For those tracking the recent round of terror plots against the US and Britain, the dire lack of expertise is a familiar pattern. On the August 2006 “liquid bomb plot”, similarly discredited as simply unworkable, former British Army intelligence officer Lt. Col. (ret.) Nigel Wylde pointed out: “Not al-Qaeda for sure. It would not work. Bin Laden is interested in success not deterrence by failure.”

The Propaganda War 

Rather than reassuring the public of these facts and implications, the government did the opposite. The UK terror alert was raised to “critical”, and the citizens were urged to remain “alert” and “vigilant”. “If it moves to critical, you should worry”, a senior Whitehall source told the BBC when asked to explain the alert level system.

Rachel North, a survivor of the July 7th 2005 London bombings, comments:

 “Oh for heaven’s sake. We ‘should worry’. That’s the suggestion is it? The official advice is: to be afraid and stay afraid?  And what pray, does being told ‘to worry’ do to help aid the fight against terrorism? Terrorism being of course designed to worry, nay, terrify and terrorise people, using terror: the state of being afraid? ...What is the ‘critical - attack imminent’ stuff then, if not intimidating, and likely to make people anxious and therefore stop them getting on with their lives? … like most of the new anti-terror intitiatives, all it does is sound scary and ramp up the fear without actually doing anything practical to tackle the situation… We didn't have this during the IRA campaign or during the Blitz, so I don't see why turning the adrenalin dial up to eleven is going to help now. We can all see the news, thank you. We don't need to have our strings pulled like this.” 

So we have established that there is, indeed, a sharp disparity between the reality of these plots as utterly amateur cock-ups by people with no idea whatsoever of how to actually pull off a terrorist attack, and the official propaganda from the state that these attacks could have killed hundreds – which they simply could not have done.

Perhaps it is cynical to recognize that these doomed-to-fail plots coincided with the British government’s new counter-terrorism proposals. Days before these incidents, on 27th June, the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee announced it was planning to hold a short inquiry into the new proposals for extended anti-terror powers, originally set out on 7th June by the Home Secretary.

Ironically, the Home Secretary’s announcement for new anti-terror legislation followed hot on the heels of revelations that a purported spectacular al-Qaeda terrorist plot unearthed in the United States may well have been nothing more than Bush administration propaganda. Such was the accusation from Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown show ‘The Nexus of Politics & Terror’, who further noted that this was consistent with a history of such pronouncements:

“The abstract, hypothetical terror plot at JFK: It sounds ominous until you ask the experts. Blow up part of the jet fuel pipeline and you still stand zero chance of blowing up the airport… We will truth squad the plot and update the ‘Nexus of Politics and Terror,’ the now 13 times officials in this country have revealed so-called terror plots at times that were just coincidentally to their political benefit, no matter how preposterous the actual schemes might have been, including the plot against Fort Dix where pizza delivery men were supposed to kill at will at an Army base full of soldiers with guns.” 

But perhaps most disturbingly, Olbermann references the extraordinary public statement by the newly-elected Chairman of the Republican Party in Arkansas: “All we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on 9/11, and the naysayers will come around very quickly for President Bush.” The full statement, made in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette by Chairman Dennis Milligan, is reported in Raw Story as follows:  

"In his first interview as the chairman of the Arkansas Republican Party, Dennis Milligan told a reporter that America needs to be attacked by terrorists so that people will appreciate the work that President Bush has done to protect the country. ‘At the end of the day, I believe fully the president is doing the right thing, and I think all we need is some attacks on American soil like we had on [Sept. 11, 2001],’ Milligan said to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, ‘and the naysayers will come around very quickly to appreciate not only the commitment for President Bush, but the sacrifice that has been made by men and women to protect this country’.” 

With all due respect: what kind of closet Stalinist thinks that “we need” another terrorist attack “like” 9/11, in order that popular dissent might “come around” in favour of Bush and his policies of domestic and international militarization, mirrored faithfully here in the UK, originally by Blair, and now it seems by his heir Brown?

To those who have researched the development of neo-conservative ideology and geopolitical strategies behind the rise of the Bush administration, this is actually a startlingly familiar sentiment among elements of the American policymaking establishment. Recall the exhortations of Bush’s home-grown think-tank, the Project for a New American Century in its September 2000 report “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”; or three years earlier, the carefully-crafted expansionist geostrategy charted by former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski in his Council on Foreign Relations study, The Grand Chessboard – all looking to a spectacular Pearl Harbour-type event as a useful tool for the control of public opinion at home, and thus the legitimization of military interventionism abroad.

More closet Stalinists to add to the collection? And some of them are now in charge of the most powerful state in the world.

Warnings, Warnings 

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