Terror level is now severe instead of critical.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

Which means: Severe - 'an attack is highly likely'

....and begs the question, if the home office can predict them like weather forecasts, maybe they should ring the police. Those bloody civil servants, eh!

I was remarking to cool_penguin_0 on MSN how the scale is a bit like fast food portions- not too many small sizes but plenty of big ones:

Critical - an attack is expected imminently
Severe - an attack is highly likely
Substantial - an attack is a strong possibility
Moderate - an attack is possible but not likely
Low - an attack is unlikely

..and moderate/low are essentially the same thing, meaning by the stunted laws of probability we are under a constant 'moderate' threat of terrorism. If it was somewhere like Kabul, I'd probably agree with you. But what's the honest dangers? Dodging a few immolating doctors driving around in 4x4's? Once again the news and the home office conspire to terrify us, even when they're trying to send out a message that they're on top of things. Yes I know it's fine, thanks.

[DistantAngel]

I've got a better question regarding the "Terror Threat Level" ... who fucking cares?

I mean, seriously, who gives a shit?  Does knowledge of the level affect your life?  And if not, why bother with the bloody thing?  If it does, then what the hell do you do about it?  What DO you DO when you hear that the level is at "critical"?  Stay indoors?  Avoid all forms of public transport?  Report any brown people you see to the authorities?  And surely if we alter our behaviour based on the threat level, haven't the "terrorists" achieved their goal of scaring us into changing our way of life?

The threat level is totally fucking meaningless in every way possible ... it's only purpose is for the authorities and the government to put the shits up the population any time they want ... any time it's convenient for them to have everyone panicking about suicide bombers; any time when we're getting a little bit too comfortable and need to be reminded as to why we're pissing away our rights and our liberties; any time those in charge are in the shit and they want a suitable distraction to stop us from asking questions.

"The terror threat level is now back to severe" ... great, whoopie-doo, I'm off for cigarette and a pastie ...

[Dusty Gozongas]

I've got a better question regarding the "Terror Threat Level" ... who fucking cares?

I mean, seriously, who gives a shit?  Does knowledge of the level affect your life?  And if not, why bother with the bloody thing?  If it does, then what the hell do you do about it?  What DO you DO when you hear that the level is at "critical"?  Stay indoors?  Avoid all forms of public transport?  Report any brown people you see to the authorities?  And surely if we alter our behaviour based on the threat level, haven't the "terrorists" achieved their goal of scaring us into changing our way of life?

The threat level is totally fucking meaningless in every way possible ... it's only purpose is for the authorities and the government to put the shits up the population any time they want ... any time it's convenient for them to have everyone panicking about suicide bombers; any time when we're getting a little bit too comfortable and need to be reminded as to why we're pissing away our rights and our liberties; any time those in charge are in the shit and they want a suitable distraction to stop us from asking questions.

"The terror threat level is now back to severe" ... great, whoopie-doo, I'm off for cigarette and a pastie ...

Nicely said and worth re-quoting.

Could a mod please cross-post this one into the following thread:
http://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=14804.0

A sense of perspective is long overdue there.

[Neville Chamberlain]

You'll be laughing on the other side of your face when terrorists start using pasties as bombs.

[Dusty Gozongas]

Now there's a bridge worth traversing come the time...

[George Oscar Bluth II]

At least ours doesn't have an eye catching, colour coded chart yet.



As you said, attempting to predict the unpredictable is ludicrous and this can only really be of any use to a government who want to try to put the shits up people.

[drberbatov]

yep, flick onto cnn of the often hillarious Fox News channel and the terror levels are constantly 'severe' in the states

[Borboski]

As you said, attempting to predicting the unpredictable is ludicrous and this can only really be of any use to a government who want to try to put the shits up people.

I don't know - I expect every local authority and police force rely upon the "threat level" to contingency plan.  It makes sense - doesn't it?  So the police force can make sure not everyone goes on leave during a critical period, or local politicians can work out whether or not to run two major events, splitting the emergency services rather than one.God, everyone is fucking cynical about everything the government does.

[El Unicornio, mang]

yep, flick onto cnn of the often hillarious Fox News channel and the terror levels are constantly 'severe' in the states

And it works too. People here are too scared to even walk in their car parking lots at night for fucks sake. A girl in my office got hysterical recently because there was a man she didn't recognise walking around the parking lot with an envelope in his hand. "But it could be anthrax!!"

[George Oscar Bluth II]

I don't know - I expect every local authority and police force rely upon the "threat level" to contingency plan.  It makes sense - doesn't it?  So the police force can make sure not everyone goes on leave during a critical period, or local politicians can work out whether or not to run two major events, splitting the emergency services rather than one.God, everyone is fucking cynical about everything the government does.

