Part II of a series | Part I

Unless you've been under a rock for most of the past week, you already know that people have been arrested in Britain and Pakistan recently, in connection with an alleged plot to bomb flights from Britain to the USA. According to reports of the arrests, the alleged terrorists were allegedly planning to take down 10 or 12 airplanes at the same time, and this grand-scale planning allegedly points to al-Qaeda. You may know quite a bit more than this, of course. Or at least you may think you do. But in point of fact, most of us probably know quite a bit less.

This post attempts to dig beneath the surface, to look at various (mainstream and other) accounts of the events and to try to determine the nature, the scope and the scale of the manipulation that has been going on. It may not point us in the direction of greater truth, but perhaps it can help us to find a direction of fewer lies.

Let's start with a point of order: Chris Floyd, writer of the excellent blog Empire Burlesque, points out one of the most sickening aspects of the coverage these arrests have received:

The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned

In the oceans of newsprint and tsunamis of pixels expended on the London bomb plot stories over the last two days, I don't recall seeing -- anywhere, either in the US or UK media -- that one little word which differentiates honest journalism from the noxious regurgitations of state propaganda: "alleged."

Everywhere, you read that a "bomb plot was thwarted" -- not an alleged bomb plot. Everywhere, you read that the plotters (or most of them) have been captured -- not the "alleged" plotters. Everywhere, whatever line is being laid down by "intelligence officials" and government poo-bahs is accepted uncritically and megaphoned out to the public. Everywhere the presumption of innocence -- one of the bedrock liberties of the "way of life" that we are supposed to be defending -- is gleefully tossed aside.
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The presumption of innocence -- like the Geneva Conventions -- is just another "quaint" relic of a bygone era.

I give Chris a lot of credit for saying this; I think it shows that he and I have been reading somewhat different sources. If we can judge by the presence of the magic word "alleged", I have found a few -- a very few -- "honest" mainstream news reports. Most of them have come from our Canadian friends.

Here's an example from the CBC:

Juice, aerosols banned on Canadian flights:

Air travellers in Canada are no longer allowed to take aerosols or juice in their carry-on luggage, under new rules put in place on Sunday morning by Transport Canada.

The items join the list of things banned from carry-on luggage on airplanes under tighter regulations put in place on Aug. 10 after British police announced that they had foiled an alleged plot to bomb commercial aircraft with explosives smuggled onto planes in hand luggage.
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At least 40 people have been arrested in the alleged bomb plot, including 24 detained in overnight raids on Aug. 9 and 10 in Britain and others in Pakistan.

As Chris Floyd almost said: the stories containing phrases like "alleged bomb plot" are few and far between. But even before I read his post, I had been looking for the exceptions. And that's probably why I found them. I even found a New York Times article with the word "alleged" in it. And we'll look at that article in more depth, later.

But at this point I want to emphasize how prominently these reports stand out -- because of their honest use of the language, because they imply that the presumption of innocence is not entirely lost, and because they are so few in number.

I must say this highlights the pathetic condition of the majority our so-called "news" services. And I can't say I'm surprised.

I was also not surprised to see a wide variety of articles questioning the timing of the arrests; some of which appeared more or less immediately after the first arrests were announced.

In a post I wrote last Thursday, I pointed out how convenient the timing was for the Republicans -- who were so busy bashing the Democrats because their favorite faux-Democrat Senator, Joe Lieberman, had lost Tuesday's Connecticut primary to Ned Lamont.

As usual, and possibly because I am almost always nearly frozen, my piece, An Avalanche of Lies, may have been too subtle about it (other than the title, perhaps). Some other writers were mincing their words a lot less than I was that day.

Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story, writing at Huffington Post, got my attention by her use of the magic word, and kept it for a long, long time:

Playing Politics with Our Lives

After learning of the London plot early yesterday morning from the television, which rarely tells me anything factual, I immediately began making calls to find out the details of what this alleged plot was, what experts believed, and so forth. I spent till roughly 7 PM EST running after this, until I was satisfied that, by all accounts, there was indeed a plot of serious consequence.

