Monday, August 05, 2013

NSA: Our Hero in a White Hat


Big news, breaking news. The NSA has intercepted or overheard Al-Qaeda terrorists “chattering” about an imminent major strike on American or European targets. High alert is ordered, and as many as nineteen embassies or American outposts in the Mideast or North Africa are shut down as a precaution. Among other claims, the major news media says the threats are specific enough for caution, yet still somewhat vague and nebulous. Hmmm, that’s crack reporting – specific yet vague. 

A new, younger generation of Al-Qaeda terrorists are said to be even more diabolical and fanatical than their forebears, going so far as to surgically implant explosives in the bodies of suicide bombers.

(This new generation may have a chip on its shoulder because the U.S. has killed or murdered so many of its fathers, uncles, brothers, cousins, mothers, sisters, and so on. You kill us, we kill you, forever and ever, amen.)

Yemen is the epicenter of this Al-Qaeda upsurge. The U.S. has a long history of intervention in Yemen, with clandestine boots on the ground, CIA agents skulking around the capitol, and drones soaring through the sky. We’ve killed so-called militants in Yemen, as well as a fair number of innocents, plus one very well known American named Anwar al-Awlaki and his teenage son. Boom, dead: father and son. The Americans went to great lengths to make it appear as if the kid was a budding terrorist, though as Jeremy Scahill reported in his recent book, Dirty Wars, the younger al-Awlaki wasn’t a terrorist at all – he was just a teenaged boy who wanted to spend time with his father.

Is it my growing paranoia or is the timing of this heightened security threat unbearably convenient? The political class and the public have responded to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures with anger directed against the Obama Administration and the national security state.

Suddenly, people are talking about the NSA’s domestic spying program, the agency’s insatiable appetite for trivial information, and how government officials have been forced to admit – grudgingly, of course -- that they have been lying to the American people. The U.S. government is pissed off, and making threats against countries from China to Bolivia, and the spying program is under intense scrutiny. The NSA is in dire need of some positive press – and what do you know -- just like that the NSA has used its awesome technological powers to foil a devious plot by the evil terrorists.

You don’t think, nah, no way, that the heightened alert is a pile of steaming horseshit cooked up by our best and brightest in the corridors of power…our government wouldn’t lie to us, would it? They wouldn’t use their powers to concoct some phony-baloney terrorist threat and make the NSA look like a cowboy in a white hat, riding in to protect us from the bad guys, would they? Our honorable government wouldn’t exaggerate the threat from a ragtag force that the Obama Administration has repeatedly told us has been decimated by JSOC raids, assassinations, and “surgical” drone strikes, right? 

Right?

What’s that fishy smell hanging over Washington D.C?


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