LB, the only thing that concerns me about this is that, while false terror alerts certainly do tend to upswing 'round about election time, there is the fact that someone might view election time as a politically astute time to actually attempt terrorist acts (in an attempt to sway elections). This has already happened on numerous occassions over the last few years -- why not here?
In other words, go ahead and be cynical but please still evacuate when the alarm sounds.
Oh, I'm a coward. I'll run in whatever direction seems most appropriate when the sirens go off. I've just lost all faith that stories like this bear any meaningful relation to reality.
For me, it's broader than that. I don't particularly believe anything the major media--NYT and WP, in particular--tell me, either. I don't think they intentionally mislead (though I no longer put that past them), but I don't particularly trust them to ferret out the truth.
Sure, the plot wasn't very developed, but people were saying things on a chat board on the internets! That's scary stuff!
I hope no one who discussed the detonation of feral cats a couple threads down has a Middle Eastern name or you might be nabbed for plotting to blow up some old guy's shed.
1 was supposed to say numerous occassions in other countries, but I think you got the idea anyway...
Sure, I believe there was a plot but nothing in the articles I've read suggests this was much further along than a bunch of guys sitting around saying "We should, like, blow up the tunnel" "Dude, totally".
I mean, how many bad guys want to blow up a bridge or tunnel in NYC? I'm suspecting lots. But there's a huge difference between wanting to and having the capabilities to and a plan to do so. Obviously, I want the government to go after people like this who are in the early stages and might not be able to follow-through because you never know, but I don't think they need to get the public all worked up about it unless it's an actual threat. It's not like people don't know bad guys want to get them. I live in the Financial District area and I assume there are a bunch of groups who'd like to do something there. I'm glad they caught them in case they are a group that could have put together a plot and followed it through but overall my reaction to the story is "Terrorists would like to blow up the Holland Tunnel. And? Is there something I didn't know that you'd like to share?"
I have trouble imagining what it would take the Times doing for me to stop reading it, but isn't their lead headline AOTW ("For Gay Rights Movement, a Key Setback") wrong, or at least highly contestable?
You know, if the media had just reported about the plan to bomb the Holland Tunnel, I might have been a little worried. But the whole flooding the Financial Distinct curlicue makes the story just funny---and I think the media, the ones I've heard at least, are playing that angle up.
I'm not sure it's a key setback; wasn't the ruling somewhat expected?
And how can something be a key setback anyhow?A key victory sets in motion events that happen with ease after the victory. A key setback does what, exactly?
You don't think it's a setback?
For the next year or two sure, but long-term I don't see it leading to anything but gay marriage being allowed in New York, and the legislative passage of same being a useful example to other states. I should probably look at some polling data before I say that though.
11: that, too. Maybe it's a setback that causes the whole roman-archéd edifice to come crashing down?
9 - If they want to flood the Financial District, I think the terrorists should just adopt the diabolical plan of waiting 50 years and letting global warming take care of it.
14: I understand terrorists are adopting precisely that plan toward Venice. I suppose I should take the kids to Venice, on the grounds that its life-expectancy is limited.
14--But that wouldn't cause the right kind of Terror...
About the NY gay marriage ruling: it's now time for Bloomberg to put up. If he does support protections for gay couples, despite his appealing this case, he's now got to prove it by leading the legislative fight to Albany. If he punts, then he is angling for national office and should be opposed ferociously. How he moves on this will determine a great deal about him for me.
Terrorists will be so happy if the Democrats control the Senate! I want to know why all these terrorists are assumed to be really up on lower-level party politics in the U.S.
I promise I hadn't read Jack Balkin's take on it before posting 7. Not that I'm claiming this general approach to the issue was my original idea or anything.
20: Becks and LB are different people. The confusion is understandable, as both are 47, balding, and men.
1: Eh. I refuse to worry about it. Call it cynicism, or crying wolf fatigue, or reason, but if "they" find out about a plot early enough to warn people, then it isn't going to happen.
On the other hand, it makes sense to take, say, hurricane warnings seriously.
If you're from a place without tunnels, perhaps you can believe that they posess a magical property (not unlike that of a drinking straw) that would cause water to flow uphill.
Even more amusing is that the Holland Tunnel comes out at Canal Street, which is a fair distance from Wall Street in anyone's book. Plus truck access to the tunnel is severly restricted.
Just more scare-the-red-staters stuff. I don't think too many New Yorkers are taking this one seriously.
Maybe the idea was to flood the financial district with people from New Jersey who wouldn't be able to get home.