But what kept nagging at me was the sense that the White House was far too eager to exploit this, that despite having only learned of the details a few days back, they appeared to be aggressively using insider intelligence of forthcoming events to their own political advantage.

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The one issue, the key issue for everyone I spoke with, mirrored my own concerns. The timing seemed terribly odd.

The arrests appeared sloppy. Scotland Yard was still involved in raiding and arresting suspects at the time the story broke, and the raids and arrests continued throughout the day and evening. The mastermind was still in Pakistan, when one would have hoped that authorities would have ensured his capture prior to the raids, as such a person could provide information about higher ups and financial backers. Why did the Brits suddenly move? This was the question that had experts completely confused.

Were the experts really "completely confused"? Or were they keeping something hidden?

If they were trying to keep it hidden, it didn't work. Larisa is a very good chess player.

My opinion on this whole timing issue is that the White House played politics with classified information, again.

Right. Exactly. Yes?

Larisa goes on to lay out a series of quotes and links that I find most convincing. I've been reading Larisa for a long time and it seems to me that she does not like to stick her neck out. She's usually entirely convinced of something before she even begins to write about it.

So when she writes stuff like this I tend to pay attention:

Is it possible that the White House, eager to score political points with the American radical right [...] actually blew yet another classified program by yapping to reporters and talking point crafters? In my opinion, yes.

In my opinion it was despite the Bush administration that the Brits managed to still secure the alleged plotters, not as a result of White House help in the matter.

The confusion around and skepticism of the alleged London bombings plot is understandable given the context of this week's events and the well documented past naked abuse of power by this administration in peddling fear for political points.

The mainstream media, however, cannot seem to separate two very specific issues: the actual London plot and the White House abuse of classified information to achieve political goals.

We know that all agency heads were briefed by the White House and that Tony Snow knew, Dick Cheney held a private press conference with pet reporters, Karl Rove called Lieberman, talking points made their rounds via right wing outlets and mouths.

While all of this chatter is going on in the States, the Brits must have watched with horror. In my opinion, their move to arrest the suspects on Thursday was more about a sleazy White House political machine and the possibility that loose lips from the White House could jeopardize the investigation, which was nearing its end.

This again, is my own opinion. Is this cynical? Yes. But look who we are talking about after all.

I would not put it past Cheney to do with this information what he did with the CIA leak case. There is no reason to give any of these people the benefit of trust, not after all of the lies, machinations, abuse of journalism, abuse of a world size platform, and all of the effort and funding that has gone into creating an image of competence, honesty, strength, and concern for American people. All of the effort toward the image and no effort toward national security.

Yes, Larisa! That's exactly the point, isn't it? No effort toward national security, which is supposedly the Republicans' best issue. How could this possibly make any sense, in the absence of a great propaganda machine?

Larisa then draws what seems like an obvious conclusion:

It appears that at the very least, this administration believes that our sanity as a nation is worth less than a GOP win. Has there ever been a time in US history when a campaign manager worked directly out of the White House, and had the highest security clearances? Now imagine a morally bankrupt, soulless, intellectually perverted campaign manager with the highest security clearances, working out of the seat of power, using government agencies and resources at his disposal.

How is this allowed?

That's another good question, is it not? Larisa and I might not have much in common -- and I'm sure she's a much better chess player than I am (which is probably why she won't play me!) -- but we do ask a lot of questions, don't we?

Watch how she asks and answers a question that is usually spun the other way:

Are we safer now than we were before September 11th?

No. We were not safe to begin with because this administration failed to do its job in preventing the attacks of that tragedy.

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We are by far even less safe after the White House created torture camps all over the world

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We have become even more unsafe because this administration spent all of our national security funding, that is, funding earmarked for securing our nation, on Halliburton and Blackwater contracts, and on building a big, palace like base in Iraq.

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We have been at near zero safety since Bush and Cheney were appointed to their positions in 2000 and we will continue to have our safety downgraded with every passing second that this cabal has control over our precious, soon to be extinguished democracy. They are not strong on national security. They are strong on propaganda.

