This threat has been known and discounted for well over a decade. No one can explain why the threat is suddenly more credible, even if those arrested were really planning an attack. Everyone seems to be carefully avoiding the fact that gallons of liquids in hundreds of little bottles are still placed on nearly every airplane before every flight. Food and drink loaded into airplanes isn’t screened in any meaningful way, and the screening of the workers who cater, clean, and load unchecked cargo onto airplanes is spotty at best. The government/media complex is breathlessly assuring us that some 2 dozen Muslim citizens of the UK would surely have blown up 9 or 10 airplanes. “Thousands of lives” would have been lost. The record of PAL flight 434 suggests otherwise. [Wolfesblog]

It seems to me that this “liquid bomb” business was actually a successful terrorist attack–by the government of the Evil Empire on its subjects.

Paving the Way to War with Iran.

Israel’s war on Lebanon is a warm-up for the U.S. war on Iran.

That is the message of Seymour Hersh’s latest superb article in the New Yorker. Hersh reveals that the Bush administration was “closely involved” in planning Israel’s attacks on Lebanon.  A former senior intelligence official informed Hersh that, beginning this Spring, “planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.”

Hersh notes:
The surprising strength of Hezbollah’s resistance, and its continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, “is a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back.”

Israel is following its own agenda.  But a Pentagon consultant informed Hersh that the Bush White House “has been agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah.”  Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers last month provided the pretext for a massive bombing campaign than had been planned long before.

The Bush team is chomping at the bit to use the “lessons” from Israel’s war for its own on Iran.  A former intelligence officer told Hersh: “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’” The Bush team apparently believes that they are entitled to create a few more catastrophes before Bush’s time runs out.

Hersh highlights the harebrained notion underlying the Israeli bombing campaign: “Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official.” 

This has backfired massively.   And yet the Bush administration appears to still believe that a U.S. bombing campaign in Iran would turn the Iranian people against the Iranian government.  

There is no evidence that Bush or Cheney have yet recognized any drawbacks, political or otherwise, from sending Americans off to die for damnfool ideas.

[BOVARD]

I’ve suspected this connection for a while. Israel’s actions are foolish, brutal, and ignorant of the lessons of their own history in exactly the same way that the neocons are. That suggested that either Olmert was independently suffering from exactly the same delusions, or else he was following orders from the Imperial capital.

Censored Video Shows Israeli Army Actions in Palestinian Refugee Camp.

Since the U.S. government has apparently admitted Israel as the 51st state and defends its every action, it might be interesting to see just what it is that we are defending. A video taken by an “embedded” Israeli camera crew shows Israeli soldiers in a Palestinian refugee camp delaying medical treatment for a mortally wounded woman and callously destroying the familiy’s home. Israel’s Channel 2 broadcast the video in defiance of Army censorship. After the video aired, the official response was not outrage at the soldiers’ actions, but outrage at the media for revealing them. Does that sound familiar? Watch the video.

[Police State USA]

No doubt the Little Green Nazis crowd will be loudly accusing the Israeli media of anti-semitism.

NY Times editorials are almost never funny,…. NY Times editorials are almost never funny, but today’s editorial about the politics of terror in the US shows how our Vice-president was already playing politics with this latest round of news even before we knew about it, but when he certainly knew it was coming. Also note yesterday’s news was completely managed by the US and British governments. How much faith do you have in their honesty? Why? [Scripting News]

I particularly like this part:

There is nothing Americans want more than to win the war on terror, to come to a place where people no longer feel it is a fine thing to forfeit their own lives and the lives of innocents in order to make the world notice their anger and frustration.

Sadly, Americans don’t want it enough to stop forfeiting their own lives and the lives of innocents in order to make the world notice their anger and frustration.

Was there a plot?. I’m glad I don’t have to fly for a while, but I cannot help but wonder if we have yet another contrived “plot,” like the recent one in Miami involving a true gang that could not plot straight. We have been down this road before, and since past “plots” have turned out to be full or at least partial hoaxes, I have a few questions:

1. Is there an “agent provocateur” involved? (Lew asked that in an email, and also showed me how to spell “provocateur.”) In other words, is this something like what we saw in Canada in which an agent provocateur promised to get huge amounts of fertilizer for a bomb, something that would be impossible to do in the present climate?
2. Were the “plotters” using real explosives, or was this something that an agent convinced them would work, only to find out they were mixing something akin to Crystal Light?

I don’t want to make light of real plots. After all, we have seen what happened on 9-11. Had the feds arrested these people before they boarded the plane, would I have been among the ones declaring that the plot was a hoax? I’m not sure, but that is why I am asking these questions now. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

This is something I’ve been wondering about too. There have been enough fake plots that I’m automatically inclined to doubt reports of another. However, the fake plots in the past haven’t led to the kind of expensive and disruptive “security” nonsense that we’re seeing now. And, as William Anderson suggests, it’s entirely possible that there really was a plot, but with government involvement. The 1993 attempt to blow up the World Trade Center was certainly a real plot, but the plotters also had the FBI helping them.

For the moment I’m waiting for more information. The fake plots that have been sold to the media in the past have generally unravelled pretty quickly.

‘Damage is done’ to Lebanon coast. Lebanon’s coastline could take up to 10 years to recover from a massive oil spill, the nation’s environment minister has said.

Yacoub Sarraf said it was impossible to tackle the problem while the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel continued.

Marine experts have warned the spill could pose a cancer risk to people living in the affected areas.

The oil slick caused by Israeli bombing of a power station now covers 120km (75 miles) of the region’s coasts. [BBC News]

Besides the immediate health problems, this is also a serious problem for Lebanon’s future (if its much more powerful neighbors allow it to have one), because tourists going to beaches is a major part of the Lebanese economy.

The IDF’s “Human Shield” Defense Blows Up.

From Haaretz today:

As the Israel Air Force continues to investigate the air strike [at Qana], questions have been raised over military accounts of the incident.

It now appears that the military had no information on rockets launched from the site of the building, or the presence of Hezbollah men at the time.

The Israel Defense Forces had said after the deadly air-strike that many rockets had been launched from Qana. However, it changed its version on Monday.

The site was included in an IAF plan to strike at several buildings in proximity to a previous launching site. Similar strikes were carried out in the past. However, there were no rocket launches from Qana on the day of the strike.

***

I look forward to hearing the IDF’s or IDF apologists’ next “close enough for government work” rationale for killing a few dozen children.  

[BOVARD]

This sounds like a large-scale variation on the standard procedure that government thugs follow when they accidentally murder the wrong person: blame it on the victim and hope nobody catches on. Like the guy who was murdered for getting on a subway in England, or the guy who was murdered for getting off a plane in the U.S.

It’s pretty stupid of the thugs to try this kind of thing, since the truth inevitably (and quickly) comes out and makes them look even worse then they otherwise would have. But then, intelligence is not a prerequisite for being a government employee.