Terror alerts become terror yawns
: CNN on air is harping on Tom Ridge’s announcement that terrorists might strike before the elections. But there’s no news in that. Nothing new. No specifics. Just another maybe with a low credibility alert.
36 responses to “Terror alerts become terror yawns”
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I like the fact that not only does no one pay attention to the “terror alert”, but when they do raise it, the reason is usually along the lines of “Somewhere in the US, at some time, there might be a terrorist attack. That is all.” Which, I think, desensitizes everyone to the point of where if someone did actually go on TV and say anything specific no one would believe it.
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Yes, these alerts are worse than useless. But it also illustrates the speciousness of claims that Bush coulda/shoulda done something with the vague warnings he got before 9/11.
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Either we have vague terror warnings now or Michael Moore harps on the lack of vague terror warnings after the attack in his next movie.
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Or Michael Moore complains that no action was taken on the vague terror warning that was received.
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The real interesting part is the insinuation that they’re doing it to affect the election, which in the administration’s mind seems to mean that any attack would be intended to get GWB out of office.
Just another way for them to try to plant the “Terrorists like John Kerry” meme (even as they probably don’t much care who is in charge). -
“The real interesting part is the insinuation that they’re doing it to affect the election, which in the administration’s mind seems to mean that any attack would be intended to get GWB out of office.”
That’s certainly not an invalid concern, but to me ‘affect the election’ could mean everything from attacking polling places, doing something disruptive on election day itself, etc. -
Just another maybe with a low credibility alert.
And if an attack happens: WAAAAH! WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN US!?!?
You’ve been warned. Do with it what you will.
The real interesting part is the insinuation that they’re doing it to affect the election
Why, exactly? We’ve seen them do it in Spain after all… -
Victor Davis Hanson just wrote an article in NRO about this topic. I wonder if just a threat would be enough of a deterrence.
Another 9/11?
The awful response that we dare not speak about.
http://victorhanson.com/Articles/NRO%20Index/Another911.htm
“Perhaps it would be best to inform hostile countries right now of a (big) list of their assets -
Well, haven’t you heard–according to Democrats, the biggest threat is not the friendly terrorists–but religious people.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=7858
{The great conflict of the 21st century will not be between the West and terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not a belief. The true battle will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists; between those who believe in the primacy of the individual and those who believe that human beings owe their allegiance and identity to a higher authority; between those who give priority to life in this world and those who believe that human life is mere preparation for an existence beyond life; between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma. Terrorism will disrupt and destroy lives. But terrorism itself is not the greatest danger we face.}
A lunatic leftist. Should be shot and beheaded by his friends. -
This topic shows how important it is that stop nuclear proliferation among rogue governments such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea.
Not only is it possible (or probable) that they could attack before the election; if we don’t control the situation now, they could NUKE us before we know what hit us. -
You’re right, Jeff.
“Heightened Alert”
Yawn
Like NYC hasn’t been there since 9-11-01, and is getting jacked up to “Code Red: Machine Guns and Sniffer Dogs Everywhere” come Republican convention time.
Tell me when you know something, Ridge. Don’t tell me about my every day existence. -
Only a butthole thinks the little terrorists aren’t at this moment, planning on an attack bigger and better than 911. Only a freaking idiot believes that. I hope for your sake that they strike the democratic convention and make you happy.
They want to strike–wherever the scum can. And they need people like you to take the heat off and make it easier on the little bastards to blow something up. It is time to quit playing partisan politics with our security and pull together as a nation–against the terrorists and not being terrorist enablers like some democrats are.
Brace for bio terror, Asia warned
{KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) – Asian governments were warned Monday to prepare for possible chemical or biological terrorism after a manual on launching such attacks was discovered recently in the Philippines.
The warning came at a conference attended by more than 70 chemical weapons experts, security officials and policy makers from 12 countries including Japan, China, Canada, the United States, Singapore and Thailand.
“There is a growing concern of the potential threat posed by chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons (CBRN) in the hands of terrorists,” said Zainal Abidin Zain, director-general of the Southeast Asia Regional Centre for Counter-terrorism.} -
Kat, who are you yelling at?
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Kat, who are you yelling at?
