Increased US Threat Level & Elections

MeatProduct

What are the views on the increased threat levels in the US? Is it genuinely based on "good" information or is it another attempt to control the public and secure more votes for Bush?

Nick

SkepticOne

MeatProduct wrote:

What are the views on the increased threat levels in the US? Is it genuinely based on "good" information or is it another attempt to control the public and secure more votes for Bush?

Nick

Apparently the stuff from the laptop was gathered by the terrorists years ago according to this Reuters article.

Fudger

I heard it was a V-Tech laptop ?

Its scare mongering. No doubt the hick americans are stocking up on m16 bullets, cans of coke and twinkies.

HerrLipp

I concur with the scare mongering theory. Funny it should also come hot on the heels of their "if there's a terrorist threat,we'll postpone the elections" announcement.

gandalf

What are the bets there will be a terrorist "incident" before the elections in November ?

Hobbes

HerrLipp wrote:

I concur with the scare mongering theory. Funny it should also come hot on the heels of their "if there's a terrorist threat,we'll postpone the elections" announcement.

Did they make an official announcement on that? They threw that idea out but elections have never been suspended in the history of the US.

I'm using the following terror alert system..


http://www.geekandproud.net/terror/

Johnny Versace

Nice article from The Register.

L5

fuuny it happened before the democrats convention?
Coincidence, i think not.

chewy

yeahthe headlines tonight are terror alert based on years old data.... surely these banks would have beefed up their security since 9/11 anyway...

there the republican convention coming up soon too nad the higher the threat evel the more draconian the laws can be the more protestors they can beat up in the name of freedom....

others conspirators said that the guy was captured about a week ago and the delayed telling ppl till the evning of kerrys speech... but pfff

Flukey

Typical tactic to be expected over the coming months. They used it to justify the war in Iraq don't forget.

MeatProduct

Well nothing about it in the news today. Amazing really. I thought there'd be a big issue about the fact that it is based on 4 year old evidence, even before 11/9!

Nick

Syth

This is what I think will happen:
3 Days before the election : The administration will announce that they have found new evidence about a possible and likely terrorist threat.
2 Day before the election : They will capture one of the ringleaders of this threat (no it won't be bin laden, they need him). There will be much 'Aren't we great?' speeches from the administration
1 Day before the election : After interegating the ringleader, the administration will announce that they have got new evidence that things will get much worse and bin laden and his heathen al qaida operatives will hunt your babies down and eat them if you don't vote for dubya.

MeatProduct

Syth wrote:

This is what I think will happen:
3 Days before the election : The administration will announce that they have found new evidence about a possible and likely terrorist threat.
2 Day before the election : They will capture one of the ringleaders of this threat (no it won't be bin laden, they need him). There will be much 'Aren't we great?' speeches from the administration
1 Day before the election : After interegating the ringleader, the administration will announce that they have got new evidence that things will get much worse and bin laden and his heathen al qaida operatives will hunt your babies down and eat them if you don't vote for dubya.

Sounds about right but I think you can add a fairly sizeable attack to that scenario. The US public won't keep hanging on propaganda, they need a disaster to keep them in check. Expect a big old terrorist attack. Of course that attack will come from the outside and the US admin will have nothing to do with it....

Nick

Flukey

Nothing from this administration would surprise me. They'll do anything to stay in power, even stage an attack.

Hobbes

Flukey wrote:

Nothing from this administration would surprise me. They'll do anything to stay in power, even stage an attack.

Why do that when they can just declare all Democrats terrorists?

Champ

Well maybe the US was right to increase the threat levels; especially after what Bush just said:
http://breakingnews.iol.ie/news/story.asp?j=139822584&p=y398z3456&n=139823462

gandalf

“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we,” Bush said. “They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”

LOL a freudian slip maybe

arcadegame2004

There is little doubt in my mind that these warnings are usually intended solely for party-political/electoral purposes, intended to portray Bush as the great leader against terrorism, the implication being that Kerry is not up to the task of defending the USA against it. The sad thing is that Bush doesn't even have to persuade that many people to win. He just needs to scare a few beyond the usual 40% that are committed to voting for both parties to win the stupid Electoral College, and lose the popular-vote. What a scandal that electoral system is.

