We can afford illegal wars but not health care.

The war on terroism is a ruse to steal resources. Same as the war on drugs. We are in South America now supposedly fighting drugs , but in reality scoping out Venuzuela’s oil.

If Lieberman was not so invested in Israel , I am sure he would be squealing about the awful Hugo Chavez. And he needs a missile or two for democracy’s sake.

What we can’t afford any longer, are false flag operations. Funny what never hits the US media…..www.worldreports.org

CHECK OUT THE LINKS AND SEE MR HASKELL’S BOARDING PASS
The texts that can be checked out from the links given here, are appended here below the links. The Editor thanks our new correspondent for this information and the Indonesian linkage insight, which is a brilliant piece of lateral thinking:

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/commenter_says_he_was_aboard_n.html

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2009/12/flight_253_passenger_says_at_l.html

• The first report by Sheena Harrison is timed and dated 6:49am Detroit Time, 26th December 2009. It cites Mr Haskell as having reported as follows:

‘I was on this flight today and am thankful to be alive. My wife and I were returning from an African safari and had this connecting flight through Amsterdam. I sat in row 27, which was 7 rows behind the terrorist. I got to see the whole thing take place and it was very scary. Thanks to a few quick acting people I am still alive today’.

‘For those of you talking about airline security, I was next to the terrorist when he checked in at the Amsterdam airport early on Christmas. My wife and I were playing cards directly in front of the check-in counter. This is what I saw (and I relayed this to the FBI when we were held in Customs):

An Indian man in a nicely dressed suit around age 50 approached the check-in counter with the terrorist and said: “This man needs to get on this flight and he has no passport”. The two of them were an odd pair as the terrorist is a short, black man that looked like he was very poor and looks around age 17. (Although I think he is 23 he doesn’t look it). It did not cross my mind that they were terrorists, only that the two looked weird together. The ticket-taker said “you can’t board without a passport”. The Indian man then replied: “He is from Sudan, we do this all the time”.

I can only take from this to mean that it is difficult to get passports from Sudan and this was some sort of sympathy ploy. The ticket-taker then said “You will have to talk to my manager”, and sent the two down a hallway. I never saw the Indian man again as he wasn’t on the flight. It was also weird that the terrorist never said a word in this exchange. Anyway, somehow, the terrorist made it onto the plane. I am not sure if it was a bribe or just sympathy from the security manager.

[more...]

[modnote: please just post a piece from an article and then link back to the source to respect the author's copyright and give the posting site the traffic they earned, thank you.]

Thanks for some perspective, Mr. BT.

I haven’t heard much, if anything, on how lame-O al-Qaeda’s attacks have become of late. I mean if this is the best they can do, Great Balls of Fire -to quote the Daily News.

duh

45,000 die annually in the class war because of a broken health care “system” and yet the corporate media and GOP are once again playing the fear card. By the way, has anyone called Jim DeMint’s office to ask why he has never denied attending an Al Queda training camp?

FWIW, about 200,000 people die each year from hospital medical errors in the U.S.: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/11856.php

You can’t fool all the people all the time.

Really, it’s true.

It’s just that sometimes in America it seems that you can.

Not counting us, of course.

Well, not counting me, anyway. ; o )

Since security practices were changed right after 9/11, there have been two attempted bombings. My calculations come to one attempted (and failed) attack per 40 million flights.

But if you people keep encouraging terrorism by undermining the CIA and the global war on terror, terrorism will be number one very soon on your little graph.

Aiding and Abetting.

The bedwetting brigade win another round. You have a greater chance of being hit by lightning than being on a plane being hijacked/whatever. TSA is an organization of losers and misfits with shiny badges, and DHS is not much better. They spend as much time creating a climate of fear and chaos as they do trying to figure out how to screw around with passengers to make air travel as unpleasant as possible for everyone.

What was once a system that worked pretty well is now completely broken. We should just shrug at the misguided fool who BBQ’d his own leg and try him in Federal Court and get on with our lives, not have this National Airport Freakout and completely disrupt every single air travelers lives with new, and utterly meaningless rules just because we’re so fucking scared of shadows and bogeymen.

