Man, you know we're pretty freaking low-risk from terror right now when so much attention is on "those two guys".

[StageLeft]

All over the news they're talking about those two dudes who were arrested and being charged only with lying to the FBI. Ooo, they may have links to al queda though! Seriously, this is hardly news at all and yet the media is all over it.

 

[Genx87]

ok

 

[her209]

Slow day at the MJ trial (I guess).

 

[Stunt]

Republican spin: Republican doctorine is working so well terror threats are almost non-existent as proven by these two guys.
Democrat spin: Damn right wing media continuing with fear politics and progressing terror.

 

[TastesLikeChicken]

Here's an example "terrorism" spin from the left in the past. In particular, note the date of the article:

http://dir.salon.com/news/feature/2000/06/12/terrorism/index.html

The hyping of domestic terrorism

Why a new report on the threat of international terrorist attacks on U.S. soil is a con job.

By Bruce Shapiro
- - - - - - - - - -


June 12, 2000 | A few blocks from where I live in New Haven, Conn., is the Yale University science complex. As on campuses throughout the country, many of the students who haunt its laboratories came to the U.S. from other countries -- like my own college roommate years ago, a chemist raised in Greece.

Walking past Science Hill the other day, I suddenly found myself asking: What would it be like if every one of these genial students from abroad, who crowd into the cafeteria and library, were under close surveillance by Washington, their movements and changes of major reported to the feds? What would happen to the easy conversations I witness as I walk by the complex bus stop, or to the frank exchanges of view in a seminar room?


This was no paranoid fantasy: Such surveillance is among the policy recommendations of the National Commission on Terrorism. Chartered two years ago by Congress, the commission released a report last week that unleashed a dire drumbeat about a coming wave of violence on American soil.

"The threat from terrorists is so high," began ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz's news account, "the potential for massive casualties is so real, that an independent panel is pushing the government to take immediate, drastic action." Warned commission chairman L. Paul Bremer III at a press conference: "The threat of international terrorism is becoming more deadly." In the Los Angeles Times, commission advisor Brian Michael Wilson of the Rand Corp. called the report "a wake up call to a more violent future."

But behind this dramatic and headline-grabbing report, the facts are these:

The National Commission on Terrorism's warnings are a con job, with roughly the veracity of the latest Robert Ludlum novel. Evidence of this fraud comes not from civil libertarians or American friends of some guerrilla army, but from the top G-man himself: FBI Director Louis Freeh.

Just over a year ago, on Feb. 4, 1999, Freeh testified on the subject of terrorism before the Senate Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the departments of Commerce, Justice and State. Freeh's testimony was overlooked in every news account this week, but his detailed evaluation makes the Bremer Commission's hold on reality appear tenuous.

"The frequency of terrorist incidents in the United States has decreased in number," Freeh emphasized. Since the World Trade Center bombing of 1993, Freeh pointed out, "no single act of foreign-directed terrorism has occurred on American soil."

Support for violent revolutionaries emanating from Cuba and North Korea, he noted, "appear to have declined" with those nations' economic free falls. Even the American cells of violent Middle East political movements as Hamas and Hezbollah, Freeh declared, are devoted exclusively to "fundraising and low-level intelligence gathering."

Just how much terrorism is not much? Freeh testified that in fiscal 1998, the FBI prevented 10 planned "terrorist acts." Not one emanated from abroad. Nine of the 10 "terrorist acts" were planned by a single, small cluster of Illinois white supremacists hoping to assassinate Holocaust scholar Simon Wiesenthal and Morris Dees, the anti-Klan crusader who runs the Southern Poverty Law Center. The other forestalled attack involved a lone individual, a militia type, from Washington state.

Foreign students did not figure in Freeh's account at all. Indeed, Freeh told Congress that the main threat of terrorist violence comes not from foreign sources but from the overlapping constituencies of the far right: abortion-clinic assassins, Christian Identity militias and the like.

