I am going to save the administration some time. I am actively plotting to topple the Washington Monument…with a nail file. I have a bet that I can accomplish this before my brother succeeds with his plan to collapse the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River…with a blow torch.
There it is. I have confessed my evil plan. Now I probably won’t have the opportunity to collect my money. I now realize the NSA can read my emails without a warrant or any oversight. I suppose getting the chance to start filing was always doubtful. What was I thinking? They probably are well aware of my plan. So, I decided to just make it public. Most likely, they have a Special Agent of the FBI staking out my local Walgreen’s, just waiting for me to purchase my terrorist’s materials. I’d never get away with it.
That’s just the way it is in today’s America. The New York Times explains it all:
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.
Frankly, I am more concerned about why I have not been visited by an agent. I have been plotting this nail filing thing for four years. Just check my email! And yet, they claim some guy had the exact same plan as my brother.
Some officials said that in both cases, they had already learned of the plans through interrogation of prisoners or other means.
I called my brother and he says he hasn’t heard ‘peep’ from the FBI. Maybe this is why.
“We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”
Here’s the thing. I have a friend that is a schoolteacher. He’s never been involved in international terrorism. But he has this plan to flatten the White House with a steel frisbee. He’s been grinding that puppy in his garage for TWO years. He called me last November and told me about it. The FBI hasn’t visited him either. I think they are too swamped.
“It affected the F.B.I. in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads,” the former senior prosecutor said. “A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to.”
That’s why I am abandoning my plot to nailfile the Washington Monument in half. I’m sure the NSA already knows about it, but the FBI just hasn’t had time to arrest me. By confessing now, that guy down at Walgreen’s can go work on a more important case. And maybe they’ll give me less than 20 years.
With any luck, my brother, my friend, and I can share bunks with Iyman Faris. We’ll swap stories about all the great plans we had, and how they went awry.
… the whole point of the NSA program was to swamp the FBI so they wouldn’t have as much time to devote to real crimes? Like the whole Abramoff affair?
Ney, DeLay, Ken Lay, etc., all of those investigations of very real crimes must have been hampered by these wild goose chases.
What if that was the entire point of it all?
…or the anthrax or the the 9/11 investigation…
Now I realize why I saw security guards in the cosmetics section of Wal-Mart. They’ve intercepted your emails Booman. Little do they know that I send my terrorist daughters into the ailes to pick up my weapons of mass destruction.
When I was in DC in Sept. I took a walk around the W. Monument. There was only one security guard on the west side of it. I could have filed for hours on the east side and no one would known it. Except for the other 300,000 terrorists that were there that day.
Nail files are so de rigeuer.
The other charge that put Iyman Faris away was a few Google searches on gliders. We’re creeping into the area of thought crimes here. It would be more credible if the charge was excessive stupidity.
How long will it be before it finally leaks out that folks from these agencies were actively participating in several internet forums/communities for monitoring? Will it come out that they were engaged in practices of entrapment?
The bad thing about all of those false leads is that it builds a false case to be used again later.
…although no crime was committed, it’s reported that the suspect has been the subject of multiple prior investigations for attempted terrorism related crimes.
BooMan, the only way to redeem yourself is to carve that statue of Reagan onto Mt. Rushmore.
WIth your nail file.
Well crap, all that time I have spent plotting and buying the extra heavy duty cuticle scissors(that the airlines took away from me in 04) twice to chip away at the hangnails in the Capitol Halls and they are not even paying attention?
This all makes for great comedy but it’s also enough to gain a guilty plea and then held as a significant advance in the GWoT.
Do you already have a bondsma…..oh, wait, that’s right, you won’t get a chance to post bail.
I wish you and your brother were more creative or evil…
Why must you hate the Washington Monument so vehemently? Do you hate it for it’s freedom?
He hates it for it’s phallic symbolism, it’s size…lol.
Another classic case of monument envy, eh?
😉
I guess Boo will next set his sights on the Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, or maybe the Coit Tower in San Francisco.
Where else but Amsterdam?
Viaje a Amsterdam y Austria, enero de 2003: Página 2
I have no idea of the meaning behind this work but Google can find anything.
Here we see how an improbable idea can evolve into sheer stupidity but still be claimed as a successful ‘thwarting’ by officials. The ‘plan’ was abandoned as unrealistic from the beginning and it appears to have been a foolish suggestion by a supposed mastermind. The name Majid Khan pops up in other suspicious places and it’s interesting to note the proximity of the area of the Beltway Sniper. The mentions of the gas station owner and textile business owner will later drag in the Paracha father and son who were lured in by deception by this Majid Khan. Sounds much like the whole thing was a setup.
