Vagueness
Today, in super-vague fear-mongering:
Al Qaeda may be planning to attack rail and air travel in Europe—possibly targeting the busy holiday travel season—according to intelligence findings, the “CBS Evening News” reported on Friday.
Seriously, I could have told you that without looking at a freaking intelligence “finding.” If this is the best they can find, then I want my money back. This is really little short of standard fear-mongering. If you have something definite, then please deal with it, but vague proclamations like this don’t make anyone safer, and only further the goal of the terrorists: fear.
In many ways, the chicken littles that spout this drivel are behaving in a parallel manner to the terrorists. They are instilling and using fear to gain power and control the outcome. That is what terrorism is about. In one case you have people directly causing damage, and thereby creating fear. In the other, you have amplifiers of fear who are doing it out of their own megalomaniacal hubris. It’s a matter of degree, mostly.
This entry was posted at 10:56 am on 11 November 2006 and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
Actually, although I wasn’t clear, I didn’t mean to say that the intelligence community was “fear-mongering,” but instead that others were, including the media, but also whoever leaks all this BS to the media. Nobody seems willing to take on the challenge of explaining the process of decision-making, and the fallibility of intelligence.
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I disagree that the intelligence community is engaging in fear-mongering. They’re basically covering theire butts. Before 9/11 they would have let this sort of vague intelligence report slide from the public’s notice. Now, nowever, they throw it out there becuase they know that if they didn’t “warn” people there’d be a backlash if anything did happen. This is precisely what happened after 9/11 when it was found out that there were reports of something going on. We, the public, have caused this.
The media, on the other hand, are fear-mongering! There is no longer “news reporting” in the USA, just “fear reporting.” And I really can’t blame them—it’s what the buying public want.