A whole lot of bad guys have been busted out of prison lately. I don’t know if that has any link to the unprecedented travel warning the State Department issued or the mass-closing of U.S. embassies. But I guess we should be prepared for some terrorist acts in the near future. Some see these warnings as self-serving, as a way for the Intelligence Community to deflect increasing scrutiny on their domestic surveillance activities. I admit that suspicion is warranted, but the extent of the precautions being taken seem in excess of what would be necessary if this were a wholly fabricated threat.
The bulletin to travelers and expatriates, issued by the State Department, came less than a day after the department announced that it was closing nearly two dozen American diplomatic missions in the Middle East and North Africa, including facilities in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Britain said Friday that it would close its embassy in Yemen on Monday and Tuesday because of “increased security concerns.”
Whatever the case, it seems that the administration has abandoned the narrative that al-Qaeda has been decimated.
And perhaps a little sensitivity to the Benghazi!! affair…
I think it may have more to do with what is going on in Syria. AQ may be benefiting from the resources(money/arms) the Saudi’s have been sending to Syria.
It’s hard imagine that they’re not connected.
If I was a terrorist, and knew some of my brother terrorists were in prison, and I thought I could get them out, why wouldn’t I try to break them out?
We have Super Max’s here, which are built like fortresses.
I don’t imagine poorer countries can afford to build something like them, so they have terrorists in with regular criminals in the jails.
And that also serves the terrorists purposes, because they have a “captured” audience to proselytize to, creating still more potential terrorists.
And I have some suspicions that some people in the governments were bribed for information about the security at those facilities.
It’s a mess no matter how you look at it.
But yeah, I’d say our government was smart to close some facilities down, and warn travelers and businessmen overseas about the potential for terrorist acts.
To me, that seems like the government taking reasonable precaution.
But yeah, this WILL help programs like the NSA’s, because more and more Americans here will be begging for protection.
…it seems that the administration has abandoned the narrative that al-Qaeda has been decimated.
Now cut that out, Boo. That’s right-wing propagandist framing. When the President made the statement that “al Qaeda has been decimated,” he went on to say (in the very next breath) that there would still be hard days ahead and that the organization still held the capability to stage attacks.
Absolutely true.
There is no such thing as wiping 100% of the threat of al Qaeda off the face of the earth. A decimated al Qaeda is one that is back to being an “ordinary” terrorist threat, like the KKK or old PLO, that can be dealt with by ordinary means.
To decimate is to reduce by 10%.
I’m fully prepared to believe that the Obama administration has managed to incapacitate at least one-tenth of Al Qaeda. Is that so hard to believe?
Finally! Someone who actually knows what decimated means!
Thank you.
But still missing the point that it was a punishment of one’s own mutinous legions.
By “incapacitate”, do you mean “kill”?
I’m curious as to how you arrive at that 1/10 number, seeing as how al Quaeda has reportedly (by US sources) moved to a franchising model organizationally and in framing to a “can’t kill an idea” model.
And the fact that US and Western sources in general pad out the size of al Quaeda by counting other groups that might or might not be affiliated with al Quaeda (the organization) at all.
A franchising model.
Nice, Tarheel.
If y’can’t beat ’em, copy ’em.
McQueada.
McTerror.
Wait’ll they get drones.
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now.
Watch.
AG
Tarheeldem, one arrives at the 1/10 number because that is the actual meaning of the word decimate – something most people who us it have no clue about. 🙂
Which is because its become a cliche as a hyperbolic (or understated) metaphor. Good point.
Pakistan had the first transition of civilian power in its history with the last election, bringing Narwaz Sharif to power as prime minister. The fact that Sharif is not close to US policy raises questions about who enabled the prison escape. Especially as John Kerry was reminding both Palistan and Turkey about Egypt’s military “restoring democracy” in Egypt.
Given the hall of mirrors that the US intelligence and covert operations community has constructed, figuring out which events are actually real threats and which events are bogus and politically motivated, either for domestic or foreign consumption, has become so difficult that I suspect even the key policymakers themselves are high on their own supply.
The same personnel who provide the data analysis to Bush are providing the data analysis to Obama. It is impossible for ordinary US citizens to know whether they are cooking the books or not. And trust betrayed is trust denied.
Of course, the Administration has abandoned the narrative that terra has been contained. The military budget is as stake; that’s the only Keynesian tool at their disposal now. If there’s no threat and if the NSA is the huge boongdoggle that reports suggest, then the IT cybersecurity bubble is about to burst with more highly-paid middle class public workers becoming unemployed.
We’ve become like Nigeria, a state that has to use the military as its welfare state to keep the economy afloat.
Which at some point has the accountants and bean counters saying, why have a large military if you don’t have a war? With the result that some nitwit leader (you know the precedent) decides to have a war.
