I really want to stop blogging on the London bomb story and get back to other, less unfunny matters, really, but I can't help myself. Every time I turn on my PC or or the television I'm faced with stuff like this ...
The thoughts of Chairman Tony, as handed down to the Foreign Press Association as reported on Friday:
On the notion that suicide bombers committed the attacks in London last week
Blair said police believe "that we know who the four people carrying the bombs were ... and we believe they are all dead."
"We are as certain as we can be that four people were killed and they were the four people carrying bombs," Blair added.
Hmmmm, shame he and his boys didn’t say anything to counter all that rabid reporting in the media over the last few days.
On the existence of Al Qaeda
Commenting on the possible role of Al Qaeda, Blair said, "Al Qaeda is not an organization. Al Qaeda is a way of working ... but this has the hallmark of that approach."
"Al Qaeda clearly has the ability to provide training ... to provide expertise ... and I think that is what has occurred here," Blair said.
Could someone who buys into all of this crap please jot down in no more the 25 words, and based on their current understanding of what constitutes reality, an explanation of how these statements can be simultaneously true
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Wikipedia's entry on Doublethink can be found here
I heartily recommend reading it
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Maybe I've been a little naughty lately, referring to people who believe this stuff as being idiots. I don't want to alienate people who give their time reading his blog. I want to communicate that there are very real, non paranoid lunatic, reasons to be concerned. Not about some abstract issues that affect people we don't know in far off lands but issues that matter to us here, at home.
There's an understandable human desire to believe that those who rule us are just like us and bound by the same codes that we ordinary people are. I'll let you in on a secret. They're not
4 comments:
Stef just for your ref (and for anyone else that might be interested) The Power Of Nightmares is available for download. Nice of them. Don't you love the net sometimes. [ref'ed from MoFi]
Thanks for the link - I already have the MP3 version but the mpeg is worth having as well.
I doubt if it will get much more airtime after the bombings in London.
The biggest mistake that the film maker, Adam Curtis, and a lot of liberal commentors made was in suggesting that the risk of terrorism had been overstated.
It hasn't. It's very real, as evidenced by all the attacks that have taken place.
The flaw in their thinking was to believe, like those they disagree with, that Al Qaeda is the only player in town. The reasoning went that if Al Qaeda is an exaggerated myth then the risk of terrorist attacks was an exaggerated myth. Wrong. Big time.
There are plenty of other groups out there who stand to benefit greatly from events like the bombings in London last week.
Personally, I haven't the foggiest idea who's responsible for the London bombings but it would be nice to think that our police were investigating with an open mind rather than starting out with a preconceived result and looking for evidence to fit.
A straight quote from the head of the Metropolitan police this week
“What we expect to find at some stage is that there is a clear Al Qaeda link, a clear Al Qaeda approach.”
Knob
When I was a lad the notion of a policeman openly predicting the specific result of an investigation whilst it was ongoing would have been unthinkable. That's how badly f*cked up and politicised this country's institutions have become after eight years of Blair cronyism.
The fact that nobody pulled the bloke up for being such a knob is equally dire.
On Friday, Tony Blair admitted quite openly that Al Qaeda is not an organisation. Aside from a discredited web site claim, there has been no connection made between Al Qaeda, whatever the fuck that's supposed to be at the moment, and the bombings, yet the Head of the Met has already told us what the conclusion of the investigation is going to be.
Fucking disgraceful ...
Oh I don't get that Curtis meant the threat had been overstated but rather that the threat had been painted as having a specific structure and purpose that seemed to be lacking since even before the paint managed to dry ('scuse the strained metaphor).
I'm getting lazier here but have you noticed how over the past few year years when we have been arresting or blowing the upper echelons of Al Q, he is always described as being the second in command and his name always sounds the same each time!
Anyway there is a Q&A style beeb interview with Adam Curtis and he appears to think the risk of terrorism is real. (Of course, now that "we are not afraid" we can no longer call people these toe-rags "terrorists".)
Online interview with the creator of the series, Adam Curtis - 26 April, 2005
"If there is a terrorist attack in the coming months - which there may be - then I think there will be a counter-reaction from within both the political and media elites.
They will seek to say loudly that this proves there is a hidden and terrifying network unlike anything we have faced before.
But I think that there is now a strong enough body of opinion that will challenge this and say that it shows nothing of the kind. "
I'd say the whole premise of the series was that the terror threat was overstated.
He did a very good job of demonstrating that Al Qaeda is a chimera. The implied conclusion was that if Al Qaeda is not this "uniquely powerful hidden organisation waiting to strike our societies" then we only have to worry about the occasional Richard Reid style nutcase.
That's plain wrong
Crudely speaking there are two kinds of 'terrorism' going on in the world
1. Desperate people doing desperate things in occupied regions and war zones. Objective? To make those occupations too costly to continue
2. 911 and "77" style attacks designed to scare the crap out of citizens of western countries. Objectives? Debatable. I have my own opinion, based on the sheer predictability of response. However, the majority of people seem to have accepted a different explanation
I think that there is evidence of planning and supporting networks for the second class of terrorism. Given that Al Qaeda doesn't appear to have that capability, or even exist, and also that the people supposedly behind these attacks don't benefit from them I have to accept the possibility that one or more alternate groups are responsible.
And there I stop. I could draw up a medium sized list including the usual and not so usual suspects but there's no way of knowing.
No way of knowing because our feckin' police force and intelligence services are off chasing preconceived fanatasies, treating evidence received from dictatorships under torture as gospel and all the rest of the bollocks that's been going on.
All those thousands of arrests, including hundreds here in the UK, all those resources squandered and they've come up with fuck all.
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