It is a set up. I will say this again.
It’s observable….THERE HAVE BEEN NO ATTACKS IN THE US BECAUSE THERE ARE NO TERRORISTS!
There are no terrorists who have the desire or means to attack America. No one is that interested.
You can’t tell me that if there were terrorists, they couldn’t enter the country and blow up themselves in a crowded place or blow a bomb up in a crowded place. THis hasn’t happened because there isn’t anybody to do it.
The back pack explosions in Britian and Spain are home grown and `really not worth the coverage they got….these are two incidents….it doesn’t happen everyday and it hasn’t happened at all here because it has no financial backing and no one willing to execute the plan.
because they’ve already won.
They’ve caused Americans to live in fear of another terrorist attack — even those who live thousands of miles away from any potential target. I saw one of those damned DHS spots this morning, with the kids asking, “If there’s an attack, what should we do?” Just as the children of the ’50s and ’60s lived with the idea of “duck and cover” in the event of a nuclear attack (when the true solution was “duck your head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye”), today’s children are being raised in a culture of fear.
They’ve given this misAdministration the excuse needed to throw out the Constitution, the goal the neo-cons have had in the back of their minds for years. The United States is turning into the totalitarian regime that the “insurgents” of the American Revolution fought against.
They can sit back, relax, and chortle how they’ve brought the Great Satan to its knees, just by being out there…and American voters continue to pull the lever for “security” at the expense of “freedom”…
Why is it that probably only half of Americans and their kids are scared the way it was back in the 50s and 60s? Even with 9/11 most of that shock-terror has seemed to have worn off. There are some alarming details to the 1993 WTC attack that don’t make the mainstream. Trial evidence/testimony shows that a major player in that was under some agencies’ control and it was supposed to be neutralized before the actual attack. Reading accounts of the attack in the near time afterwards shows several references to the ‘Pearl Harbor like attack’. 1992 was a critical time for the foundations of much of what we’ve seen. Evidently the public wasn’t scared enough then and it would take a much more spectacular event.
Still, there’s a fundamental difference between those who fear the threat presented by the govt and those who perceive the threat as a result of the govt. The same groups who accept all of the govt claims of the existing terror threat are also those who seek external control of their lives. Conservatives might say they want small govt but it seemes clear that they want the govt to limit choice by law. These same people seek the control that organized religions and church offers. Those people are about 52% and willing to sacrifice everyone’s liberty for their false sense of security.
A greater point gets lost. Although some of these accused sleeper cells had contacts with groups prior to 9/11, they didn’t pursue that extremism and actually tried to distance themselves from it after 9/11. The Lackawanna 6(7) are a good example of this. Instead of trying to prove a nonexistent threat, the authorities should be claiming a victory of the American spirit.
Britain, Spain and 9/11 are all more similar to an organized criminal network than any type of religious extremism.
The boys are just taking care of business amongst themselves and the collateral losses are unfortunate.
Several weeks ago I posted an essay on how secret police work is ineffective. It is like looking for a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know it is a needle.
The part of the secret police activity that does work well is spying on well-known political dissidents.
My essay uses examples from history, but as today’s NY Times article illustrates these things never really change.
So, at the risk of being a bit immodest, here is the link:
Surveillance vs Liberty
The other part of the story today is of a number of suits by the ACLU and others over exactly this sort of spying on domestic political activity. Whatever the initial motivations for the creation of a secret police, ultimately it transforms into a mechanism for the government to stay in power by suppressing political opposition.
Hey boo,
Maybe your teacher friend needs a steel hat, just like Oddjob had in Goldfinger. I don’t know if it would take down the White House, but it separated a head off a statue pretty well! Also, it’s even more ridiculous than a steel frisbee. 🙂
I guess I’ll have to give up my plan to breed giant mutant genetically-engineered beavers who can gnaw the legs off the Space Needle.
Always beware the beaver that bites back.
Especially if it’s twenty feet tall and has teeth that can bite through steel girders the height and width of a boxcar. 🙂
I’m shocked, shocked I say, at the results returned in a Googlesearch of giant beaver
This will be on my to do list when I finally get to visit Canada.
BooMan– DUDE– how could you reveal my plot so publicly??? Two years of my life spent working on that frisbee, and now they know all about it!!! I’ll never forgive you…
Ummm, Booman, you are now on the no-fly list.
Imagine Tom Petty singing “Don’t come around her no more” as the Feds descend upon you demanding to see your passport for sign of “the wrong stamps”, and asking “Where is bin Laden!”