It is impossible for ordinary US citizens to know whether they are cooking the books or not. And trust betrayed is trust denied.“
The default should be to believe they ARE cooking the books.
That applied as a general rule can lead to bad political choices as well.
Any “default” is going to lead to bad political choices.
Decisions and understanding, we’ve had such recent opportunity to learn, shouldn’t be made at the level of the gut.
There doesn’t seem to be much these days that does not lead to bad political choices.
I don’t trust much of anything I hear from politicians.
When Reagan succeeded by spin-doctoring, it set the Beltway pattern for the future. And in order to compete, Democrats started doing it too. Over-managed communications strategies have killed political discourse in this country in terms of having policy effects.
So the policy gets done by a bunch of decision-makers in such a tightly controlled communications environment that getting “high on one’s one supply” is almost inevitable. And with US political consultants lending their advice, both Canada and the UK have now followed the same pattern toward disastrous decision-making.
really just means one in every ten has been killed.
And actually all they ever claimed was that the parent organization of al Qaeda has been almost put out of commission. No one has ever claimed that the affiliates, particularly the AQ-Arabian Peninsula and AQ-Islamic Maghreb, are not still active.
Yeah.
And a whole lot more “bad guys”…much worse guys on the evidence of the number of deaths directly attributable to their actions/inactions…have avoided any punishment whatsoever for their crimes. Not just lately, but since at least the year 2000.
As long as these criminals walk the face of the earth unpunished no amount of travel restrictions, terror alerts, whistleblower attempts, so-called “diplomatic efforts” (How can you have effective diplomacy if every embassy and consulate is a seething warren of spies? And bet on it…every one is as CIA-ridden as that little plotting place in Benghazi. Feigning surprise is so lame!!!) or any other sorts of peace proposals are going to have any effect whatsoever. All of these things are just smoke and mirrors while the real deal…domestically as well as internationally…continues in a cloak of almost impenetrable secrecy. Penetrate even the first level of that secrecy and you end up Assanged, Manninged and Snowdened. Bet on it.
WW III is upon us, Booman, only it’s it’s a War On People, not a conflict between states.
The WAP.
The corpororate-owned world vs. everybody. And anybody who supports the purveyors of WAP bullshit…neoliberals just the same as neocons; Bush II and Obama are just two faces of the same counterfeit coin as can be plainly seen by anybody with an ounce of courage and brains who looks at what Obama has done with his reign so far…anybody who continues to support these people is as misled (or worse, as guilty) as were the Vichy French.
You ought to change your logo, Booman.
This frogmarching thing just ain’t up your alley anymore. You only want to frogmarch guilty Republicans. That is so early 21st Century.
AG
Kind of puts progressives, the Tea Party, the Oath-keepers and, for that matter, al-Qaeda all in the same boat. Strange bedfellows… You don’t suppose they’re just trying to distract those slated for global serfdom by stirring them up against each other with bogus ideological and religious conflicts, do you?
Shouldn’t it be WOP?
Too politically incorrect?
Y’know…I didn’t think about that, and I am usually quite careful about acronyms. It didn’t even enter my mind; I just wrote WAP. It sounds so much like “WHAP”, and that is what it feels like when hit by it, too.
“WOP” sounds more like a wet towel, I guess. This is a whip they are using.
A bullwhip.
A bullwhip dipped in bullshit.
So it goes in poetic acronym land.
I’m stickin’ wid WAP, myself.
AG
They call it the War Against People, and you won’t have to be poetic.
I guess that’s what I did the first time I used it, a couple of days ago. The War Against People. Thanks for the reminder. At 1AM after driving home for 2 hrs. from a really hard latin gig (to which I first had to drive 2 hours) and a couple of glasses of wine to wind down, the ol’ mind ain’t firing on all cylinders.
So it goes.
AG
it seems that the administration has abandoned the narrative that al-Qaeda has been decimated
What is “al-Qaeda”? If we define it as bin Laden’s organization then it probably has been – indeed it probably was long before his death was announced.
But if we think of the term “al-Qaeda” like we think of the term “mafia” then it’s a completely different concept. Mafia is a general term used to describe criminal organizations that behave in similar ways. It’s origin probably was one specific organization, but that was long ago.
For over 10 years now various groups have touted ties to “al-Qaeda” as status-boosting and of course the permanent military in Washington loved to play along, basically labeling anyone they didn’t like as having “links to al-Qaeda” – just don’t look to closely or you’ll find the link was that his brother’s friends’ aunt once attended a wedding where another guest was a sister to the father of someone who once drove an al-Qaeda local leader to the airport in a taxi.
In other words, the term is meaningless except as describing a general type of organization or behavior.
Interesting that bin Laden himself never used the term in public before 9/11. But it was used all over Washington as this was the term the CIA used to describe his group. The origin of the term – whether it started with bin Laden and was picked up by the CIA and vice versa – is unclear.
