So while everyone is running around seeing terrorist boogeymen around every corner. While the media happily re-iterate the threat with shiny happy faces. While Repukes are falling all over themselves to point shoot aim at ANYONE and everyone but themselves and just making up facts and history as they go along. While all of this noise, recently turned up because some depressed priviledged loner decides to burn his wanker on a plane, starts to rear it's fearmongering head once again. A funny thing happened.
Al-Qaeda is actually losing it's influence and it's abilities. Now many of you are probably thinking, "surely you jest". Bear with me as I go through some facts from a refreshingly journalistic Time article.
Amid all the noise with the media happily playing along, there was one lone voice out there that was not saying that. At least not this week.
http://www.time.com/...
Here's a fact about the underwear attack that you might have missed in the media shoutfest: it failed. It failed, first of all, because Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was just one terrorist. Once upon a time, al-Qaeda's modus operandi was to launch multiple, simultaneous attacks. That way, even if one attack failed, the entire operation wouldn't. On 9/11, the network deployed 19 hijackers on four planes; on 12/25, by contrast, it managed only one. Second, the underwear attack failed because Abdulmutallab wasn't particularly well trained. The 19 Sept. 11 hijackers were personally selected by Osama bin Laden from the tens of thousands of potential killers who went through al-Qaeda's Afghan training camps in the 1990s. The ringleaders got extensive training on the design of airplanes and the behavior of aircraft crews, even before they enrolled in U.S. flight schools. The grunts were made to slit the throats of camels and sheep to overcome their inhibitions about murder. Abdulmutallab, by contrast, reportedly used a syringe to try to detonate a notoriously hard-to-detonate explosive called PETN. "To make this stuff work," says Van Romero, an explosives expert at New Mexico Tech, "you have to know what you're doing." Abdulmutallab, it appears, did not.
President Obama said this week that by succumbing to the fear and compromising our values because of these attacks, we are in fact doing EXACTLY what the terrorists want. I'd include the video but it's often too much of a hassle on DK. Needless to say, Al-Qaeda could not have asked for better American leader ship on the fearmongering and compromised values front than Bush/Cheney.
Why can al-Qaeda no longer pull off the big one? For one thing, it's under more pressure. In preparing the 9/11 attacks, the hijackers and their bosses took dozens of international flights and repeatedly opened U.S. bank accounts under their own names. Al-Qaeda operated a document center at the Kandahar airport. All that would be virtually impossible today, as hordes of counterterrorism officials scrutinize financial transactions and cell-phone calls, and drones track al-Qaeda leaders around the clock. And while government no-fly lists remain flawed, at least they exist. Today, the number of suspected terrorists prohibited from boarding a plane in the U.S. is about 4,000. Before Sept. 11, according to al-Qaeda expert Peter Bergen, it was 16. (See pictures of a jihadist's journey.)
Al-Qaeda is not just under more pressure from the West. It's also under more pressure from fellow Muslims. Across the greater Middle East, notes Jenkins, governments that once took a passive, or even indulgent, view of al-Qaeda have been frightened into action by jihadist attacks on their soil. Al-Qaeda's butchery has wrecked its image among ordinary Muslims. After jihadists bombed a wedding in Amman in 2005, the percentage of Jordanians who said they trusted bin Laden to "do the right thing" dropped from 25% to less than 1%. In Pakistan, the site of repeated attacks, support for al-Qaeda fell from 25% in 2008 to 9% the next year. In 2007, the Pew Research Center found that in Pakistan, Lebanon, Indonesia and Bangladesh, support for terrorism had dropped by at least half since 2002.
Not surprisingly, the main stream media could care less about this whole fact based angle. Saying things are getting better is almost NEVER good for selling a product when that product is attention getting news.
So where to from here? Shall we continue to allow ourselves to be manipulated by "terrorism" and the main stream media that is all too willing to take us on that ride. Or should we show that we do not fear, are not going to be manipulated, will not compromise our values?
http://www.time.com/...