100% of Your Weekly Dose of Terrorism Panic

See also Barry Crimmins recent post regarding mainstream framing -
< “>http://www.barrycrimmins.com/index.php?page=news&family=&category=&display=8985>

Accused, tried, convicted, and categorized all in the space of a single cover, with a warning of more to come. Tidy. And, maybe, aided and abetted by just a touch of unlawful command influence? Will Joe Lieberman have him declared an illegal enemy combatant with all that implies? Our entire frame of discourse (nicely illustrated by the Time cover) is too narrow, and too constricted to serve us. That red border defines a space that is more keyhole than window.

and Mark Benjamin’s comprehensive take on
‘The medias silly Fort Hood coverage’
The cover of Time magazine depicts another befuddling sideshow to the Fort Hood story..
..The passionate determination to hang the “terrorist” label on Hasan, or rail against “political correctness” in the military, are just more symptoms of media stars more excited about hot-headed debate than covering the real story. And the real story may be sadly familiar: It looks like Army medicine blew it, once again
http://www.salon.com/news/fort_hood_shooting/index.html?story=/news/feature/2009/11/12/hasan_coverage

Oh. Terrorism. A new Bad Word; especially in the light of the Obama Administration’s being in charge and all. No, an instance of domestic Terrorism! isn’t allowed, is it? Because that would point to Obama’s (GASP!) failure.
Can’t allow those sorts of things on Teh O!ne’s watch, now can we?
TERRORIST: QUICK! REDEFINE THE WORD!!!11!!ELEVENTY!

So…Typepad is broken all of a sudden? WTF?

Three shooters, no, two shooters. Wait, lets blame the lone nut muslim. Just a thought. Or fragging?
Otherwise, my psychiatrist friend who interviewed for a job in the military said that a military psychiatrists first obligation is not the patient’s well being. Instead, it is to get that soldier back on the battlefield. Can you see how there might be a conflict there?

serr8d’s weird posts aside, I think we might be over-reacting. Was Timothy McVeigh a terrorist? A domestic terrorist? The Columbine kids? If so, this guy is too. It comes down to definitions. Is it just mass violence driven by some under-lying dissatisfaction? OTOH if terrorism means using violence to instill fear to achieve a political end, I’m not sure any of these cases count. What we certainly need to resist is a definition a terrorism that only includes violence and Islam. That seems to be what the Right wants to do. And they’re doing it to achieve political ends!

‘Global War On Terror’
John A. Nagl, the former Army officer who helped write the military’s latest counterinsurgency field manual, said the phrase “was enormously unfortunate because I think it pulled together disparate organizations and insurgencies.”
“Our strategy should be to divide and conquer rather than make of enemies more than they are,” said Nagl, now president of the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy think tank in Washington.
“We are facing a number of different insurgencies around the globe — some have local causes, some of them are transnational. Viewing them all through one lens distorts the picture and magnifies the enemy.”
Makes sense to me, eliminating GWOT also questions the label, Terroist which has become a common jerk reaction or a reaction of Jerks from the day it was coined by GWB.

Timothy McVeigh – yes, because he intended to terrorize a population in order to effect a change in political policy. The Columbine kids – no, their actions were a burst of psychotic rage. They were not attempting to create political change.
Every murder is not an act of terrorism. It goes to the motive behind the act. McVeigh came out of a group of political (whacko) discontents who wanted to force the US to bend to their will, while the kids at Columbine were mentally ill. In that vein, the attacks by extremist animal-rights activists against university researchers are certainly terrorist acts, while the assault on Ronald Reagan was not.

the eyes are the window to the soul, so i guess they didn’t want that showing thru.
and everything michael said.

There’s more to the Columbine story than we’ve been told. Harris and Klebold didn’t just go off; they meticulously planned the attack and intended it to be much bigger than it was.
Five years after the incident, Dave Cullen, writing in Slate, suggests:
Columbine was intended not primarily as a shooting at all, but as a bombing on a massive scale. If they hadn’t been so bad at wiring the timers, the propane bombs they set in the cafeteria would have wiped out 600 people. After those bombs went off, they planned to gun down fleeing survivors. An explosive third act would follow, when their cars, packed with still more bombs, would rip through still more crowds, presumably of survivors, rescue workers, and reporters . . .
I don’t know the current state of Columbine massacre theory, but mental illness is no longer high up on the list. Were these guys terrorists? Perhaps a Bag reader who’s up on this will check in.

