They didn't have tickets, they didn't have bombs, and some didn't even have passports -- but the threat was imminent. Yeah, sure.
I wasn't surprised to see the New York Times banging the terror drums again today. It seems to have become a specialty of the house. My attention was particularly drawn to piece in today's NYT by Eric Pfanner of the Iternational Herald Tribune, which bears this headline: Europe Seeks to Unify Airport Security Rules.
I noticed that headline immediately, because I have good reason to believe it may be misleading...
Nowhere in the article -- or anywhere else that I know of -- is there any indication that "Europe" "seeks" to unify airport security rules. Instead, the article describes what regular readers of The BRAD BLOG -- or of my own nearly frozen blog -- have come to expect: that Britain, represented here by Home Secretary John Reid, is trying to force the rest of Europe to follow it down the garden path that starts with phony terror and leads to totalitarianism.
Based on what we've seen so far, we have no reason to believe John Reid and every reason to be suspicious.
But that doesn't stop Reid from providing the usual scary quotes:
“It’s very important that the measures that are taken in one country are reflected in other countries because we want equal security for all our countries,” Reid said at a news conference after the meeting. “What is clear to all of us is that we face a persistent and very real threat across Europe,” he said.But his logic is faulty and his propaganda is showing. There is no good reason why measures that are taken in one country should be reflected in other countries, especially if they are imposed arbitrarily and most especially if they don't prove effective.
The new security measures put in place in Britain last week, while inconveniencing tens -- maybe hundreds -- of thousands of people and causing the cancellation of more than a thousand scheduled flights, were not even sufficient to keep a 12-year-old boy from boarding an international flight without a ticket or a passport!
Thank God he didn't have any contact lens cleaner with him!
In other words, the new "security measures" could be described as "laughable" if they weren't so oppressive.
We've had all kinds of warnings, and unsubstantiated claims of anti-terror success, we even get all sorts of blather about "ongoing investigations" and "foreign connections", but we still haven't seen any actual evidence that would lead us to believe that our governments are telling us the truth about the "terror" threat.
While we wait for such proof to materialize, it is by no means clear whether or not we face a "persistent and very real threat" ... unless we can count the persistent and very real threat that our so-called democratic governments may be setting up their own false-flag terror operations (such as this one), and rapidly turning non-democratic.
Oh wait, that's not a threat -- that's reality!
Despite the rather obvious facts -- or maybe because of them -- I've been seeing an explosion of editorials from all over the world, clamoring for less freedom in the name of more "security", but none so ludicrous as this piece from Japan, which accepts the reports from the British security forces at face value -- without even the slightest hint of a question -- and contains the following very specious claim:
[I]t would be foolish to even imagine of complaining about the new security checks that are being rushed into place at airports everywhere.So much for fair and reasoned analysis. So much for open debate. So much for so-called journalistic standards.
I could rage about that Japanese piece all day. But I want to get back to the piece in NYT for a moment. In my opinion, the most important sentence in the whole sorry tale comes at the very end, after most readers have already made up their minds to give up some of their rights in turn for some so-called "security".
None of the suspects have been formally charged.So ... we are so sure of the "imminent threat" that we have to take away basic freedoms from all sorts of innocent people, not only in Britain and the USA but throughout all of Europe; but we don't even have enough on the so-called "terrorist suspects" to charge any of them with a crime!
And it would be foolish to even imagine complaining about this?
Well, ok, then. I won't. How about you?
We wouldn't want to do anything foolish, would we?
UPDATE: The NYT article which I quoted in this item has been changed significantly since I first read it. Passages which I quoted here no longer appear in the text. Jason noticed the difference and was kind enough to point it out. My response to his comment is here; the previous version of the article is mirrored here.
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third in a series