Why make it public then? What is the difference between Severe and Critical? Specific intelligence and the security services are what stop terrorism, not giving the public a set of indistinguishable and therefore meaningless alert states.

[Still Not George]

They had one before, pretty much; alert bulletins sent out to the emergency services etc.

This whole "public alert" thing is just media-centric scaremongering - it doesn't do anything the bulletins didn't do except scare idiots.

[P K Duck]

I really like the threat level indicator, it's a real hoot, but then again I'm not the minority group chosen to be the target for our propaganda. I expect it acts as a useful curfew for people of a certain look.

I especially like the way they're so deadpan about issuing it. I think it would help their case a bit more if the announcer read the news from under their desk when it bumped up above Moderate.

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

I'm surprised fox don't have it on the ticker, with the headlines and the weather.

[George Oscar Bluth II]

They do have it on the ticker, I think?

[Pinball]

I can't quite decide whether nowadays the US is or .

Either way, it's a fucking nightmare. It would be an incredible joke were it not for how it impacts us, what with the Americans being our overlords and everythang.

[ziggy starbucks]

I've got a better question regarding the "Terror Threat Level" ... who fucking cares?

I mean, seriously, who gives a shit?

they tend to put the terror level up to critical AFTER a terrorist attack has taken place

when a warning system is rather pointless

Its like having a fire alarm that only goes off after you've died of smoke inhalation.

[DistantAngel]

You'll be laughing on the other side of your face when terrorists start using pasties as bombs.

They'd work rather well as grenades, don't you reckon?  The right size to hold in the hand, and like the traditional main course / dessert pasties of tin mine fame, you could have a grenade in one end, and a mobile to call in the coded warning in the other.

I don't know - I expect every local authority and police force rely upon the "threat level" to contingency plan.

You're assuming that there IS a contingency plan?

God, everyone is fucking cynical about everything the government does.

I wonder why that is?  Could it be that, in the last 5 years the raising of the threat level, both here and in the US, has 9 times out of 10 come at politically expedient moments.  Moments when there are definite issues the government would like to draw our attention away from?  Even MSNBC spotted this, and reported on 13 specific incidents where the Bush admin was in the shit and, coincidentally, the threat level got raised, or there were reports of "thwarted" attempts.

There is absolutely NO practical use for the public to know about thwarted attacks, other than to underscore how those wonderfully draconian laws none of us fought to prevent being introduced are keeping us safe, and how people who bang on about liberty and privacy and all that are just a bunch of whinging terrorist-sympathising commie lefties.  There's not even a real need for us to know about imminent attacks, because if the information was specific enough, the authorities could move to thwart it; and if it's not specific enough, what the fuck can we do to avoid it?

As a nation we managed for decades to get on with life and the possibility that any one of us could die at the hands of the IRA - I've grown up with it, but I've never let it once change the way I live because that's what we did; we just got on with it.  We never had threat level warnings, tanks outside Heathrow, or hundreds of new laws being introduced that protect nothing but the government from it's own people.  So why all this now?  It's bullshit, all of it ... you have more chance of being killed by a lightning strike or a peanut allergy than by a terrorist.  I don't see a Peanut Threat Level warning being published, or War on Weather being launched, do you?

They do have it on the ticker, I think?

Yeah, I think they do ... isn't it usually inserted after every third headline or something?  I only know that since its inception it has NEVER dropped below "Elevated", and it never will.  They don't want people to be comfortable, because comfortable people are harder to manipulate.  When someone is scared, you can do anything you want.

[Huzzie]

Everytime there has been a terrorist attack I have noticed that the "terror level" is critical.  It's no wonder they keep fucking up their attacks if they do it when it is most expected! They should wait till it is low.

[Huzzie]

I've got a better question regarding the "Terror Threat Level" ... who fucking cares?

I mean, seriously, who gives a shit?  Does knowledge of the level affect your life?

It did affect my mates brother in law's life. He is American, from New Jersey and after 11/9 he moved into his basement for 2 months.

He was a right prick though so maybe that has something to do with it.

[DistantAngel]

It did affect my mates brother in law's life. He is American, from New Jersey and after 11/9 he moved into his basement for 2 months.

He was a right prick though so maybe that has something to do with it.

I find that both highly amusing, terrifying, and a little bit sad all at the same time.  Every American not equipped with a sufficiently developed sense of perspective assumes in spite of all reason that, if it's going to happen, it's going to happen to THEM.  Like they, or the town of Buttfuck, Idaho, that they're living in is SO important that, well, why *wouldn't* it be in the cross-hairs of Al-Qaeda?!

