How to organise a major terrorist scare

[PatrickHenry]

The Big Dummy’s guide to security booga-booga

How easy is it to organise a major terrorist scare like the one that’s currently gridlocking the world’s airports? Dead easy. If you follow a few simple points you can panic the populace and stampede the media with virtually no risk of getting caught. All it takes is a little confidence. Here’s a simple “how-to” for aspiring top-level spooks: 1. The politicians don’t want to know Have confidence that the government really doesn’t want to know what it is you’re getting up to, as long as the effect benefits them. By their very nature, secret police intelligence and espionage organizations operate in secret and often do, “in the national interest”, illegal things or stuff which ordinary folk would regard as grossly unethical – things that would embarrass the government if they were to be exposed. If anything goes wrong the politicians want to be able to “plausibly deny” they were involved. This relationship hands enormous, uncontrolled, power to your small, ultra-secretive, self-governing elite clustered at the top of the nation’s security “service”. Your colleagues are invariably drawn from the upper reaches of the political and economic elite and of course you know better than anybody what’s in “the national interest” and you have a God-given right to rule. Breaking ranks and talking isn’t in your colleagues’ class nature. <snip> 8. Don’t worry about proving links to real terror groups Once upon a time, not so long ago, it was felt necessary to show that your local “terrorist cell” was recruited by, and in communication with, al-Qaeda, or some group with actual form some time in the not-too-distant past. This requirement brought its own problems, since evidence of the links often failed to convince, or, worse still, unearthed shady figures with a track record of collaboration with the CIA or M16 or Mossad. It’s still a good idea to hint at such links but it isn’t de rigueur because the problem disappeared with the happy invention of the “spontaneously-forming, self-activating” (SFSA) terror cell theory in the aftermath of the 7/7 London bombings. According to the SFSA theory, terrorists don’t have to be recruited or trained. Wherever any three integrated, happy, and successful young Muslim men get together to discuss politics or religion or even just to play cricket, they spontaneously decide to set up a do-it-yourself terror cell. They scour the internet for recipes for powerful but highly unstable explosives made from sports drinks, peroxide, hair gel, acetone and baby formula. Without outside direction they select targets and decide the day. All you need to “prove” conspiracy was that they met, discussed politics and had in their possession common household chemicals, fizzy drinks and a mobile phone. It doesn’t matter if their conversations show nothing explicit. Just say they were talking in code. If you can show at least one of them has travelled overseas, that’s a plus. If not, assert that they “investigated” booking airline tickets or showed an interest in travelling overseas. The SFSA theory not only relieves you of having to prove connections to international terror groups, there’s a bonus: it also increases public fear. Any group of young Muslims kicking a ball around in the park is actually planning to blow up trains. Or airliners. Anything you do to these people is likely to be “overlooked”, if not vocally supported by patriotic simpletons. 9. It doesn’t really matter if a court finds them innocent Your victims won’t get their day in court for months, maybe years, and if you’ve organised things well, you’ll be operating under laws that ensure that the public and your tame media are prevented from reporting key details or even excluded from court altogether. By the time your victims get to court, the scare you used them to create will have done its job. Even if your victims are found innocent, that fact will get little press attention from a media who are embarrassed by their role in such an obvious scam, and anyway, the accused terrorists’ acquittal will be lost in the next big scare. Good luck, and have fun.

[Osborn F Enready]

LOL

Do you watch Steven Colbert Patrick?

[PatrickHenry]

I do. I am not religious about it, but I do catch it on the DVR sometimes.

BTW here's the reference to the original post...pretty funny but sad.
How to organise a major terrorist scare