One thing that the Brits have right, and I guess it’s from having London almost-bombed back into the stone-age more than 60 years ago, and having IRA bombs blowing up everywhere randomly for quite a few years is an attitude of “you can’t change it, so just get on with life”.

Why we can’t do that too is beyond me, it really is. I guess that the powers that be have done such a good job of marketing fear as a way of life, that being afraid is the norm, we are just now a nation of utter cowards.

tinmam, how big a cut are you getting from the CIA’s heroin enterprise in Afghanistan?

Colin Powell on terrorism in the USA:

These are dangerous criminals, and we must deal with them. But come on, this is not a threat to our survival! The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn’t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn’t use fear for political purposes—scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex.

george:

It is rarely pointed out that, with a national security state defense budget greater than the rest of the world combined, the heart and soul of the American economy is war. Literally tens of millions of jobs depend on it in one way or another.

So, the more scared we are, the easier it is for others to cash in on it.

The main thing that will fuel an increase in terrorism is indiscriminate bombing, imprisoning and/or torturing innocent people surrounding the very few real terrorists out there.

Thanks for the post and the nifty graph.

On Obama’s side, which I rarely end up being on, a few pundit types were quite unhappy that he had not been overwhelmingly pushing the fear button from the get go. Not so long ago we would have been up in the high oranges and talking about covering the basement in large swaths of plastic as a defense against… well a defense anyway.

A little bit of fear helps the medicine to down.

Oh, and I would like to remind folks again that every 24 hours 18,000 chidren will die from starvation around the planet. That’s nearly 6,700,000 children a year.

Think about that number on a chart.

It’s the equivalent of 2,190 9/11 terrorist attacks.

linky?

U.S. daily terrorism abroad, imposed deprivation, blowing up hospitals and homes, has greater impact, on the other hand.

Great graf. We need many more like it. For those who think, it puts into a single image the mass of unmet needs this Congress and this ConservaPresident finds just dandy, while it wastes far too many resources amid the distractions of combating terrors that are not as immediate or threatening.

The comeback will be that the graf conveys that because of rather than in spite of the outsized efforts devoted to undersized threats – by likelihood of threat and harm.

That’s spin. Of course we need to devote reasonable efforts to counter possible physical threats to ourselves. That includes threats to our livelihood, health and pocketbooks.

The latter are George Bailey concerns, not Mr. Potter’s. They are a bit dowdier, more homegrown, and harder to make careers and fortunes while meeting. DC attracts the big bucks artists, who want to fix what attracts them, regardless of its priority. In fact, like Hoover, it’s easier to name “the most wanted” when they are at last easiest to pick up. Good for the statistics and all that. We need more Congresscritters willing to do their jobs instead of to take care of themselves.

A couple I know were on that flight just a few rows behind the exploding pants dude. The husband was able to laugh about it Sunday morning when I spoke with him, but said after being quarantined at the airport for over six hours, he was starting to wish he had been killed in the attack.

It’s amazing though how so many people like to exploit the situation to cause a massive freak-out.

I hope you wrote this note on toilet paper. That’s what you should use it for.

OT Ben Nelson is trailing the Repub governor who is likely to run against him by 2 to 1 !!!

Americans kept their cool largely the ENTIRE COLD WAR with thousands of NUCLEAR WEAPONS ready to KILL EVERYONE. We didn’t tear up our civil liberties, and those who tried — like Joe McCarthy — were rightfully discredited.

Now, twenty years after the Berlin Wall came down, we are ready to panic over this? What kind of cowardly souls have we become?

go back to the beach and bury your head again… thats all your statement is worth… a bucket of sand…

Where do they teach these persuasive counter arguments?

Electronic – think zeros and ones – no paper involved.

( I know, I know, don’t feed the trolls. )

It’s funny my friends who were on the flight said they never really felt like they were in any danger – of course they actively avoided the press afterwords.

word

Lordy! Where’s my handkerchief?

Let’s See
2 Incidents since 9/11. 2 people.
241 million passengers per year in 2007.
2.4 Billion Passengers since 9/11 (approx).

2 in 2,400,000,000 or 1 in 1,200,000,000 or
1 part in ten-to-the-ninth.

