James K. Galbraith asks some very good questions

worthy of some thought. oh, i know there are terrorists out there. people who mean to bring the united states (and other countries) harm. i also know there are some liars and some immoral and some insane people running this country as well as other countries.

jon stewart had correspondent john oliver on the other day. they were talking about how electing ned lamont would of course open the door for terrorists, osama and the rest of al qaeda to come marching right into this country. it was WICKED hilarous (i checked you tube to see if they had the video, they didn't. at least not yet).

did announcing the arrests of the alleged terrorists in britain right after the primary elections in the united states amount to one big fat coincidence?

Groundhog Day

by JAMES K. GALBRAITH
[posted online on August 16, 2006]
James K. Galbraith flew from Manchester to Boston on August 10, enduring eleven hours without a book.
Let's see... It's August. Bush is in Crawford on a "working vacation." His polls are in the tank. Congress is in revolt. The economy is going soft. The next elections don't look good. Cheney is off in Wyoming, or wherever he goes. It's 2001. No, it's 2006.
In The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx reports that "Hegel writes somewhere" that the great events of history tend to occur twice, first as tragedy and then as farce.
On September 11, nineteen hijackers commandeered four airplanes and succeeded in killing some 3,000 people. On August 10, we are told, British authorities upended a suicide-murder plot aimed at destroying twelve airplanes, killing everyone on board including the bombers, possibly with more fatalities than on 9/11. As a senior British police official put it, "This was intended to be mass murder on an unimaginable scale."
From all official statements so far, we are led to believe that August 10 was a highly developed, far-advanced conspiracy, under surveillance for some time, which could have been put into action within just a few days. And perhaps 8/10 really was the biggest thing since 9/11. But then again, perhaps it wasn't. We don't know yet. And it's not too early to ask the questions on which final judgment must depend.
Well, then. Here is a checklist of some things we should shortly be hearing about. Bombs. Chemicals. Detonators. Labs. A testing ground. Airline tickets. Passports. Witnesses. Suspicious neighbors. Suspicious parents. Suspicious friends. Threats. Confessions. Let me spell this out: By definition, you cannot bomb an aircraft unless you have a bomb. In this case, we are told that there were no bombs; rather, the conspirators planned to bring on board the makings of a bomb: chemicals and a detonator. These would be mixed on board. ..........