Sunday, May 20, 2012

Police organized terror plots

A couple of guys who used to be in the occupy fort lauderdale camp have been charged with attempting to attack a nato summit with molotov cocktails.  I can't help but note that the vast majority of these types of cases are virtually all set up by the government, usually the FBI.  And by set up, I mean the design it, provide the supplies, organize it, then find some poor sap to bite.  And since it's a pretty big country, there is always going to be somebody that does.

The Liberty City 7 case, which was a plot to be supposedly carried out, along with others you can read about here.

Ultimately, what I think is happening is that the law enforcement agencies have tremendous power.  Power of course is measured in economic terms by money.  If you have a business with massive sums of money flow or assets you have more power than the ones that do not.  And if you are an agency of the state then the ones with the largest flow have the most power.  Obviously, it matters how narrowly the money is distributed (i.e. 10 billion dollars distributed to a small agency compared to 100 billion dollars distributed to the entire society) but generally, money is a good metric to use to measure these things. 

The mechanics that differentiate a government agency from a business exist, but the underlying principles at the consumer psychology level are about the same.  And what these agencies are doing is legitimizing their existence by providing periodic propaganda examples for why they need to exist.  All large institutions require large amounts of money.  Large businesses and large state agencies.  And they end up inevitably using that money on employing people to occupy social roles of some form or another.  So if you are running a multi-billion dollar security budget, and you have idle hands, and you need to find things for people to do, then new social roles will be found.

And these social roles are basically built around setting up terror plots, then finding people to carry them out.  It's a public relations exercise that it can disseminate to the population at large in order to justify the continued power and ultimately the reason for the agency to exist in its current form.

They don't need to invent these plots per se, but they need to get results to demonstrate the necessity of their budgets. But it's fairly impossible for the agencies to disrupt real and actual threats because those, inevitably will remain secret. Anybody reading this could make a Molotov cocktail right now (gas+oil+bottle=molotov cocktail), and throw it at the next car they see--and there wouldn't be a damn thing that anybody can do about it except deal with it after the fact. So other than the leakiest of terror plots, which seem to be limited in number, there seems to be pressure on the agencies to mirror whatever the national propaganda imperatives are, and create these plots, and then recruit people to carry them out. The cold hard fact of the matter is that any REAL terror plot, is almost always going to be impossible to stop ahead of time, and only can be solved in traditional criminal investigations after the fact. 

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