All of us, I hope, because Kat is dead right. 9/11 was years in planning. Look at the pattern over the last decades. Each terrorist event has morphed into something more horrific. They vowed in 1993 to be back to bring the WTC down and they used the intervening years to plan it. It’s naive to think the jihad is over. People in Israel, Sudan, Nigeria, the Phillipines, Indonesia, etc aren’t safe living on Islam’s bloody borders. The US won’t be safe until we defeat Islamofascists or surrender to them. Being isolationists just pushes the day of reckoning off onto our children.
Tom, if intelligence could give us the specific time, place and means of the next terrorist attack we’d be at a place where we owned al Qaida. We aren’t there yet. I have no problem with the best they can do with their alerts. -
onecent and Kat, you are preaching to the choir, but the problem a lot of people have with these announcements is that they absolutely desensitize the population. Homeland Security should make announcements to its officers and so on, but until there is something specific, alerts do more damage than good.
By the way, you realize that this will go on forever, right? Will al-Qaeda or some other shadowy group be permanently put out of commission? Nope, not if we’re worried about 19 guys waging assymetric warfare. I don’t see how we can ever say “we are pretty much safe”. That’s not good for our security.
We need to look to the example of the UK, where terrorist bombings were a way of life for over 30 years. Sure, they never killed 3,000 people but they forced the authorities to think intelligently about security and the public. -
Tim–if there is an attack tomorrow, some will wonder why they weren’t warned. I believe there must be a very good reason for this warning–something specific that has authorities concerned. They succeeded in Spain and got the desired result. They will try it here.
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Kat, these warnings are meaningless to me because every day my wife leaves the house in the morning to head off to her job in midtown Manhattan, and I pray to God that today isn’t the day that either:
a) the tunnel her express bus uses getting into Manhattan, or
b) the subway and SI Ferry she uses coming home isn’t blown to Kingdom Come.
Since I work mostly out of my house I only have to add myself to those prayers an occasional time or two a week.
That’s my every day reality. Ridge can’t tell me shit I don’t already live. It’s gonna happen again, here, in NYC. It’s just a matter of when. Every day of my life is spent thinking that day is gonna be today. So I’d rather he just shut up and go kill any bastards he learns have a plan in motion. -
Actually I think NYC is a done deal for al Qaeda. What they like to do is finish a job not yet completed. They took down the towers finally.
It’s DC that is the biggest concern. -
Maybe it has something to do with this from http://jihadwatch.org/
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;sessionid=TUATAQHUXVJ3NQFIQMGSM54AVCBQWJVC?xml=/news/2004/07/09/wafg09.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/09/ixnewstop.html
Mullah Omar, the one-eyed Taliban leader who has eluded capture for three years, has been contacted by Afghan intelligence agents on a satellite phone carried by a captured aide. -
TC
Ridge and others are just putting out information, how you take it in and process it is your business. I live immediatly across the Potomac from DC, a target just like you, and as far as I am concerned the more info the better. If this info allows one of us ‘civilians’ to notice something out of the ordinary then it is a total success. Note that they didn’t raise the color level, you can start panicing when it gets to red, and then my guess is it is pretty much too late to do anything about it anyway. -
Just CYA so he can say “I told you so”.
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“A lunatic leftist. Should be shot and beheaded by his friends.”
Classy, Kat. But it comes from a religious person, so I guess it’s to be expected.
The statement you quoted is right on, but you’re too blind to see it. Religious extremists (Christian, Muslim, and more) want to CONTROL OUR LIVES according to their principles.
Tell me, does this quote come from a secular person, or from a freak? -
We all know there will be an attack, maybe this year, maybe in two years. These people don’t act willy-nilly. They’re impossibly patient, and quite smart, as 9/11 showed.
So how can we view Ridge’s BS as anything but a political ploy?
“Hi, I’m up here to scare you. I really have no justification for it, so I won’t even bother changing the pretty color gizmo. So I just want to tell you what a wonderful president Bush is, and you should vote for him so I can keep my job in this Homeland thingy.” -
AQ wants GB to win- they know he is their best recruiter, and they know that an attack in the fall will almost insure his re-election.
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Max
AQ wants GB to win? Didn’t the exact opposite happen in Spain? You got some twisty logic to tie those two together? -
No, Angelos–atheist extremists want to control my life. They want to put me in jail for speaking against what I think is immoral and wrong. They want to tell me what I should think. They want me to pay for late term babies to be scissored in the skull so they are dead when the head comes out. They want to call that choice and I’m a bigot and a religious extremist for calling it murder.
