This is a conversation that we need to continually have as a nation and I am glad to see it being covered in more "mainstream" press.
What are we giving up to gain our freedom and is it worth it in the long run? The intelligence apparatus our nation has constructed only has value as long as we have fear, they are thereby induced to continually keep us in a state of fear whether real or fabricated. My biggest fear is that many of these recent "terrorist incidents", not 9/11, were in fact created by our own agencies...yes a bit of a tin foil hat scenario to be sure but one that is not all together unreasonable given the current revelations.
While the indirect creation of terrorists is certainly also a factor, the direct method of creating plots that you can then "foil" has been widely documented and analyzed:
If you think you're Number One, then everything must be Perfect. If it's not, that contradicts your entire world view, and then you go in overdrive trying to reconcile expectation and reality.
Nothing makes the economy "boom" more than focusing productivity on single-use weapons and other commodities of war. The industrial production of WWII is what kicked off the boom that followed. If some is good, then more must be better - perpetual war must be the best stimulus we could give our economy!
Shutting down all those embassies in response to vague chatter. If all a terrorist needs to do is talk about an attack for us to shut everything down then they clearly win. That is not to say we can't respond just that this response is only rational if it was was purely political in nature.
Not to mention clearly stating we bugged this guys call was stupid from an intelegence standpoint.
I'm convinced the embassies were shut down for political reasons. No way this administration wants another Benghazi on their hands. I do think to some degree is was an overreaction considering our embassies are considered sovereign territory and its on the host country to defend the embassy - which funny, didn't happen in Libya.
>>>Not to mention clearly stating we bugged this guys call was stupid from an intelegence standpoint.
Agreed. I'm still surprised why this administration continues to leak intelligence to the media. All those lines of communication and means of intercepting intel are now burned.
Obviously, the leaks are intended to justify the current trend of global surveillance.
You should have heard the backlash against Biden for dropping the "ST6 killed bin Ladin" bomb in the press. People were saying that naming (a defunct since 1987) SEAL team as being responsible for killing bin Ladin equated to placing those SEALs at risk... (as if being a SEAL wasn't already placing yourself at risk?)
What is it about naming a SEAL team, which is only identified by the addition of a single digit, that puts them at risk or creates issues for them? Assuming they are consecutively numbered, I would assume there is a ST1, ST2, ST3, ST4, ST5 and possibly many ST(n+1). What makes ST6 special?
"Marcinko was the first commanding officer of this new unit, which was first called MOB 6 (Mobility 6) and Sixth Platoon. Eventually the unit was dubbed SEAL Team Six. At the time there were only two SEAL teams. Marcinko named the unit SEAL Team Six in order to confuse Soviet intelligence as to the number of actual SEAL teams in existence."
"Candidates are put through a variety of advanced training courses led by civilian or military instructors. These can include free-climbing, advanced unarmed combat techniques, defensive and offensive driving, advanced diving, and Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. All candidates must perform at the top level during selection, and the unit instructors evaluate the candidate during the training process"
In in short - they're the best of the best. Also, they haven't been defunct since 1987. They were renamed the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group. The Army equivalent is Delta Force.
For the past century or so, America has needed an "enemy" in order to provide an opponent to focus on. For years, it was the Soviets and Communism, but with the quick collapse of the Iron Curtain, we suddenly lacked one. Luckily (!) terrorism stepped up as a replacement, and well, here we are. Victorious, at the cost of our treasure and our morals.
Fight fire with fire they say. You seem to be doing well :)
Snide remark aside, I'll admit that my comment is not very insightful, because it is pretty much common knowledge. That does not make it any less true though.
The aim of a terrorist is to instill terror in the population. I don't delude myself I thinking you can carry on as if nothing happened, but the measures that are taken should be an appropriate response to the threat, not born out of fear or an effort to soothe the population. If you don't let an irrational fear take hold of you, then all the terrorist efforts have been in vain.