Bam! That's it, isn't it? Their one strong suit is propaganda! And Larisa nails them on it with a certain panache, don't you think?

What an essay! I urge you to read the whole thing. But then I always say that, especially when I'm talking about Larisa.

Earlier in the day, without doing the same research, Buzzflash had come to the same kinds of questions from a slightly different angle:

U.K. Terror Plot Foiled Just a Day after Lieberman's Defeat. Coincidence?

The pattern continues. A terrorist plot is uncovered just as the masses start to question national security strategy. The day after Senate Democrats brought a vote to pull out of Iraq, we catch a few idiots in Miami who were supposedly trying to blow up the Sears Tower, despite the fact that they lacked the means and ability to do so. Then there were the guys busted for supposedly plotting to blow up a New York subway exactly a year after the London bus bombings. And don't forget the release of new Osama bin Laden tapes just before the 2004 election as well as the very day after the Supreme Court decision striking down the Guantanamo Bay military tribunals. And now today, a few men in England were arrested for a plan to blow up planes flying to America, just a day after Connecticut voters flatly rejected Joe Lieberman and the war in Iraq.

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While the exact nature of today's arrests is still unclear, none of the plans seemed to have been immediate or imminent threats. The decision of when to intervene has been arbitrary, making the coincidental timings pretty convenient.

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Imagine a conversation late Tuesday night between Bush and his British Prime Minister lapdog, just as Ned Lamont declares victory. "Yo, Blair," Bush says while scarfing down a dinner role. "I gotta to do something about this sh*t. Can you finally arrest those suspected terrorists you told me about? This election business is ruining my vacation! I know you're chillin' in the Caribbean yourself right now, but it sure would be great if you could make a few calls for me ASAP."

Don't buy it? Consider this quote from a Reuters article on the story: "President George W. Bush had known about the investigation for several days, was briefed about it regularly and knew the arrests were coming, a senior administration official said." Both countries are surely monitoring several terrorist leads that could lead to arrests at any time. The British group would have been stopped eventually, but there has been absolutely no indication why it had to be today.

Terrorist threats may or may not be real. They may or may not be activated as a result of the Busheviks now becoming the motivational cause of terrorists at this point.

We will never know, as long as one-party dictatorship prevails and incompetence and unending war are the means of maintaining power.

But timing is something you can document. And this timing of the latest act of terrorism announcement appears more political than operational.

A senatorial candidate who questions the strategic value of the Iraq War is denounced by the top level of the Bush Administration as an appeaser of terrorists -- and then once again there is an arrest of people we are told intended to commit grievous acts of terrorism.

There appears to be a pattern here, and it's one employed by masters of tyranny, not democracy, to cover up for a failed war and a failed foreign policy.

I think you should read this whole piece too.

When I need a different -- calmer, clearer -- view of things, I try to consult Gwynne Dyer, who can be hard to find. Serious truth-tellers sometimes have difficulty getting published, and their readers sometimes have to make an effort. This time I found Gwynne Dyer in an Australian paper.

Who benefits from security hysteria?

Back in February 2003, when Prime Minister Tony Blair was trying to persuade a reluctant Britain that invading Iraq alongside the United States was a really neat idea, tanks suddenly appeared on the perimeter road around Heathrow to guard against an impending terrorist attack.

It wasn't clear what they were supposed to do — crush the terrorists under their treads? — and no actual terrorists ever showed up, but it helped to shape public opinion. So how different is it this time?

Well, that's the thing, isn't it?

How is this different?

What should we do about it?

Should we do anything different?

Strangely -- tragically -- these sorts of questions have been virtually off-limits, for almost five years.

Isn't it time we started talking about them? Apparently Gwynne Dyer thinks so.

[In] the United States more people die on the roads every single month than Islamist terrorists have killed since the year 2000, and in Britain it's more people every week. Yet neither country has tried to restrict access to cars.