19 -- I thought Chief Judge Kaye's dissent was correct in every particular, including that this decision will be seen as a mistake. I guess her views on this subject are not any big surprise either. Maybe you New Yorkers ought to take a page from the anti-choice folks and combine working for legislation with working to get CJ Kaye 2 more votes.
Just more scare-the-red-staters stuff.
I don't think it scares the red-staters. They ain't aimin' at me.
No, this a 'Really, it's a planetwide war with Islamofacists, Promise!' story. Never mind the absence of participation of the bulk of the planet in said war. Scare the Bush supporters on Wall Street, yeah. Gotta fund the war, doncha know.
that the whole story is invented nonsense, planted for political purposes.
Yer intel services are going to hear crap like this all the time. They've been hearing crap like this since the time they were trying to figure out if Hitler was still in Berlin or fleeing to an Austrian Redoubt. And that concept was vaguely realistic. Most of the time over the last 60 years, they wouldn't report this kind of crap, precisely because it would be someone talking out of their ass. Reporting such things would reduce confidence, which is bad for the stock market and whatnot. In this case, however, they WANT to reduce confidence, and there you go.
It's ALL crap...
The elections are coming, so the terror alerts are going to kick into high gear too. I don't like being cynical -- naive optimism suits me much better. Can someone make that possible again?
...and it has been since 2002 at the latest.
The upside, of course, is that if you know that they're all evil, lying, power-hungry SOB's, then it's a lot easier to figure out how they're trying to screw you.
max
['Just read the newspaper like everyone (including the reporter) is lying to spinning you. The world makes a lot more sense that way.']
ca. 14: This article, besides being very interesting, seems appropriate. Highly recommended read.
Are you all reading the same article that I'm reading? It specifically says the Holland Tunnel was NOT targeted, rather PATH tunnels between NY and NJ. And there's nothing in there about flooding the financial district, just disrupting the transportation system, like the explosions in London's subway system.
I don't doubt our current Administration would use, and have used, these sort of scare tactics. But we aren't helping the by inflating the "plot" beyond the terror-mongering tripe that's being reported.
As for the "key setbacks" to the "Gay Rights Movement," I'm always annoyed when they refer to homosexuals who want to marry as being a homo(hee)genious mass, i.e. "Movement." They do the same with feminists, as if we are part of a hive mind or something. The headline should have been something like "Old heterosexual men keep status quo intact by denying rights to Gays." Except that's too long, of course.
27: Huh. I actually saw the story first in the News on paper, and grabbed this as an illustrative link when the News was loading slow. But I'd scanned through it and thought it matched the News story better than, on re-reading, it seems to. The flooding thing was in the News, as was the Holland Tunnel.
That LATimes story has changed throughout the day. When I first read it, it ended by saying that the Financial District was above Hudson River-level, so that the plan didn't sound very good.
That LATimes story has changed throughout the day.
Lousy bastards.
22- this is certainly true. All I was saying is that, while the chance that our administration will trumpet false terror alerts may skyrocket as we near election season, the chance that someone might actually try and pull off a bona fide attack probably increases as well.
31: Maybe. I note that, for all the Bush-supporter claims that Bush must be considered successful because there hasn't been another attack for 5.5 years, Clinton successfully prevented another attack for eight years (after WTC Attack 1) at a much lower cost. An alternative explanation is that it's actually sort of hard to pull off massive terrorist attacks for all sorts of stupid reasons (primarily, I suspect, personnel). I'm betting on the latter.
That LATimes story has changed throughout the day.
Ah, that explains it. Sorry about my accusatory grumbling, LB.
For all you knew it was perfectly justified. Hell, you convinced me that I'd been reading carelessly -- I thought that the article was different when I linked it, but not strongly enough to make the claim.
33 -- They're fighting us over there so they don't have to fight us here.
I hope and trust you weren't reading me to suggest that manipulative, overblown terror alerts are okay in any way, or that the Bush administration has done much of anything whatsoever to improve our safety. Because that would be a terrible misreading. I'd wager they've done a great deal to decrease our safety, on balance; hence my warnings in 1 and 31.
And yes obviously large terrorist attacks are difficult to pull off. That doesn't mean that it can't happen, of course, as we all know.
39-
LB, how many times to do I have to tell you: I do not hate religion.
Is it wrong that I'm mostly hoping the plotters of the Great Manhattan Flood weren't tortured for idly chatting in an IRC channel?
It worries me that stories like this now morph so continuously that after a day or so it's hard to tell what you knew yourself (and when you knew it).