vorbis

in our own presidential election arcadegame2004, a candidate can and has lost the election even though they won the popular vote. The electoral colleges system is a way of maintaining a federation of states rather than simply one big country.

daveirl

This post has been deleted.

matthiku

Johnny Versace wrote:

Nice article from The Register.

with a follow-up here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/11/al_q_geek_us_overthrow_plot/

Al-Qaeda computer geek nearly overthrew US
By Thomas C Greene
Published Wednesday 11th August 2004 16:45 GMT

Update A White House with a clear determination to draw paranoid conclusions from ambiguous data has finally gone over the top. It has now implied that the al-Qaeda computer geek arrested last month in Pakistan was involved in a plot to destabilize the USA around election time.
Two and two is five

As we reported here and here, so-called al-Qaeda "computer expert" Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani, was arrested on 13 July in possession of detailed but rather old surveillance documents related to major financial institutions in New York, Newark, and Washington.

Since that time, other intelligence has led the US security apparatus to imagine that a plot to attack the USA might be in the works. (No doubt there are scores of plots in the works, but we digress.) Therefore, last week, the ever-paranoid Bush Administration decided that Khan's building surveillance documents, and the hints of imminent danger, had to be connected. Indeed, if al Qaeda is to strike at all, it is most likely to strike the targets mentioned in Khan's documents, as opposed to thousands of others, the Bushies reasoned.

New York, Newark and Washington were immediately put on high alert, at great expense, and to the inconvenience of millions of residents. The sites mentioned in the Khan documents have received extraordinary attention, while thousands of other potential targets remain exposed to easy attack. (Anyone doubting this should look at the photos of unguarded access and control points to a Manhattan gas pipeline over forty inches in diameter, photographed without difficulty by Cryptome's John Young.)

But government panic over dubious intelligence was not enough. Another Bush Administration hobby horse is a notion that foreign evildoers intend to disrupt the November elections. We've been hearing about this ever since it was assumed that a terrorist attack determined the Spanish elections back in March.

So it did not take long for Bush security apparatchiks to begin leaking to the press strong hints that this is precisely what's behind the Administration's current terrorist hysteria.

According to an article in the New York Times, Khan the cyberterrorist "was also communicating with al Qaeda operatives who the authorities say are plotting to carry out an attack intended to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said Saturday."

Given the amount of skepticism the Administration has had to confront over its most recent Chicken Little act, and its hammerheaded aversion to acknowledging even the tiniest of mistakes, perhaps it was inevitable that the terror hype of last week could only be hyped further. It was impossible to retreat.

It has now got every citizen and law enforcement officer obsessing on a handful of targets that, thanks to the news cycle, al Qaeda knows not to mess with.
Missed opportunities

Meanwhile, back in Britain, UK Home Secretary David Blunkett - in a rare moment of common sense, if not lucidity - upbraided the Bush Administration for "feed[ing] the news frenzy."

The information on which the Bushies decided to raise the terror alert level is "of dubious worth," Blunkett said, adding that such information should be published "only if it would prove useful in preventing injury and loss of life," which he obviously believes the Bush hysteria would not do.

"There has been column inch after column inch devoted to the fact that in the United States there is often high-profile commentary, followed - as in the most current case - by detailed scrutiny with the potential risk of inviting ridicule," Blunkett said, inelegantly but rightly.

Blunkett is spot on in that critique, and still it gets worse. According to wire reports, Kahn the geek had been cooperating with Pakistani security forces, until the Bush Administration's insistence that he be arrested immediately, and their leaking of his name, ended his cooperation, and stuffed up several terror investigations in various countries, the UK included.

Pakistani intelligence forces have complained that several high-profile al Qaeda suspects they'd been keeping an eye on have gone to earth and now can't be found, merely because Khan was named. The twelve suspects suddenly rounded up in Britain last week were almost certainly nabbed in haste for the same reason.

But Khan is clearly a small-fry player, one whose continuing cooperation would have yielded more fruit than his arrest. Indeed, his arrest has signaled to scores of other al-Qaeda players that they should shift their plans. ®