Freeh's testimony squares better with recent history than the Bremer Commission's anxiety-provoking report. Not a single one of the commission's recommendations, for instance, would have stopped two disaffected Army buddies from driving a truckload of fertilizer up to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Nor would it have prevented a paranoid schizophrenic camp follower of the right-to-life movement from firing an assault rifle into a Brookline, Mass., women's clinic.

Facts also do not square well with the commission's alarming suggestion that, as commission advisor Jenkins puts it, "current efforts to detect, prevent and prepare for such attacks are inadequate."

In fact, even with domestic political violence continuing to fall, the FBI's counterterrorism budget has grown almost 400 percent since the World Trade Center bombing: from $78.5 million in 1993 to $301.2 million in 1999. The number of FBI agents devoted full-time to counterterrorism has flowered, too, from 550 in 1993 to 1,383 in 1999.

Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, wiretaps are at an all-time high and the number rises every year. Yet the Bremer Commission proposes removing the few insulating layers of Justice Department review -- essentially letting the FBI set its own, independent wiretap agenda. The Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, a draconian package passed by Congress in 1996, gives the president the broadest authority to prosecute suspected "terrorists" in American history, yet not a single instance of "terrorist fundraising" has surfaced for prosecution. (One of the few worthwhile recommendations in the report -- apparently a sop to commissioner Juliette Kayyem, an Arab-American and Justice Department attorney -- is ending the "secret evidence" trials permitted under that same 1996 law.)

Yah buddy. We should never trade liberty for security. :roll:

Too bad we have to learn the lesson of how much BS that slogan is after the fact though.

 

[boredhokie]

You really don't understand the implications of that statement. What's the point of living if you can't live in freedom? Isn't that what this country is founded on, and now you quote some article in order to show that freedom isn't that big a deal, that we need constant surveillance on the US population in order to minimalize foreign terrorism?

I'm guessing you're in the middle class, why do you support ideals that are designed to take away YOUR freedoms? Do you expect to be rich one day, and above all this?

 

[StormRider]

Actually, if that kid did go to one of those terrorist training camps in Afghanistan, I wouldn't feel too comfortable having him running around free.

 

[StormRider]

Originally posted by: boredhokie
You really don't understand the implications of that statement. What's the point of living if you can't live in freedom? Isn't that what this country is founded on, and now you quote some article in order to show that freedom isn't that big a deal, that we need constant surveillance on the US population in order to minimalize foreign terrorism?

I'm guessing you're in the middle class, why do you support ideals that are designed to take away YOUR freedoms? Do you expect to be rich one day, and above all this?

I believe in having some sort of balance between freedom and security. Right now, I haven't personally felt any lost of freedom so I feel it is sort of an exaggeration about us losing our freedoms. It hasn't gotten to the point where I feel any danger yet (knock on wood). I mean, do I really care if they could look at our library records?

 

[phantom309]

Get ready for more disinformation and "terror alerts" - Patriot II is coming up for a vote soon.

 

[tommywishbone]

These two guys are just like the two guys in Sacramento a few years ago, who were charged with "terror activities" for planning to blow-up a propane storage tank with a "giant shotgun." Just more nonsense. Sorry I don't have a link to the giant shotgun incident; it was high comedy.

 

[ntdz]

Originally posted by: Skoorb
All over the news they're talking about those two dudes who were arrested and being charged only with lying to the FBI. Ooo, they may have links to al queda though! Seriously, this is hardly news at all and yet the media is all over it.

One of them admitted to attending an Al Qaeda training camp. I think I'd call that a pretty conclusive link. There is no "might have links" about it.

 

[boredhokie]

Of course there will be a balance between freedom and security, but people aren't questioning what this security is. They just swallow it whole under the promise that we'll all be safe and secure as long as we support proposition X, ie the Patriot Acts. My argument is that these actions do NOT make us any safer or more secure, they provide the illusion of security while at the same time undermining our civil liberties. People need to stop being so goddamn lazy and actually read what their representatives are pushing in the senate.