or How I Spent Five Hours Saturday Trying to Keep My Head From Exploding
It struck me on Saturday morning that I needed to know just one true thing. Thursday’s re-declaration of a global war on terror by President Bush, followed by Thursday evening’s obligatory warnings that the New York Subway System was under imminent attack had left me shaking my head, yet again. I am one of those people with a hunch that we, the masses, are being manipulated as part of some grand political scheme.
I tried to let it go on Friday. But then I remembered a passage from George Orwell’s 1984:
Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment of paper…. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It was a half-page torn out of The Times of about ten years earlier — the top half of the page, so that it included the date — and it contained a photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on that date they had been on Eurasian soil…. There was only one possible conclusion: the confessions were lies. Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil bone which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory. It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been published to the world and its significance made known…. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers. Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes…. The past not only changed, but changed continuously…. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past were obvious, but the ultimate motive was mysterious.
And it left me needing to know just one true thing. A worthless goal, really. But I had to try.
Like Winston, I suspect that my government might be engaged in an attempt to control information, and thereby control the people. My speculation: 1) President Bush gave a speech on Thursday designed to buttress his flagging approval ratings by reigniting fears about global terrorism, and by trying to re-connect the War in Iraq with his efforts to combat that terrorism; 2) That this was done because support for the President has been battered by failure in Iraq, Katrina, the Meirs nomination problem, and the potential indictment of high figures within his administration; and 3) That the Administration orchestrated the announcement of a terror threat to the subways of New York City, so that the news media would ignore the stories damaging to Bush, and focus coverage on a story that would help cement the link between Iraq and terror that Bush was trying to forge with his speech.
Unlike Winston, no news clipping floated onto my desk which would unequivocally confirm my suspicions. But I did get a newspaper this morning. And I’ve got the Internet. So, in order to convince myself that I am not becoming a fictional character in a political-horror novel, I spent some time examining my thesis.
Time for a question from the rather paltry weekend audience, I suppose.
Now that we’ve read all this bullshit prelude, what the fuck is this diary about?
Glad you asked. In short, I just want to see if I can find some evidence that Thursday’s terror alert was a) a completely orchestrated bullshit event designed to keep the rabble in line, or b) a serious and credible threat to our nation’s security, justifying the expenditure of a lot of money on preventative measures, and a whole lot of television coverage being distracted from other issues of the day.
How you gonna do that sitting in front of a computer somewhere in the Midwest, you idiot?
Good question. Well. I’ll just have to take what I can get. I’ll take every fact I can find from three news reports on the event, New York and Washington Try to Explain Two Views of Threat, Terror Officials Work to Assess Subway Threat, and N.Y. Threat Tip Came From Source in Iraq, and sort them all out. And I’m bound to shed some light on the truth.
Fat Chance. You aren’t going to make us sit through a list of all the facts you’ve sorted out, are you?
No. That would be cruel. I’ll just try to summarize them. Like I did with that really long-ass section of the novel I remembered and reproduced above. I’ll just throw in a couple of quotes to support my points.
All right. Go Ahead. Did you, like, solve this existential crisis, or what? But be quick, okay. I’m competing in a really cool photo contest you know.
Thanks. Okay. Well, it looks to me like there is some pretty good evidence buried in these articles which suggests that Thursday’s terror alerts were total bullshit. You probably already guessed, huh?
Hurry the fuck up.
Okay. Where to start. Well, as you probably all know by now. There was only a single “informant” in Iraq who started this whole terror alert:
The information that led Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to raise a public alert about a “specific threat” against New York City’s subway system originated in Baghdad from an Iraqi informant who approached U.S. authorities in the past two weeks, U.S. officials said yesterday.
Wow. Single source, huh? The information he gave them must have been stellar, or they would have never shut down the subways and co-opted the airwaves like that, huh?
Well, you would think. But, not really.
According to a senior U.S. military officer, the report originated with an Iraqi informant who voluntarily approached U.S. authorities. Information was developed over the past two weeks, said a Bush administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because analysis is ongoing.
The military officer, who is in Iraq and has access to intelligence reports, said the story that the informant told was very detailed. It alleged a complex international scheme involving about 20 people in different countries, explosives packed in suitcases and a series of attacks targeting New York’s transit network.
“Frankly, the whole layout was so far-fetched that I looked at it skeptically,” said the officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. “The story was fairly elaborate — the description of the devices, the mix of personalities said to be involved. But then there were key things that the source claimed not to know that you’d think he would know if he knew all the rest.”
U.S. and Iraqi forces proceeded this week to round up three people in Iraq who had been identified by the informant as planning to leave the country to participate in the alleged plot. The officer described the three as pharmacists, although the Bush administration official said only that at least one man was reported to be a pharmacist.
“The people turned out to be real and where the source said they would be,” the military officer said. “But it’s still not clear whether they have anything to do with any plot. We still basically only have one guy with this story.