That is also more or less the point of the article, I just laid it out more tersely.
After listing historical terrorist events and responses, Mr. Koppel tries to lump in our invasion of Iraq as an over-sized reaction to terrorism from 9/11 which happened eighteen months earlier.
The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, it was about oil, as we all know now, after the propaganda has died down and people have generally gone back to sleep.
The loss of privacy and rights since then, and currently, is our govt misbehaving, and also has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
The invasion of Iraq had everything to do with 9/11. Without 9/11 or something like it, there never would have been enough support for an invasion of Iraq to actually carry it out.
Yes, among the people at the top who planned it, it was not a reaction to terrorism. But the public support for it absolutely was.
Our democracy is far from perfect, and much of government is corrupt, but the government is still by and large a reflection of the people. The people's massive overreaction to terrorism allows, even requires, the government to do bad stuff like invade Iraq, wiretap every American phone call, and more.
We need to convince the people to stop overreacting to terrorism so that the government loses that excuse to misbehave.
"Without 9/11 or something like it, there never would have been enough support for an invasion of Iraq to actually carry it out."
Why not? It happened before, how could it not happen again? Actually, seen from outside of U.S., the Iraq events that followed the reinstatement of the Bush family appear very naturally, those were like... family policy!
Even with 9/11, there was massive public opposition to the invasion. However, 9/11 had caused a massive shift overall, resulting in much greater popular support for the government in general and the administration in particular, and it caused the Democrats to abdicate their role as the "loyal opposition" and instead become rubber stamps. Additionally, 9/11 was used to drum up a great deal of additional support for the invasion by painting it as part of the war on terror. I don't believe it was ever outright stated, but it was heavily implied that Iraq was partially responsible for 9/11, and that the invasion would prevent future attacks.
In a hypothetical world without 9/11, the Bush administration would still want to invade Iraq, no doubt. It's been shown that they started the project of figuring out how to do it well before. But I don't think they'd be able to pull it off. Public opposition would have been much greater, Congressional opposition would have actually happened, and I don't think they would have been able to steamroll over that, or even anywhere close.
Bush more or less came into office as a lame duck. He was the first president in living memory to have won the election while losing the popular vote. He was often thought of as a buffoon, and even his supporters, in my experience, supported him more out of team spirit than because they actually thought he was some brilliant leader. I believe that, in this environment, the default position on a proposed invasion of Iraq would have been a solid "no, why would you even want to do that?"
But mix in 9/11 and the following year and a half of terrorist-related paranoia and fighting, and a lot of people changed their minds to "yes, we must support our leaders in their glorious fight against the al Qaeda menace."
I love (not!) the way people who were against domestic surveillance when the previous administration was caught doing it are now strangely quiet after the current administration admits to doing the same.
I hope the US is actually doing something smart/tricky. The CIA (or whoever) say this is because of some chatter. Can't they decode the chatter? Maybe they are pretending they can't.
I would bet that this particular incident is not like the others. This strikes me as an intentional overreaction by a government trying hard to justify their surveillance programs.
It's both. The news isn't pushing a particular agenda, they'll take anything that pushes people's buttons and grabs their eyeballs, whether it's this or another missing white girl.
The news most definitely pushes their funding partner's agenda. Also, they mostly get's their material from well funded sources (with agenda) instead of themselves nowadays.
Comment got down votes, not because the commenter was right or wrong, but for the rhetoric commentary that basically does not contribute anything constructive to the discussion. It's sort of an I told you so rhetoric.
What are we giving up to gain our freedom and is it worth it in the long run? The intelligence apparatus our nation has constructed only has value as long as we have fear, they are thereby induced to continually keep us in a state of fear whether real or fabricated. My biggest fear is that many of these recent "terrorist incidents", not 9/11, were in fact created by our own agencies...yes a bit of a tin foil hat scenario to be sure but one that is not all together unreasonable given the current revelations.