Tuesday, August 15, 2006

The Politics of Terror.

This is the first "guest" blog, written by my uncle Terry. The text comes from an email I just received from him and a story on MSNBC about Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" yesterday.

"A few press outlets are finally reporting the fact that the U.S. Government essentially browbeat the Brits into making the recent terror arrests before they wanted to do so, with the result that terror arrests wiped Connecticut voters' ouster of Lieberman off the front pages.

Last night, Keith Olbermann updated a previous report and ran down ten instances in which bad news about the Administration, Iraq, military atrocities, etc. were followed within a day or so by announcements of imminent terror attacks and (usually) a hike in "terror alert" status to "orange." I encourage you to have a look - it begins about halfway down the page:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14360348/

In his conclusion, Olbermann acknowledged the danger of "post hoc ergo proctor hoc" reasoning:

"In all fairness, as we observed last October and we observe again tonight, we could possibly construct a similar timeline of terror events and warnings and their relationship to the opening of new chain stores around the country. But if merely a reasonable case could be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, especially the one last week in which terror policy was again injected directly into a political race, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country, questions about what is prudence and what is fear-mongering."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Reporting about this "coincidence" continues to reverberate throughout the press from the Seattle Times to the internet Altermedia [http://us.altermedia.info/]which calls itself World Wide News for People of European Descent. This appears to be yet another in a long line of instances when the Brits have been the most consistent and powerful enablers of the Bush neo-con doctrine. I believe without Tony Blair GW would be even more apparent as the bumbling puppet of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.... It will be interesting to see on January 2, 2008 if he is permanently retired to Crawford by the neo-cons [or maybe he'll never return to his phoney ranch to cut brush once that image no longer carries political weight)or if he collects huge fees for speaking from the corporate powerbase that has supported him financially and which he in turn has awarded unprecedented power and influence.

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