That doesn’t sound very convincing. They probably should have given the guy a lie detector or something before they tried to get everyone worked up.
Well. Here is where the stories diverge a little. And it gets kind of interesting, really. The Washington Post says:
The informant was given a polygraph test, which he passed, the officer said. A law enforcement official in New York said the source “had been proven before on al Qaeda operations.”
But, the New York Times gets a little more specific information, which I think tells us something significant. Pay attention to the italicized parts.
The informant, according to one official, had also passed a polygraph examination in Iraq on the information about an attack that he had given to Defense Intelligence Agency officials, although his statements on other issues during the examination were deemed inconclusive.
So what’s your problem. The guy passed a polygraph. We gotta err on the side of caution. I’m done with this crap. I’m going to read more important stuff.
Wait. Come on. Don’t go. Just one more second. He didn’t pass a polygraph about the crazy subway bomb plot that caused this terror alert. At least that’s my contention. He passed a polygraph about an attack. Another attack. It was the one where he had provided “credible evidence” in the past. My bet is that the “inconclusive” part of the polygraph related to his crazy theory — the one the senior U.S. military officer said sounded like bullshit. The one that ended up in this terror alert. The one about the buggies and bombs on the New York subways.
You are full of shit. Are you a terrorist or something? You should start writing on blogs and call yourself Ductape Fatwa or something? You can’t be sure he didn’t pass a polygraph. And you can’t risk the lives of people in NYC based on your bullshit.
Well. I won’t deny I’m full of shit a lot of the time. But think about it for just one second. If this guy had said that he knew specific people who were going to blow up the NYC subway on a specific date, and he had passed a polygraph to that effect, don’t you suppose our government would be all over that?
They were. Remember. Thursday’s terror alerts.
Well. Not really. You see. Almost every named federal official, and most unnamed federal officials were saying that the threat wasn’t credible. Something they would never say if this guy had made these allegations and passed a polygraph.
On Thursday, an unclassified bulletin on the possible threat to the subway system was provided by the Department of Homeland Security to law enforcement agencies and emergency managers. It said that the agency and the F.B.I. had doubts about the credibility of the threat.
Terror Officials Work to Assess Subway Threat
But the official was far more skeptical of the threat itself, saying that intelligence officials who have sifted through the F.B.I. interrogation reports from Iraq that prompted the initial warnings believe “there are real questions about the credibility” of the information.
-snip-
Given that mandate [Chertoff’s desire to measure DHS responses to potential threats, vis a vis DHS responses under Ridge], on Thursday evening Mr. Chertoff’s press secretary, Russ Knocke, did not hesitate to publicly play down the report that was causing alarm in New York, calling the threat “specific but noncredible” from information “of doubtful credibility.”
New York and Washington Try to Explain Two Views of Threat
One federal law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said agents had so far “not been able to corroborate any of the facts, so it leads one to believe it’s not true.”
Okay. Maybe I will concede that this guy’s information might not have been all that good. Maybe he even failed the polygraph on the important parts, like you say. But, don’t you see, the fact that all these federal officials were downplaying the threat from the beginning — that defeats your whole premise. I mean how did the Bush administration manipulate this. They were telling everyone that the threat was not credible.
Good point, I guess. Unless maybe the federal government understands that the locals almost have to react, to even the slightest officially reported threat.
But [the Homeland Security] bulletin provided certain details [to the locals], including that the information about the possible threat indicated that a team of operatives “some of whom may travel to or who may be in the New York City area” might attempt an attack on or about Oct. 9. It also said that the terrorists might use remote-controlled or timed explosives concealed inside or underneath baby carriages, in briefcases or suitcases.
Terror Officials Work to Assess Subway Threat
A senior United States counterterrorism official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly, echoed Mr. Bloomberg’s statements when he said on Thursday that “obviously, when you’re in New York, even if the information is not rock solid, you’ve got to take it seriously.”
New York and Washington Try to Explain Two Views of Threat
“I don’t think any people should be scared,” said a federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. “I would take what Bloomberg said at face value. We looked at the information, we developed it, we provided it to the New York officials, and we let them determine how they need to react in terms of their own defense measures.”
-snip-
A police official in New York who has been informed about the threat said the department does not have the time to carefully vet a threat to determine whether it is serious before acting. “We can’t wait for certainty,” the official said. “It doesn’t have to be a certainty for us to act.”
New York and Washington Try to Explain Two Views of Threat
The latest developments in Iraq came as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, defended their decision on Thursday to significantly increase subway security and alert the public although the plot had not yet been verified.
“I can tell you we had very specific information and that we believe that the source of some of this information was reliable and we acted accordingly,” Mr. Kelly said during a news conference with Mr. Bloomberg. He added, with emphasis, “We did exactly the right thing.”
Well. It’s an interesting theory. What you gonna do with it?
Flush it down the memory hole, I think. The immediate advantages of falsifying the past are obvious. But the ultimate motive — it’s a mystery.