FBI warns NY officials of Thanksgiving Day terrorist plot Happy Thanksgiving holiday, United States. Here's your first helping of holiday terrorist panic. The US Department of Homeland Security and FBI has been issuing warnings to New York state officials and law enforcement of a "plausible but unsubstantiated" threat of a terrorist bomb attack on the New York City subway and train …
Of intercepting millions of emails and mobe calls and sampling the odd word.
Perhaps a phone conversation went like this`. I hope this THANKSGIVING will be as good as last year when I came over on THE TUBE, the TURKEY went down a BOMB. AL QUAEDA don't know what they're missing.´
Still it means a bit of overtime for the fuzz, which is handy with Christmas coming up
DHS has to remind people to be scared, lest they wise up and people figure out that it's constantly overblowing the terrorist threat.
What kind of annoucement is based on "plausible yet unsubstainted" information? Of course, AQ MAY have had a conversation about New York subways. They may not have, either.
This is just DHS fear mongering, nothing more. Business as usual.
Paris - because she has a much clue as DHS officials
I still fondly remember video footage of Americans wrapping their houses in plastic to protect them against anthrax and other hazardous materials like oxygen.
A threat level that people are habituated to ignoring is worse than meaningless.
Or perhaps it will remain at yellow until the republicans regain the whitehouse.
As usual. Beware, some terr'ists might or might not want to cause havoc. Did they raise the threat level from orange (medium by the book, completely and absolutely inexistant in reality) to brown (for "abuse of booby-trapped turkey might cause you to shit your bed")?
Beware America there is a plausible yet unsubstantiated threat of terrorist action in the Boston docks area, you'd better begin stocking tea right now.
Because there was one for the 9/11 attacks, and the 7/7 attacks, if DHS isn't going to be performing any "what if" terrorist scenarios with the emergency services, then it won't happen :P But so far, any time they do, people get killed when the training goes on at the same time as an actual attack, which ends up being the same scenario they're training for, go figure.
But it's not like anyone important ever died, just a bunch of peasants, and when they ask questions, just scare the crap out of them till PTSD kicks away their will to speak.
While smallpox was deliberately used as a biological on some Indian tribes in British Columbia and possibly elsewhere, the real depopulation of North America was due to influenza.
Look for the book "Plagues and Peoples" by William McNeill for a reasonably full, level-headed discussion.
and killing of the head of the Indian anti-terrorist in Mumbai.
Fairly safe to say that during the Christian festive season the attacks will be on the up.
But you know when you think about it, when has there ever been a time when people have not been killing other people, seems a pretty consistent truism throughout all of time.
If I gave my boss some critical experiment results based on plausible yet unsubstantiated information I'd be sacked, I'd expect to be sacked. Why not these loons?
I suppose they have to cattle prod the Merkin populous every now and again to remind them they are "at war".
Paris - cos I'd be in about her like a dug wi' a burst baw
There are two ways to look at this announcement.
The first way is the way you see it. Specifically, that the government is trying to keep the people in a state of panic, so as to provide the reasoning and thrust behind the continuous removal of liberties which were once considered so important that this nation was built upon them.
The second way is that there are multiple reports saying the government had plenty of advance notice regarding the 9/11 (11/9 for the rest of the world) attacks, but did nothing with the information, choosing to ignore it instead. They probably feel that they cannot let that happen again, for the common people may lose faith in them if it happened again, and the government cannot afford to lose the faith of the people. This is especially important now, in this time of economic crisis, when a black man was recently elected to be the next president (which itself is apparently already leading to many problems with the bigots in the country who can't seem to look past the color of a person's skin)*.
Both of these choices are plausible, but unsubstantiated at the current time. While I'd like to think it's the second choice, I agree that the first choice is more probable.
* Imagine if people of every color would stop fighting each other. Maybe then they would pay attention to what the government is doing**. As Motley Crue wrote 23 years ago ("Fight For Your Rights") -- "We're all slaves to time / No color's right / Throw our hate into the fire". And as Tree wrote 9 years ago ("All of Us") -- "Take a good look at our history / Shouldn't really come as a mystery / Take a good look back at our past / It's not about race, it's all about class".
**Unfortunately, even if we stop hating/fighting along race lines, religion will always promote hatred and fighting, as ironic as it may seem. We simply need to look at the Middle East, wherein many of the countries' laws are based on the ruler's interpretation of their religion. That's precisely why the US' Bill of Rights' Amendment I begins "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;...". Of course, then Congress went and decided to give religious organizations tax-exempt status, and put God everywhere from our Pledge of Allegiance to our money to the Presidential inaugural oath.
@ Charles Manning. You probably hit the nail on the head there Charles, there most likely is an arab or two behind each Bush. Along with their oil.
@ The Other Steve. The pilgrims were only able to survive the first winters in the New World because of food and other help including effective medicines from the natives who took pity on them and in spite of that many of them died of diseases, many of which they brought with them.
@ RW Smallpox was introduced in a number of places often by trading blankets that had been used on Smallpox victims. Though it is true that the Indians had little or no natural resistance to flu and the common cold. A worse genocidal tactic was the destruction of the great buffalo herds which numbered in their millions and were in all respects the staple of the Plains Indians,the buffalo were seen as an obstruction to the white man farming the plains as well as encouraging the Indian to stay where the buffalo ranged.Destroying the herds was a device to prosecute the Manifest Destiny of the white man in developing the New World by starving out the tribes and removing much of the materials of every day life.
Read `Bury My Hearty at Wounded Knee´.
The whole threat level thing is useless.
Many of us have lived through decades of IRA terrorism, and were warned to beware of suspicious packages. Being alert enough to notice something wrong is a good thing. I remember the warning notices on the Underground.
But the way the Americans talk about a threat level is meaningless. New York would do better to copy what the London Underground did, and then tell the FBI to feck off.
Though the DHS probably do think the London Underground is a political movement.
..are people going to figure out, en masse, that there is no Terrorist Threat?
Let's see now, when exactly was the last terrorist attack on the US mainland? (be it performed by a foreign power or not).. ...ah, that'd be 2001 then. Seven years ago. And, let's face it, there is substantial evidence for doubt that it was carried out by the so-called 'Al Queda network' or even that such an entity actually exists at all!
It's the same over here in the UK too; the 7/7 attacks were carried out by what effectively appears to be a bunch of disaffected persons in a 'copy cat' attack - no substantial links back to AQ at all.
So, why all the disruption to our daily lives, why the display of 'threat level indicators' all over the place, why the constant news reports regarding 'potential, but unsubstantiated' threats?
Oh, the government say, thats because our intelligence services are doing a fine, fine job of detecting terrorist activity before it happens, our border controls are second to none and terrorists can't get into the country to carry out these 'potential attacks'...
Well, mr. government, why then are you spending billions on introducing ID cards that are supposedly *essential* to our continued security if we're doing such a great job of stopping the terrorists blowing us up, sending us anthrax, securing suitcase-size dirty bombs, and so on and so forth? Why?
Is that silence I hear?
We are more under threat from our own government than we are from external terrorists.
More people died in the UK swallowing bees in the last three years than have died as an action attributable to *any* terrorist action, let alone specifically AQ.
Maybe we out to think about ID'ing the bees.
*snort*
Black Helicopters, for obvious reasons.
By the bushies before they get shoved to the other side of the tracks by the next administration who might actually look at the information before acting like twats. This just gives them another excuse to paw through everyone's belongings as they try to get on the stupid subway / tube (take your pick, whingers).
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