2006-09-15 Ask the pilot

2006-09-15 Patrick Smith Salon \airport security\US Transportation Security Administration\liquid explosives\fearmongery http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2006/09/15/askthepilot201/ Ask the pilot Ask the pilot  How would you feel, and how would all of the recent madness affecting air travel -- the long lines at airports, the banning of liquids and gels, and the thickening mood of fear -- look if you were told that allegations surrounding the London liquid-bomb conspiracy were in fact substantially exaggerated? Consider yourself told. In an Aug. 28th article in the New York Times, senior British officials admitted that public statements made following the arrest of suspects plotting to destroy airliners using liquid explosives were overcooked, inaccurate and "unfortunate." Revelations in the nearly 3,000-word story are startlingly out of sync with the doomsday rhetoric we promptly heard, and continue to hear, from the media and government. We learn the conspirators had been known to law enforcement officials for at least a year, and were under round-the-clock surveillance for quite some time. The plot's leaders were still in the process of recruiting and radicalizing would-be bombers. They lacked passports and airline tickets and, most critical of all, they had been thus far unsuccessful in producing liquid explosives. "Questions about the immediacy and difficulty of the suspected bombing plot cast doubt on the accuracy of some of the public statements made at the time," the article concludes. That's a convoluted way of saying the plotters were likely months from pulling off the massive, synchronized attack we've been told was only days away. "The reactions of Britain and the United States," the story continues, "... were driven less by information about a specific, imminent attack than fear that other, unknown terrorists might strike." As for the scope of the attack, British investigators described the widely parroted report that up to 10 U.S. airliners had been targeted as "speculative" and "exaggerated." Why then did U.S. and British government spokespeople, up to and including our respective heads of state, trumpet an evidently incipient scheme as having brought us to the very brink of catastrophe? Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff spoke of the conspirators having been "really quite close to the execution stage." "There may have been too much hyperventilating going on," offered Michael Sheehan, former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism for the New York Police Department, speaking in the Times.

Who, exactly, is responsible for terrorizing the American public over the past month? Was it the failed London cabal, or the U.S. government, with an eye toward elections?   