More Surprises... Surprised?

A bit of a roundup of the recent revelations (major and minor) in the British air terror scare and that niggling war between Lebanon and Israel. Culled almost entirely from the great Cursor.org:

The Gadflyer takes a moment to reflect on how the American left might sound had they any balls:

"As we've been saying for five years, describing the campaign against anti-American terror groups as a 'war' is as accurate as calling it an armadillo [...] We'd be winning that argument if we had made it from the the beginning. And winning that argument would have meant winning arguments about torture, illegal domestic surveillance and Bush's powers as Commander-in-Chief. It all started when so many of us bought into the rhetorical war."

The Tattered Coat has more about Bush's rushing and pumping up of the British boom-boom flyboy bust.

The World Socialist Website nails the complicit American media:

"No details of the supposed plot have been provided, and no hard evidence that would justify the arrest of so many people or the imposition of chilling security measures that had wreaked havoc at airports in the US and Britain [...] The lack of facts has not prevented the mainstream media, especially in the US, from uncritically accepting the official claims and embellishing them with commentaries by “terrorist experts” about Al Qaeda connections, home-grown terrorist cells and similar hypotheses, all of which are calculated to create a climate of fear and intimidation."

And of course Counterpuch is on task with Christopher Reed's London Fog:

"We await the release of more facts about the 21 (or 23, or 24) young men and one (or two) young women who intended to blow up in mid-air nine (or 10 or 12) transatlantic airplanes "soon" or in the "next few days" or just "imminently". The two-score young Muslim Brits allegedly were preparing liquid explosives disguised as soft drinks, but actually nitroglycerin (or nitormethane, or triacetone triperoxide). However, one of these was so unstable it was likely to fail (as it did in another plot) or smelled so pungent a patrol dog would sniff it at half a mile, or was "almost impossible" to mix on an airplane."

Brasscheck gives us a video collection of the growing series of bogus terror plots as told to us by our government and inflated by our their media.

Seymour Hersh digs up some serious dirt on America's involvement in Israel's "response" to Hezbolla's kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. As it happens, our fearless leaders were intimately involved in the planning and execution of the murder of the thousand-some innocent men, women and children. I guess we had to share what we learned in Iraq with somebody, eh?

"President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli
Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American premptiveive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground."

Hersh is interviewed on the article by Democracy Now's Amy Goodman and by CNN's Wolf Blitzer (scroll to the end of the segment). And the White House swiftly, stiffly responds.