Statement Tom Ridge, Secretary of Homeland Defense:
"The U.S. intelligence community has received a substantial increase in the volume of threat-related intelligence reports. These credible sources suggest the possibility of attacks against the homeland around the holiday season and beyond.
"The strategic indicators, including al-Qaida’s continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland, are perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th, 2001.
“And in other news, you can now save up to fifteen percent or more on your car insurance.”
*Originally posted by Diceman *
**They’d never get away with hijacking planes again. **
Well You’d think that wouldn’t you. I just had another conversation with someone in the airline industry and it appears that there is a recon effort going on.
**They might go back to bombing them, tho. **
I haven’t heard anything to support that but there seems to be an attempt to flush out air marshals by acting weird (doesn’t work, just gets them yanked off the plane).
Not that this will surprise anyone, but these are foreign born individuals on visa’s.
Actually, Magiver, it doesn’t matter what the bad guys manage to smuggle on the plane or threaten folks with, passengers are unlikely to sit quietly and wait for the end. They’re most likely to go down fighting, and even if they don’t, pilots know lots of manaouvers which can scramble the folks in the back without crashing the plane, and I’m sure they’ll be more than willing to try them out on anyone who makes too big of a ruckus.
IAC, my 72 year old mother is flying down from Ohio on Christmas Eve, and she’s already told me she’s not gonna take any shit from no stinkin’ terrorists! :eek: So you folks have nothing to worry about.
But…but…didn’t our president just tell us not two weeks ago that the world is now a safer place? Had something to do with taking down Saddam. Now he raises the threat level? Does that mean the world isn’t a safer place after all? Or that it was, but now it’s not again? Could he have been…wrong? Could he have been overstating the case? Tooting his own horn? Waging a war on the wrong country while the real terrorists run loose?
I’m trying to think of a funny line to put down here, but I can’t come up with anything.
Then why tell the rest of us? What the hell good does it do to tell me I might very well die at the hands of a terrorist, but I shouldn’t worry about it? Talk about mixed signals from our Fearless Leader(s). When they ground all flights, close all public places, and restrict us all to our homes, I might be concerned. Wait, though, that could just be the signal that the 2004 elections are at hand, couldn’t it?
When the Floogit Bird is frightened it flies in ever decreasing circles unt till it flies up its own back door where it sits, flinging foogits at its enemies and cries: “FU FU FU”
Nice going there America. Continue living in fear of stuff you have less chance to die from then to win the jackpot with the stupid lotto ticket you just bought.
I can’t imagine what this kind of tricks can do to your collective spyche but it can’t be good!
Shouldn’t they be issuing a RED ALERT for all the casualties by car accidents too, considering the many more deaths caused by cars then from terrorists?
Think of it as an opportunity to prioritize rotating your disaster supplies: “It was an Orange Alert; I had to get a fresh jar of candied chestnuts and a bottle of J!”
Pretty much the point of my thread. A cowering populace is less likely to be troublesome to the people in charge. Keep them afraid, saturate the news with ominous portent, and it’s much easier to pass the next piece of egregious legislation or to undermine constitutional rights and process.
We are becoming a nation of whimperers, looking over our shoulders in suspicion of everyone and everything, and lashing out in anger at countries who don’t meet our definition of “good guys”. I refuse to buy into it and so should you all.
Robert Anton Wilson’s “prediction” about the political climate at the beginning of the 21st century seems one of those hairs less far-fetched now that we’re here, doesn’t it?
It looks more and more as if the true “terrorists” are working in the West Wing. If they are really trying to protect us, the “alert levels” should be as remote from the people as “def-con” levels. Telling us, racheting up the “threat” level publicly, serves no purpose against the terrorist threat, but does much to make the populace willing to accept horrific levels of internal contral. When all of the news media go along so willingly, does anybody still think we have a “free” press?
After being reminded of that quote from Illuminatus!, I put on my tinfoil hat on for a minute and recieved the following transmission:
1975, the year that Illuminatus! was published, was an interesting year. Donald Rumsfeld took the helm as Secretary of Defense that year, and President Ford made Dick Cheney Chief of staff. Halliburton, which would see Cheney as CEO twenty years later, was incorporated in the Cayman Islands in 1975. And of course, in 1975, there was a significant terrorist attack in New York City, at the Fraunces Tavern. Although this has often been connected with the FALN, who were responsible for hundreds of other bombings, the jailed leader of the group disavows any connection to that one single bombing:
Of course, the Fraunces Tavern is a perfect symbolic target, since, (apart from being the preferred place for the Illuminati to get beered up,) starting in 1789, it housed the Department of Foreign Affairs, back when NYC was the U.S. Capitol. Exactly 200 years after that, Dick Cheney became Secretary of Defense, just in time for Gulf War I.