Sure, it looks like this latest batch (if by "latest" you mean "latest since their leader was nabbed nearly three months ago") could probably have been dangerous, or up to no good, or something. But I'm not sure we'll ever get a stright story about it. National Security, don't'cha know. Well, at least it sure takes the edge off of unpleasant memories, right?
Is it too early in the War for a Niemöller moment? Have we learned nothing?
I found the rainbow party story here almost impossible to read. (And link bookslut, rather than the story itself, because I thought others—Tim?—would appreciate the queer studies.)
Sample:
My office is down C-Corridor. To get there, I have to walk past the Heavy Unit, which is always a drag: the shrieks, the echoey sobs. I told Captain McBride at the picnic last week, Can’t we cut their vocal cords? It was only a joke; McBride wouldn’t do something like that. That’s the kind of stuff they do at Hero Base—not here.
Exactly. You end up with a vague sense that stuff is happening, and we should be concerned about terrorism, and it's all crap, crap that's using real people as props.
(By the way, I understand from your blog that you're Pants's guy? Welcome! Or, you know, hi anyway even if I've got that crossed up.)
The IRA used to do a fairly good job of pulling off large terrorist attacks on a fairly regular basis even in the face of pretty intense security. In the 1970s, the Balcombe Street gang, for example, carried out dozens of attacks over a single year.
I'm fairly sure that if there were non-negligible numbers of people serious about mounting terror attacks we'd be seeing a lot more of them than we actually are.
Attacking infrastructure, rather than people, for example, surely isn't even that hard.
There's a difference between a bunch of hotheaded young guys mouthing off about what they'd like to see happen and actually serious planning to make attacks.
47 to 45, of course (D'oh!)
46: Of course, you're correct too, Matt.
But if you had read about a plot of 19 Saudis to highjack 4 planes and crash them into the Twin Towers, like something out of a Tom Clancy novel, you'd have believed it? In 2001?
It's more believable than the earlier points that the terrorists had suddenly gained power over the laws of physics and could make water flow uphill.
But I'm not sure what the point about the 9/11 plot is supposed to prove. I barely believed it when I saw it on television, but whether I find it fantastic or not doesn't directly bear on the reliability of the information intercepted, nor would it say much about whether the administration's methods are within the rule of law, nor whether the latest trumpeted capture is a real plot - like 9/11 - or a cleverly timed piece of self-praise.
Given that it's an election-year and the President's approval ratings are in the basement, I'm skeptical. Given that our press core couldn't investigate a story if Sherlock Holmes popped out of the books and led them by the hand, I'm concerned.
The obvious solution is to stop holding elections. Then they can never be disrupted. Call it asymmetric democracy.
46: I guess that's partly what I was thinking about. Logistics seem like they would often be easy (the whole boxcutters + crash a plane seems like an answer to a 101 engineering problem set), but the personnel issue is a bitch. IRA seems like a gimmee--they were already basically there, and they had ties to the land (broadly). And since they lived next door, they could keep it up forever. That's not really true for the Islamo-scaries. They have to get a passport, get on a plane, get through customs, hang out in a strange land until everythings ready, etc. And then you have to recruit someone else to do it. For years and years. It's a pain in the ass.
Didn't law enforcement used to be required to wait until someone took a definite action towards a bad act? Buying explosives or a truck, something like that?
Yeah, yeah, it's a whole different kind of threat, Bush says. But isn't it actually better to wait for something like that to happen, then grab the guys? 1) You'll be more certain you're really getting bad people (as if they really care about that), but 2) You can pull on other threads to lead to other people. If someone forwards these guys $20k to buy a truck to carry a bomb, then you can track the finances back to others. (Oh, that's right, you can't, because the NYT are Traytorzzzz!!1)
It's too bad Weiner's not around. Someone should give Rah a fruit basket.
Our synagogue overflows on the High Holidays, and we use the Sanctuary of Fourth Presbyterian, on Michigan Avenue for overflow. I was assigned to read the "Prayer for our Country" in 2001; I remember almost choking with emotion.
After services, I was standing outside, a beautiful September afternoon, looking way up at the Handcock Tower, a famous skyscraper right across the street. An old man I love, who has seen terrible things in a long life, came up to me, looked up, and said: "Well?"
"I was thinking," I said, "that this is a millenial-level exploit, one for the ages." "Like Pizarro conquering an empire: shouldn't have happened, odds against it coming off almost astronomical, yet once it had happened, it changed everything catastrophically."
"Yeah." he said, taking me by the arm.
43: Is it too early in the War for a Niemöller moment?
First, they came for the dudes talking shit on the interwebs, and The Mineshaft was so totally boned.
