Snakes on a Plane

Here it is August 10, 2006 and we are getting the first report that Al Qaeda was planning a 911 celebration involving toothpaste and hair gel. I suppose I should be outraged but the discovery of this latest plot merely depresses me. More long lines at the airport, more privacy restrictions, more infringements on my civil rights. I also suspect we will be uncovering a few more of these plots in the run up to the fall elections. (see this). If I sound cynical please forgive me, I suppose I shouldn’t expect my government to manipulate information to perpetuate its hold on power. Unfortunately, this government has lost all of its credibility on this issue. Nevertheless, if it weren’t for our invasion and occupation of Iraq and the monstrous propaganda machine required to keep the public support (Just who makes all those yellow “support the troops” ribbon magnets, anyway?) we could have been focusing our efforts on the eradication of Al Qaeda as an institutional threat. We will never be able to eradicate hatred, but it takes planning and no small amount of organization to pull off an attack. If we had spent a small percentage of those hundreds of billions of dollars we spent running around in the desert on say, training a generation of Farsi speaking operatives or even propagandizing a generation of Islamic youth, we might be better equipped to handle these matters before they get to the operational stage.