On Saturday, a couple of guys drove a Jeep Cherokee into Glasglow airport’s main terminal hoping to inflict mass casualties on Britain in retaliation for helping Uncle Sam occupy Iraq. Immediately, the corporate media sprang into action, filling the airwaves with terror alerts, talk of murderous terrorist masterminds, and commentary from self-proclaimed terror “experts”, none of whom could build a car bomb even with instructions.
The hysteria comes despite the fact that the only people they managed to injure were themselves. The hysteria comes despite the fact that these guys only had a couple cans of gas and a box of nails in the back of the Cherokee, which, even if it had exploded, would have just set the car on fire and not even come close to damaging the terminal much less killing even a dozen people.
A day before the “attack,” the British police defused a bomb consisting of a propane tank and 33 gallons of gas, which they claim could have caused “significant loss of life.” The gas tank of a Cadillac Escalade has a capacity of 26 gallons and the propane tank in the car couldn’t have been much bigger than the one people use at their family barbeques, so you get an idea of what kind of monstrous Weapon of Mass Destruction this thing was. The only significant loss of life would have been the millions of innocent bacteria that would have perished in the heat of the explosion.
Already the pundits and politicos are saying these “terrorists” are “linked” to Al-Qaeda. Apparently AQ does it all — from mass murder at symbols of economic and political power (WTC and the Pentagon) to amateur burn-only-yourself crash-and-burns. One thing that comes to mind is the terrorist “graduate ceremony” footage that ABC aired a couple weeks ago, which showed English speakers vowing to attack Britain, the possibility of which US counter-terrorism officials dismissed as “a bit of a stretch.” Sometimes it’s hard to tell which group of terrorist idiots is worse, the ones armed with AK-47s and cheap video cameras or the ones running “our” government.
Of course I’m glad no one was hurt (except the idiot driving the car), but Britain is lucky these guys were not the fanatical masterminds that the media is making them out to be. Both Britain and the US have been very lucky thus far that the people angry enough to take up bomb-making in response to the deaths of 650,000 Iraqis and thousands of Afghans haven’t come to the homeland to wreak havoc. Apparently, most of them just want to kick the occupiers out rather than launch (counter-productive) strikes on innocent civilians on this side of the ocean.
What a surprise!
I say lucky because a handful of angry people building bombs and launching attacks can’t be stopped by warrantless wiretapping, e-mail snooping, racist profiling, torturing detainees, putting video cameras on every street corner, or forcibly occupying other countries. The only reason the recent plot against Fort Dix was foiled was because the would-be terrorists brought a jihad propaganda tape into Circuit City (so much for “Jihad vs. McWorld”) to get it transferred to DVD and the clerk thought that was a little strange. The only reason the 1993 WTC bombers were caught was because one of them was stupid enough to go back to the car rental company and demand his $400 deposit back for the truck he had blown up.
The corporate media says we should be scared. I agree, but not because I’m dumb enough to think that more and more people are willing to die because they “hate our freedom.” I’m scared because the only thing separating us from another 9/11 is the stupidity of the terrorists who increase in number with every day US forces stay in Iraq and Afghanistan.