We have no technology in any industry that is able to detect “poisons” in that concentration. Especially when it is not know if that individual is “activated”. Just not feasible.

We know this:
1. It’s a lower bound or floor. There were no less than 2 incidents.

2. The upper bound is a function of self-congratulatory publicity by law enforcement. Aside from the group of wanna-be bozos in Florida who probably had trouble stamping a beer can flat, there were few incidents publicized.

So….
floor 1 in-ten-to-the-ninth
ceiling 1 in-ten-to-the-eighth

That is between 2 and 20 incidents. If there were 200 (10 per year) we’d know about it.

Either way, it is still effectively zero. And this does not include all the soft civilian targets that abound in our everyday life.

When I lived in ZA, we planned for civil insurrection. We concluded that soft civilian targets are so numerous that they were unprotectable. As the IRA proved in London.

ergo: There are NO AQ terrorist cells in the US and damn few targeting the US. Where are the incidents?

Even in a total police state, you’d probably see at least that many incidents. I guess that doesn’t speak much to the level of liberty we enjoy.

Exactly right.

If we only had five bodyguards for every soft target we’d all be safe and snug. Except maybe the bodyguards and their families.

Two incidents and both guys fried small parts of themselves. The real problem is that this is all actually a plot to lull us into a false sense of security by making the terrierists appear incompetent.

As so many of the patriots during the American revolution said, freedom only comes from being afraid.

Yes, terrorism is less common that airplane crashes.

Damn the terrorist pilot error! And don’t get me started about the terrorist corrosion!

I wonder whether your friends were any of the rather sardonic-looking and decidedly unshocked people I saw in tv shots of the quarantined.

Right on, Blue Texan. With our ever-hyping corporate media and our insane Republicants and dopey teabaggers, we should not be too surprised to see how out of proportion things seem.

Terrorism is a law enforcement concern, not a military one. Always has been. Always will be.

This fact will not stop law enforcement from exploiting these incidents to the max to get more $. Part of our 14 trillion dollar national debt is all of the homeland security money that got dropped everywhere – this is one of the reasons law enforcement is so much more militant now. Too much money + fear = militarism.

I wonder if Barack’ll Bombya is going to change that ridiculous name “homeland security” and re-org that whole mess to roll back BushCo changes. Probably right after he breaks up the CIA. Ha ha ..

Where are the incidents?

In particular, where are the incidents that do not occur in the first-half Xmas travelling season and involve botched attempts by confused young men to deploy incomplete plastics?

Btw, that beer can line was priceless, priceless.

Americans will soon be proudly flying naked… Guess that the airlines will have to turn up the ole thermostat a few degrees, no?

You mean like outing CIA agents working on nuclear proliferation?

You are right. Those kinds of attacks on the CIA are counterproductive.

LOL. Terrorist corrosion. Classic.

Let us put all this TERRORISM into perspective. Our national defense and security BUDGET is based on some THREAT. The USSR served that useful purpose since the late 1940`s, after the fall of the USSR, we needed another threat to take its place, since allocation of huge sums of money to the public defense sector requires a threat to counter – that is, identify, seek, destroy, and terrorism fits the agenda nicely. Our defense contractors thrive on that formula.

It is very obvious that this false flag Muslim patsey underware bomber is just a distraction so the congress can sell out the American people with this mandatory corporate take over of our health care.

To hell with private health insurance corporations, they are nothing more than parasites that suck the wealth out of the the Americans pockets. To hell with government health insurance because it is full of corruption and waste.

If we had pay as you go we would not have this mess and a nights stay in a hospital would cost only $200 and the average family of four would have an extra $18,000 in their pockets each year. Health care is so damn expensive right now because of waste, fraud, administrative costs and excessive wages for the certain few.

Waste, fraud, inefficiencies, insurance co’s skimming off the top, lack of preventative care – all account for maybe 40-60% of costs? You will still need some insurance in case something bad happens. No reason why we can’t just make a big pool of everyone.. if nothing very bad ever happens to you, you will appear to lose some $, but not very much. You will actually gain $ b/c you will benefit from a healthy, secure nation that you are a part of.