I want Ridge to keep talking. They charged 5 of the scum in Texas yesterday–one a CAIR founder. I want people to look twice at every muslim in America and never to allow them to plot their dirty schemes unhindered. I want mosques to be under surveillance and I don’t want to make it easy for the scum who come here to plot their terror.
If you don’t want to listen to Bush, listen to your buddy, OBL–he has new plans. Maybe you’d rather take his word.
What I consider American values and what you do, are two very different things. Religion is a value I treasure–what some leftists call values, I’d call trash.
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/24791.htm
Angelos–{The statement you quoted is right on, but you’re too blind to see it. Religious extremists (Christian, Muslim, and more) want to CONTROL OUR LIVES according to their principles.}
Gee, what did you atheists call it when Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Enver Hoxha,Stalin, Hitler, etc. outlawed religion, burned the Bibles and peace on earth reigned supreme.
If you were to tote up the casualty count achieved by those few officially atheistic secular, religious fanatic free regimes the world has seen, the atheists have the Bible believers beat by a mile. Notorious atheist butchers like Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and Enver Hoxha,Stalin, killed and slaughtered their own people at an unheard-of rate. -
Kat:
It’s amusing in a scary way that there are religious fanatics like you out there -
Hey, Angelos, one screwball judge in Arkansas catches your attention while his quoted statement….
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Michael, atheism is an ideology. What I don
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Kat, don’t waste your breath, Michael’s psuedo-edgy prose shtick is all he has going for him. He didn’t read a word you wrote or can’t process the content, hence his best shot is that you are a religious extremist. When concepts fail, as they do with him, he adds personal insults.
His idiotic drive-bys, fun for adolescents, are like bugs squashed on a windshield – annoying but a fact of life.
Thanks, Kat, for a clarity and moral resolve that is good to hear. I salute you. -
We need to look to the example of the UK, where terrorist bombings were a way of life for over 30 years.
Tim, regretably, some feel that the IRA withered because the Brits ultimately bought them off. We don’t have that luxury with a billion Muslims. Either they stop and join the botherhood of man in this century – secular, free and tolerant – or we will be a few decades facing their messy failed culture. -
Look at any statistic Kat, and you’ll find “leftists”, or Democrats, or whatever you want to call them today are just as religious or churchgoing as the thumpers on the right. Open a newspaper more often.
Maybe read a medical journal while you’re at it too. That form of abortion was used so rarely as to have brought up this quote “It seems hardly anyone uses partial-birth abortion, and if it’s banned, almost no one will miss it.” An OBGYN I know says she’s known of 2 in her ten years of practice, and in both cases the procedure was to save the woman’s life. But I guess you’re not THAT pro-life. Eh, to hell with the mother, this baby’s coming out!
The nice people you mentioned killed for powermad, political, and/or racial superiority reasons. But don’t logic stand in the way of your keyboard.
“I want people to look twice at every muslim in America…” Ah yes, round ’em all up. And all the other funny-colored people too. Is there anyone more bigoted than a white “Christian”? -
Angelos–thousands of babies a year have been scissored to death–not one or two–but thousands,and that procedure is NEVER required to save a mother’s life–just to guarantee a dead baby. When a woman wants an abortion she wants a dead baby.
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Today both Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin linked to “Terror in the Skies, Again?” where the author describes what appears to be a terrorists’ dry run. I’d like to think that Dept. of Homeland Security knew these men and were able to subsequently trace their actions.
My question to you, if this was one of the events triggering the alert, should Tom Ridge have given us this the nitty gritty details? If Tom Ridge had described this flight, could it not have crippled the airlines at the height of the summer travel season? Would you have reconsidered some of your business trips?
How can Tom Ridge emphasize the credibility of the threat without being labeled an alarmist and opportunist? Some would argue in an election year it behooves the current administration to heighten our fears. And, Al Qaeda can still derail our economic recovery by calling on sleeper cells to engage in actions would would heighten our fears. (They would call on the ones they suspected of already being under surveillance. It’s a means of getting us to throw our resources at false trails.)
Of course, this woman is flying out of Detroit which has a large Arab population so maybe 14 men traveling to Los Angeles is not such an anomaly. Being large men, they may have felt cramped in their seats and preferred to stand and socialize.