Terrorism (noun): the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.
What were the political aims of the Columbine shooters? They had none. They weren’t political, they were psychotic. They wanted to kill a lot of people and go out in a blaze of ‘glory.’
Mass murder is mass murder. It might or might not also be terrorism – but to my knowledge, no one has ever asserted that those kids were politically motivated.

Waaaaay too thoughtful an analysis, Bill.

“Politics is a process by which groups of people make decisions”. Ref [

‘If war is terrorism, then the US is a terrorist state,
> Correct, it’s the best keep secret by those who choose to be wilfully uninformed or for other reasons. In the old days it was difficult to get info. It took tough digging and days of hard work to acquires knowledge which can be had in hours using the Internet.
My 1950 Zenith Short Wave Radio was a marvelous source of information. I recall quality coverage of world events from the Dutch, the Australians, Canadian Foreign service and others. Both American and Soviet Programs mostly offered a steady diet of comical relief.
I received I.F Stones Weekly, how Izzy got his breaking stories amazes me to this day. http://www.ifstone.org/
To end this ramble I’m thinking Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, only 3 million slaughtered – Operation Rolling Thunder dropping more Bombs than in WW II in Europe.
Agent orange anyone? Napalm has unique qualities ! Cluster bombs are groovy and great for removing body parts for years to come. Depleted Uranium coated munitions dust attacks friend and foe equally.
In London, The Odds Makers were giving 450 to 1 for the good guys to win in Iraqi
Tom Engelhardt @http://tomdispatch.com/ takes us to the skies with the latest goodies for the bad guys:
‘Drone Race to a Known Future’
Why Military Dreams Fail — and Why It Doesn’t Matter.

It appears that this week was full of news and images of “terrorists” with Muslim names:
James MUHAMMAD, the DC region, sniper is executed by lethal injection
Khalid Shaikh MOHAMMED, the accused 9/11 mastermind faces civilian trial
Nidal Malik HASAN is charged with 13 counts of murder. His name is also a variation of the US President’s middle name and George W Bush’s archenemy’s last name.

More to come? More of what exactly? More military men going off the deep end and turning the gun on themselves and others (not that there’s anything new there)?
Or, more scary, scary Muslims going off the deep end and attacking us here, there, and everywhere?
Methinks TIME is going for the second, to leave people with that impression. However most Muslims living in the States have not proven themselves very likely to go all “Allah Akbar” on us and commit mass slaughter in the name of the Ummah. It’s already been eight years since 2001, and it just hasn’t happened.
If they are all ticking bombs, what are they waiting for?

We trained and promoted him
James Muhammad enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard in 1978 and, after seven years of service, volunteered for active duty in 1985. In 1987 he joined the Nation of Islam. While in the Army, Muhammad was trained as a mechanic, truck driver and specialist metalworker. He qualified with the Army’s standard infantry rifle the M16, earning the ***Expert Rifleman’s Badge*** This rating is the Army’s highest of three levels of marksmanship for a basic soldier. He was discharged from military service following the Gulf War, as a sergeant, in 1994. – wiki
Did he see the Iraq’s road of death while sojourning there.
I’m having trouble getting http://www.youtube.com/watchv=3NCLfhmWvJ8 so please google ‘Iraq’s road of death’ > 2 min 23 sec- 22 August 2008 to get video clip
When Bush II got his war on, http://www.youtube.com/watchv=WN6z5xr7EiI
Six months later James Muhammad declared war as well..

Joe Lieberman as the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security has done his level best to link Major Hasan’s crimes to terrorism. I am wondering if Senator/Rabi Joe Lieberman is qualified to occupy that seat continuing to misinform the American people and milk their emotions?
The following article looks into these kinds of psy-op deceptions played on the American minds.
“Was Homeland Security Created to Protect Those Who Deceived the US?”
http://www.middle-east-online.com/ENGLISH/?id=35702

The weakest evidence for the terrorism argument is who he shot. Although Hasan had a relatively high rank and a very high security clearance, his victims were random. If he was consciously trying to inflict damage, he could have used his rank to gain access to a secure area and shot a general or two.
More likely, he was just a stressed out soldier who snapped. He worked with soldiers with post-traumatic stress and probably listened to some really horrific stuff. Although he was hearing it second-hand, it might have been overwhelmed. Also, many of the vets coming back say that while they were in Iraq, anti-Arab and anti-Iraqi racist speech was very common. Certainly he heard about that, too. If it didn’t politicize him, it added to his depression.