You're right though. The headline on MSNBC.com this morning said, simply: MARTYRDOM, EXPLOSIVES. Wow, real informative. Next time they should just run BIG SCARY and leave it at that. I mean, jeez, why lift a finger when our imaginations can do all the work for them? I think yesterday's Overcompensating makes an excellent point in an admirably oblique way: we've heard about it so much that terrorism isn't really scary anymore. Hear about it enough, and we find it impossible to care. It's the radon scare all over again - dangerous, yes, but I'm so tired of hearing it.
In what are either some of my darkest or most inspired moments, I long for the day when someone turns the tables on Coulter by calling her fearmongering "so 9/12" while making the point that maybe, just maybe, life goes on if we let it.
re: 52 and
"IRA seems like a gimmee--they were already basically there, and they had ties to the land (broadly). And since they lived next door, they could keep it up forever. That's not really true for the Islamo-scaries. They have to get a passport, get on a plane, get through customs, hang out in a strange land until everythings ready, etc. And then you have to recruit someone else to do it. For years and years."
Unfortunately, that's not true. The 7/7 suicide bombers were all British, as was Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) and the July 21st bombers were all (naturalised) Brits .
It's not the case that Islamic terrorists necessarily have to come from outside the country.
I wouldn't want to stoke the 'enemy within' rhetoric. As I said, if there were significant numbers of young Moslem men serious about carrying out terror attacks we'd be seeing a lot more of them, but those who *have* made plans or actually carried out attacks have largely been British or naturalised British so it's not the case that they have to come in from outside with all the attendant difficultes that brings.
Didn't law enforcement used to be required to wait until someone took a definite action towards a bad act? Buying explosives or a truck, something like that?
Yep. Because otherwise you run the risk of a defense lawyer accusing you of entrapment. (IIRC only a law enforcement representative can be accused of entrapment, which seems wise -- who would have a greater incentive to convince themselves that these guys are Really Bad and need to be coerced into proving so they can be arrested?)
isn't it actually better to wait for something like that to happen[?]
Only if your goal is to eventually prosecute them successfully in criminal court. Not if you just want to fear-monger.
As LB said in the post, I hate that I now think in such cynical ways about my country.
Unfortunately, that's not true. The 7/7 suicide bombers were all British, as was Richard Reid (the shoe bomber) and the July 21st bombers were all (naturalised) Brits .
Yeah, but again, you've got a well-sized population that actually lives there. We've got something like 2-6 mil. Muslims in a country of 300 mil., and they're spread out all over the place. And, for various reasons, our Muslim populuation doesn't seem angry about the way that we treat US Muslims; I gather the analogous sentence could not be said about British Muslims.
Plus, in the UK they've got the Scots as models. Of course your guys are violent.
Props to the article linked in 26 for not using the discredited slow-cooking frogs analogy for our poor response to gradual change.
(54: Y'all can find the fruit basket link yourself, can't you? Anyway, this is currently canonical.)
61: Well, its point 4 doesn't use the actual cooking frogs analogy, but the point is the same. And it is the last point.
That's what I'm saying -- it would've been tempting to use the frog-boiling analogy, and I praise him for not doing so. The point was much better made with the refrigerator hum and other concrete examples of things getting gradually worse.
Score one for me!
25: I don't think it scares the red-staters. They ain't aimin' at me. No, this a 'Really, it's a planetwide war with Islamofacists, Promise!' story. Never mind the absence of participation of the bulk of the planet in said war. Scare the Bush supporters on Wall Street, yeah. Gotta fund the war, doncha know.
Dallas Morning News (George Bush's favorite newspaper) editorial, today:
"[...]The public disclosure of these plots is a vast improvement over the days when Homeland Security's color-coded alert warnings mostly confused and frightened the public. [Actually the problem was that it became a joke on the late-night talkshows, I do believe.] Terrorists are not amorphous color-coded designations. [Terrorists prefer high-contrast color schemes combined with minimalism & touches of Dada.] Terrorists are people with dangerous thoughts and ambitions. [THOUGHTCRIME! THOUGHTCRIME!] [...] Cynics may scoff that law enforcement is simply generating positive press or corralling low-hanging fruit.[That's overly kind to law enforcement, doncha think?] This is, suspects who had no means of carrying out their schemes. That misses a bigger point -- terrorists are plotting against this country and intelligence successes are disrupting these plots. That's a whole lot better outcome than the alternative."
Since 1941 (or earlier) people have plotted [in thought or verbalization] against the United States
a> every day.
b> every hour.
c> every minute.
d> all the freakin' fuckin' time.
e> Yes. Can I get some fries with that?
max
['E! Pick E!']