Good points, well-stated.
for the warnings and actions slated for September 11 (2013).
Could be the last gasp in the minds of al-Qaeda; Expect serious outbreaks of terror. Really.
Why I think this: Last year’s benghazi incident allowed the GOP TeaP’s to attack the Obama Administration. The GOP doing aL-Qaeda’s dirty work seems to be a win situation for the bad guys.
Which is why the US intelligence community better be as good as they claim to be in their hype.
I do think that al-Zawahiri plus any al Quaeda who studied in the US understand US politics well enough to play it to their advantage. But their understanding seems not to be the simplistic nonsense that the rightwing and the intelligence community use in a self-serving fashion.
After all 19 guys and a few thousand dollars have had the effect of delegitimizing the power of the “sole superpower” in 2000 and making the US appeals to “human rights”, “democracy”, “justice”, “peace” ring hollow. The failure to swiftly, dramatically, and institutionally reverse the policies of the Bush administration and hold real accountability has transformed the view from “a crazy President” to an “out of control government” and unless there is some electoral accountability in 2014, it will change to “a deranged populace”.
OT:
Douglas Cox and Ramzi Kassem, The Jurist: The NSC, Drone Killing Accountability and New FOIA Litigation
That mechanism ties off an absolute denial of due process in Presidentially-ordered assassinations. Who for the administration is arguing for these measures? And why?
.
In the fog of a Presidential election, Democrats were eager to declare victory over terror – see BooMan’s front-page story in June 2012. I did not agree – Dream on Guys. Soon a deterioration was seen and has continued.
The world has become a more dangerous place as the backlash of the US War on Terror (WOT) has become a potent global threat. Before the invasion of Iraq, there was no Al Qaeda in Iraq and the war lords in the Magreb kept a low profile. The dictatorships of Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, Mubarak and Assad were a thorn in the eyes of Western democracies on human rights abuses. The Gulf States were and are left alone because of their oil and gas resources and their unlimited wealth. A welcome source for capital investments in our financial markets and a destination for export of Western sophisticated military equipment.
The Arab uprising in Tunisia and Egypt were most promising, however in the past weeks the tide has turned to a failure in democracy and assassinations/violence has returned. The intervention in Libya has never made the country stable as it is split by a multitude of warlords and roaming militias. The massive supplies of arms inside Libya has spread throughout North African countries and reached militants throughout. Battles and war has increased in Algeria, Mali, Niger, Cameroon and Nigeria. Hundreds of innocent civilians have been slaughtered. Shipments of Libyan arms has been diverted through Qatar to foreign fighters in Syria. The overthrow of the Assad regime has been an idea-fix of US administrations and the old colonial powers Great Britain and France. A complete disaster has unfolded as Western powers, jointly with new-found allies of the Gulf States and Turkey, would be succesful in a matter of a few months. Repeatedly Obama and H. Clinton voiced satisfactory statements of imminent victory in the fall of the Assad regime. Thirty months have passed and the death toll reached 100,000 victims, refugees and displaced persons poses a security threat in the region. The prospect of a military solution is beyond anyone’s scope. Even the Geneva commitment of June 2012 has been undermined by the Western alliance from the start. The political opposition was never united and are in shambles through infighting and a slpit between Saudi Arabia and Qatar for most influence. I never understood the blurred vision of Hillary Clinton as she traveled endlessly from one capital to another. Putting on miles but no tangible results.
From yesterday’s diary – Threat Level Raised for Al Qaeda Attacks – US State.
Over 600 European muslims have joined Syrian rebels and receice Al-Qaeda like training in explosives and urban warfare. Great for a backlash the next decade for our European friends. WOT has a future.
Those drone strikes certainly have done their job. They are moving to Syria. /s
Sounds like most police departments’ strategies for ridding their communities of crime, drugs, and homeless people. Encourage them to go somewhere else.
Watch Narwaz Sharif’s response to this. And Iran’s.
So, we have two choices. Either the claimed terrorist threats are exquisitely well-timed exaggerations to push back against public and Congressional desires to understand what is being hidden about the breadth of our surveillance state, or our method of dealing with people and organizations who wish to conduct attacks on Americans and their interests, under the completely undefined and therefore infinitely elastic term “Al-Queda and their affiliates”, are proving ineffective in taking away their motivation to conduct attacks. Now that I think about it, it’s not exclusively a choice; I choose both.
BTW, the Sunday talk shows I was able to catch this morning dealt with this subject pretty shamefully. Martha Raddatz, someone I viewed as having journalistic integrity, appeared captured by her relationships with those who lead the military-industrial complex. Two examples: if you’re trying to get to the truth about what is going on in these areas, you certainly do not bring on Michael fucking Chertoff and credulously lap up every word without follow-up questions. You also don’t do PR flacking for General Dempsey by taking many minutes of airtime to talk about your long relationship together and asking him about his new grandchild and his singing hobby.