Balance of Terror: From Detroit City to Ghazi Khan
December 29th, 2009Via: Chris Floyd:
A lone man on an airliner makes a badly botched attempt to ignite what appears to be some kind of hastily cobbled-together device that might or might not have caused some kind of unspecified but apparently non-crippling damage to the plane. The plane lands safely; no one is killed.
Yet the reverberations from this half-baked enterprise quickly roiled the entire world. Within hours, a whole range of new, even more intrusive and draconian security procedures were imposed on travelers across the globe. Governments hastened to launch “security reviews,” and promise “tough new measures” not only to thwart terrorists but to root out nests of agitators and “radicalizers” clinging to the soft underbelly of our all-too-tolerant, too-nice-for-its-own-good Western world.
Perhaps most significantly, the non-igniting of the homemade device has “rejuvenated [the] debate … over the proper balance between security and privacy,” the New York Times informs us — while quoting several “experts” who let us know just which way this “balance” is now going to tilt. These “experts” include Bush retreads like ex-Homeland Security commissar Michael Chertoff, who now dabbles profitably in the “risk management and security consulting” industry — yet another of our great and good for whom every act of terror (real or imagined, successful or unsuccessful) means boffo box office.
The sudden insertion of Chertoff into the story gives us another example of a grim, enduring truth: the construction of “conventional wisdom” among our media and political elites is always driven, in large part or in whole, by raw, brutal self-interest. The new CW now being assembled before our eyes is a “rejuvenation” of one of the ruling tropes of the 21st century: “Liberty bad, security good.”
II.
Here is another story in the news: in an isolated rural province in Afghanistan, 10 people were killed in a raid by American-led forces. The Afghan government, installed and sustained in power by the United States, said the victims were all civilians — including eight schoolboys.
But there was no international outcry about this incident; it barely garnered a few mentions in the global press. And even these were quickly shunted aside after a NATO official denied the claims of the Afghan government, and affirmed that all those killed in the raid were evil-doers.
…
But the NATO official said the Afghans were lying. We will never know the whole truth, of course, for the story will ultimately be controlled by the very force that carried out the attack: the American-led military occupation.
But what an instructive contrast. In one story, an attack which did not happen and which killed no one shakes the entire world. In another story, ten human beings, including eight children, were slaughtered in a sneak attack by night — and the world can scarcely be bothered to notice.
What is the chief difference between the two? It’s simple: the first story lines the pockets and increases the power of imperial elites. Thus it is important, monumental, emotion-ridden; it calls for immediate action. The second story, if it were pursued and publicized with equal vigor, might threaten, in some small way, the profits and power of imperial elites. Thus it is unimportant, run-of-the-mill, a humdrum case of cranky primitives making the usual wild charges against the defenders of civilization. Were children murdered by American forces way the hell over in the village of Ghazi Khan? Maybe, maybe not. Who the hell cares?
http://matrixmasters.com/blog/hagerty01.html
Obama Far Outdoes Bush in Escalating War — The Numbers Will Surprise You
http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/144449
As the US continues to collapse, the technocrats have already moved on to the next country to rape and pillage. The economic elite don’t have a home country, to them the entire globe is theirs, and the majority of the US can collapse into poverty for all they care, and that’s exactly what they want to happen.
The US working class is the biggest threat to them and they want us eliminated.
As the IMF would say, there has been a structural adjustment program in place, and the US working class is obsolete.
When you understand this, you can understand how the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are wars against the US public. Wars that weaken and drain the US working class of vital resources and social safety nets.
This whole incident is a fucking joke, and that
Chertoff’s name has been somehow been miracously resurrected as an outcome raises the hairs on my intuitive zones even higher.
What a fucking joke. Uh, are we going to look at the security measures from this freaks origin of flight, where obviously, things were kind of lax?
No, we’re going to go off into some freaking twilight zone.
I say look at the secutity measures at the point of departure.
Criminy, who would have caught a guy with a large amount of what amounts to a large amount of contact lense solution strapped/hidden on his body?
This whole incident, in my universe, is a resurection of Bush and all of his minions. Everyone not making enough bucks of late on the “Be terrified” meim.
Someone, somewhere, needs to say Enough already.
Life in this universe cannot proceed in an orderly fashion when there are numbnuts out there cashing in off of frightening people over flying in a plane.
I think we should investigate the security measures where whoever it was departed from. Censor them, not the rest of us flying sheeples.
And piss on you Chertoff, wherever you are.
And I also forgot to write that no-one, it is true, appears to give a shit about who dies where and from what in the freakin war on peoples who just by happenstance, live on the planet in places whre the PTB happen to want their stuff.
Ya, as Bruce Cockburn once wrote in a song re south america – if I had a rocket launcher, I’d blow a few people away. But then again, that kind of action doesn’t solve anything.
I don’t know if any of us can halt the frenzy of the Israelis against the Iranians. Maybe its just time to protect ourselves against the nuclear fallout. I dunno.