Maybe it's cynical, but there are strong grounds for suspecting that this is all a charade. If they infiltrated these terrorist cells many months ago and have now have arrested most of the members, then why would they institute drastic new security measures on flights at this point? And did they really only realise in the past few days that explosives come in liquid form as well?

After the arrests in Britain on the night of August 9-10, Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch, assured the media that "during the investigation an unprecedented level of surveillance has been undertaken ... We have been looking at meetings, movement, travel, spending and the aspirations of a large group of people ... The investigation reached a critical point last night when the decision was made to take urgent action in order to disrupt what we believe was being planned."

Fair enough, although this is the same organisation that took "urgent action" to kill an innocent Brazilian called Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005 "in order to disrupt what we believe was being planned", and earlier this year shot and wounded another innocent person in London in the course of a raid on a Muslim family in east London based on manifestly unreliable information.

So maybe 24 terrorist plotters have been arrested in Britain, or maybe 24 innocent British Muslims with full beards, or more likely some combination of the two. But whatever the truth of that, why the panic?

British Home Secretary John Reid boldly asserted that the "main players" had been accounted for, and Scotland Yard Deputy Commissioner Paul Stephenson proudly announced that "we are confident that we have disrupted a plan by terrorists to cause untold death and destruction and commit mass murder".

Well done, lads — but if you have them all locked up, why are you closing the airports and bringing in all these draconian security measures now? A couple of months ago, when you first uncovered this plot but didn't know all the "main players", I could understand such drastic precautions, but why now?

Maybe it was those explosive "liquid chemicals" they were planning to smuggle aboard the planes. After all, it's only 160 years since nitroglycerine was invented. It's a mere 11 years since al-Qaeda associate Ramzi Yousef plotted to blow up 12 airliners flying across the Pacific at the same time with nitro carried aboard in contact lens solution bottles. Who could have foreseen this? Quick! Bring in new security measures!

They really aren't that stupid. They have been checking liquids that people want to carry aboard flights at airport security checkpoints for years. There would be no need for drastic new security measures, even if the alleged British terrorist ring were still on the loose.

This is all hype, designed to frighten the British and American publics into supporting the wars of their deeply unpopular governments (and the war of their Israeli ally as well).

LONDON - NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.

British officials knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.

In contrast to previous reports, one senior British official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.

At the White House, a top aide to President Bush denied the account.

Another U.S. official, however, acknowledges there was disagreement over timing.

One senior British official said the Americans also argued over the timing of the arrest of suspected ringleader Rashid Rauf in Pakistan, warning that if he was not taken into custody immediately, the United States would "render" him or pressure the Pakistani government to arrest him.

One week ago, President Bush and his political aides were facing the most daunting election-year landscape of his presidency.

Their party was splintered over Mr. Bush’s proposed immigration overhaul and uncertain about the political effect of violence in Iraq. Even with the White House working to bring Republicans together behind the president’s agenda, several candidates were making public shows of establishing their distance from him and his sagging approval ratings.

That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States.

By the time the president’s top political strategists met at his ranch on Friday for an annual summer fund-raiser, the events had given them an opportunity to pull together the Republican Party as it headed toward the home stretch of the campaign, rallying once more around Mr. Bush’s signature issue, the fight against terrorism.

The entire effort was swiftly coordinated by the Republican National Committee and the White House, using the same political machinery that carried them to victory in 2004. It began in the days before the anticipated loss of Mr. Lieberman, a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq, to Ned Lamont, a vocal war critic whose victory Republicans used to paint Democrats as “Defeatocrats.”

That word originated in a White House memorandum by Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Tony Snow, suggesting ways to frame the debate, that was shared with officials, including Ken Mehlman, the Republican chairman, and Karl Rove, the president’s top strategist.

The effort continued with the news of the British intelligence breakthrough, with the message that the plot had highlighted the stakes of a fight that the Democrats, according to Republicans, were not equipped to face.

But Democrats, seeing a political opportunity, began to focus on national security, making a vigorous case this week that the Republicans were mismanaging the war and making the country more vulnerable to attack.