Lets be honest here. There was only that one time, more or less, and they felt bad afterwards. Thus attempt to it cover it up.

You’re the one who’s ‘aiding and abetting’ – the fear, over-reaction, and idiotic the ‘war on terror’ is exactly what a terrorist would want us to do.

As for more frequent drone air strikes and targeted assassinations in Yemen, what does the president imagine it will do in response? Use harsh language or mount a a conventional war? Unlikely. It will call in favors and recruit those willing to die for their country and their religion.

They will act independently. A few serious, successful attacks on American or Western interests and what then. A non-declaration of war and greater, more intense strikes yielding another war.

How convenient that Yemen is at the entrance to the Red Sea, virtually half-way between the Canal and the Persian Gulf, among its other attributes. A more intense, public campaign against Yemen would seem to be a dream policy for those who want more war, war instead of reverting to pre-Bush, jaw, jaw diplomacy and enhanced law enforcement.

If only there was a way to autoscroll passed any comment that starts with… “But if you people”.

Hell, even lightening: “during the past 30 years (1979-2008) lightning killed an average of 58 people each year” (noaa.gov).

This was part of something I posted in comments on the article: An Interview with Matthew Hoh

That Islamic terrorism on U.S. soil is somehow a vast and grave threat to American life and prosperity:

If, every single month, ~3,500 people die in auto-accidents compared to ~3,200 in almost 40 years due to Islamic terrorism in the U.S.; then Islamic terrorism is not a vast and grave threat to life.

If, every single month, ~3,000 people die of the flu and it’s complications compared to ~3,200 in almost 40 years due to Islamic terrorism in the U.S.; then Islamic terrorism is not a vast and grave threat to life.

If, every single month, ~1,250 people die from run-of-the-mill homicide compared to ~3,200 in almost 40 years due to Islamic terrorism in the U.S.; then Islamic terrorism is not a vast and grave threat to life.

If, in 25 years, specious fiscal/monetary policy and de facto regulatory capture can create ~$22,000 Billion (in 2008 Dollars) in economic harm, and induce a global economic contagion, compared to ~$84 Billion in almost 40 years due to Islamic terrorism; then Islamic terrorism is not a vast and grave threat to prosperity.

Despite a list of staggering mortality numbers that total almost 2.5 Million Americans every year, and economic losses over 260 times more severe than those caused by Islamic terrorism on U.S. soil; we manage to soldier on and find all new ways to kill ourselves (and each other) and throw our prosperity to the wind on a regular basis.

If one provides even a modicum of objectivity, our obsession with the “terrorist threat” moves from seeming simply imprudent to outright paranoid conspiracy.
9/11 was special in one way, and one way only; in that it broke us (ever so briefly) from the secure geopolitical insularity brought about by being flanked by two massive bodies of water, and bordered by two largely compatible and stable nation-states.

It fits here nicely.

Great Post!!!

The USA MSM, goes in hyperdrive when the word terrorism is mention.

The USA military industrial complex has made Islamic Terrorist a bigger threat then the RUSSIANS in the cold war.

We are spending a TRILLION dollars a year to fight an enemy without TANKS, WAR SHIPS, FIGHTER AIR CRAFT, SUBS, etc.

This has got to be one of the biggest SCAMS ever pulled.

I have no idea how to link in cyberspace. But you can read the Powell interview at GQ Magazine from October 2007.

Well, if that’s what you mean by linky, anyway.

If You add up all that is spent to so-called protect us from terrorists, we could have paid for National Healthcare.

If all of it, or any part of it had worked we would not be talking about the guy with the bomb in his shorts.

All the so called security measures we are subject to mean nothing, because the terrorists or even crazies just find ways around them.

It’s all to make us feel good and not to really protect us, and we are so foolish we can’t see that.

Just when you think you have reached the limit. Somebody pushes it just a bit more. With all the hype trying to sell naked scanners, you’d think that would be as far as things could ever go. I was reading comments on an article about the new naked scanners over at Wired.com and somebody posted (paraphrasing here) well what about an internal package? They were a little too graphic I think. Could they ever go that crazy? First it was the shoes, how far will it go?