The Year of the Thwarted

Break out the champagne! Mary Louise Kelly declares that "You could call 2006 the year of the thwarted attack." She headlines this Bush commercial with the alleged Heathrow Plot of August 2006 and wraps it up by noting, "Here in the US security officials were also busy trumpeting foiled attacks. In June the FBI announced the arrest in Miami of seven homegrown terrorists..."

We then are subjected to three "experts" on terrorism:

• John Brennan, a CIA veteran and former head of the National Counterterrorism Center. NPR doesn't even realize the sick irony of having a loyal CIA veteran on to talk about counterterrorism.
  
• Ohio State Professor John Mueller (seems like the most thoughtful and least ideological)
• Bruce Hoffman (RAND hack and regular guest/apologist on NPR)

About the only interesting fellow among these three is Mueller, who argues that the terror threat is overblown. Notable is that none of the guests talks about the crass and rather Orwellian use of threat alerts and fear-mongering by the US government to justify attacks on civil liberties (eg. the dictatorial Military Commissions Act) and continued funding of its bloated war industry. There is also no attention given to the likelihood that US-Bush policy has created a new generation of sophisticated and battle-trained terrorists who will be a around for many years to come. And finally, given that the report opened with Kelly "trumpeting" the thwarted Heathrow and Miami attacks, it is significant that the two plots are not held up to any scrutiny, even though the Heathrow allegations were problematic in many ways and the Miami plot was a farcical construct of the FBI and Gonzales.