“If the Republican Party thinks this is a good political issue for them, they are mistaken,” said Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

And a top Republican strategist cautioned that the party’s candidates still faced serious challenges in states where the war and Mr. Bush were overwhelmingly unpopular.

But at the very least, news of the plot helped the White House and the Republican Party achieve something they have struggled to do all year: bring the party forcefully together with the president.

The plan came together at the same time that Mr. Bush and his top security aides, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, were being intensively briefed on the unfolding British investigation. That led Democrats to charge that the White House had actively used the plot to its political advantage.

“For people to suggest there was somehow a larger, coordinated effort between the Lieberman loss and the disruption of the terror plot is just absurd,” said Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican Party.

Administration officials said that those who had been briefed on the plot had not expected any arrests for several days, well after the initial political fallout of the Lieberman campaign would have played out.

But in several interviews, the officials said the attacks had reinforced arguments they had devised to meet Mr. Lieberman’s expected defeat.

Officials said they had identified a Lieberman loss as a potential watershed moment that could reinforce the Democrats’ antiwar message — and scare Republicans out of taking White House advice to embrace the war in Iraq and national security in general. That advice was wearing thin as the death toll in Iraq continued to climb.

At a Republican gathering in Minneapolis on Aug. 4, Duf Sundheim, chairman of the California Republican Party, said that national security had “been a great issue for the Republican Party over a long time, and there’s still a good choice between the two parties. But what changes the dynamic is the current situation in Iraq. It dissipates it.”

Still, last weekend, Republican officials said, as the Lieberman loss seemed a certainty, the Republican National Committee and the White House began working to bring the party together on a message that the Democratic Party was taking a hard turn toward the antiwar left.

The Republican talking points, reviewed by Mr. Rove and Sara Taylor, the White House political director, went out to state committees across the country, with statements like “Ned Lamont’s victory over a distinguished public servant like Joe Lieberman represents the end of a tradition of proud Democrat leaders in the mold of F.D.R., Harry Truman, Scoop Jackson and J.F.K.”

Mr. Mehlman, the Republican National Committee chairman, led the “Defeatocrats” charge in a speech on Wednesday in Ohio, a key swing state.

In Crawford this week, Mr. Snow told reporters there were two approaches to fighting terrorism: “And in the Connecticut race, one of the approaches is to ignore the difficulties and walk away.” He added, “Now, when the United States walked away, in the opinion of Osama bin Laden in 1991, bin Laden drew from that the conclusion that Americans were weak and wouldn’t stay the course, and that led to Sept. 11.”

As Republican officeholders echoed the talking points around the nation, Mr. Cheney set up an unusual conference call with reporters from his vacation home in Wyoming. He said Mr. Lieberman’s defeat had sent a signal to “al-Qaeda types,” who, he said, “clearly are betting on the proposition that ultimately they can break the will of the American people in terms of our ability to stay in the fight and complete the task.”

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said in a statement to supporters that it was “disgraceful” that Mr. Cheney’s comments had come after he had been briefed on the British investigation.

Mr. Snow said Friday: “He did not know that there was an operation that was to take place.”

Yet by Thursday afternoon Congressional Republicans had already issued a flood of e-mail messages hailing the breakup of the plot, and crediting the administration’s anti-terror effort.

Congressional officials said they were acting on their own, not on guidance from the White House.

“We really knew instinctively what we wanted to say,” said Ron Bonjean, a spokesman for the House speaker, J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois.

Party officials said that they had no plans to issue statements about the plot until late in the day, after the Democrats had criticized the Republicans as mismanaging national security.

Republicans said they expected their arguments to carry through next week — when Mr. Bush is to meet with counterterrorism and Homeland Security Department officials — and Democrats are girding for more of the same around the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.

But even Republicans acknowledged that the climate was unpredictable. “When something like this happens it just sort of sweeps across the political landscape and changes things,” a senior Republican official said. “The pendulum can swing very quickly on it because there are events out of your typical political control.”

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