It might seem heartless, but when 9/11 happened, I actually couldn't feel sympathy for America.  I don't mean I couldn't sympathise with the victims or their families and friends, of course I could, it's a deeply horrible thing when someone you love dies, and it's even more horrible when it happens like that ... I mean that I could not feel sorry for the way I saw people weeping over "what has happened to this country".

I could not, for the life of me, understand such a grossly disproportionate response as the frankly unreal hysteria unfolded before me ... a TV screen flooded with people, breaking down crying for the loss of America's "innocence", it was hard not to want to call up my friends and the US and ask, "what the fuck is wrong with you people?"  Do they really think the entire world loves them?  Were they really so naive as to think that they didn't have an enemy in the world, that no-one could possibly want to attack them?  Yes, what was happening was bad ... really, REALLY bad ... but when I saw people who'd lost absolutely no-one that day, wailing in agony like America was their only daughter and they just got home to find her lying on the floor, anally raped and bleeding, I couldn't muster a thought other than, "get a fucking grip".

Does that make me a horrible person, or am I right to say there was a smidgen of an overreaction by most Americans that day?

[El Unicornio, mang]

The oddest thing is that America is probably the least united, most polarised country in the western world. Everyone is waving their flag but none of those people give a toss about other Americans, or the country as a whole. It's everyone for themselves. It's like when health care is brought up "Why should I pay for other people?". That's the attitude.

No, basically 9/11 was an excuse for Americans to feel like they're part of something because they wear a cap with "9/11 - never forget, FDNY, NYPD" on it and to go and do one  of the few things they think they're good at, "kicking ass". Most people in the US who go on about 9/11 like it was "their loss" would step right over any of the victims if they were lying dying on their doorstep. But because they died "on TV", crashing to the ground in the ultimate symbol of America, by "freedom haters", they're suddenly part of their lives.

Every time I see someone plastering their SUV with stars and stripes, and "We will remember" and BUSH/CHENEY bumper stickers I want to go and slap them. But they'd probably shoot me.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

You just want the terrorists to win.

[P K Duck]

No, basically 9/11 was an excuse for Americans to feel like they're part of something because they wear a cap with "9/11 - never forget, FDNY, NYPD" on it and to go and do one  of the few things they think they're good at, "kicking ass". Most people in the US who go on about 9/11 like it was "their loss" would step right over any of the victims if they were lying dying on their doorstep. But because they died "on TV", crashing to the ground in the ultimate symbol of America, by "freedom haters", they're suddenly part of their lives.

Which neatly expresses the Neo Conservative ethos: social unity through expression of myth.


The sad part is that some people would find this thread significantly offensive to report it to the authorities, completely stripped of context, and with all the obvious humour removed. That's the part of this whole charade that is scary: the breeding of widespread fundamentalist thought in a democracy (well okay, something that resembles a democracy anyway), exactly what we're told the terrorists are trying to achieve.

[sick as a pike]

Do they really think the entire world loves them?  Were they really so naive as to think that they didn't have an enemy in the world, that no-one could possibly want to attack them?

You just reminded me of the Seumas Milne piece in the Guardian on 13.09.2001

They can't see why they are hated.

[Pinball]

Watching whinging Americans is sometimes like watching a serial rapist blaming his upbringing. They are not the victims.

[Pinball]

This is quite good, albeit a tad histrionic:

http://www.shoutwire.com/viewstory/78364/Why_They_Hate_Us

What's more obnoxious than a person who constantly whines about the injustices committed against him while ignoring his own injustices against others?

A country that does the same thing.

We often hear American politicians and commentators reciting a list of "terrorist" acts committed against the "United States." It typically includes the 1982 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1996 bombing of U.S. Air Force housing in Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden in Yemen. Reciting this string of attacks supposedly demonstrates, without further argument, that the United States has been the major victim of violence on the world stage — unprovoked violence perpetrated by "Islamofascists" because we are free. Indeed, it is widely believed that the attacks on September 11, 2001, were in part the result of "our" failure to retaliate for the earlier attacks.

But this is sheer balderdash. The attacks, while often criminally misdirected, were hardly unprovoked.

The last century-plus of U.S. foreign policy has largely been a story of aggression and empire-building. American presidents have intervened and interfered in every region of the world, not in self-defense, but in the name of U.S. "national interest," which in reality means the interest of well-connected corporations and their ambitious political agents who felt appointed to bring order to the world. As a whole, the American people haven't gained by this — in fact, they have paid dearly in money and lives. But not as dearly as those on the receiving end of that policy. For all the pious moralizing about democracy and human rights, American foreign policy has treated foreign populations like garbage, beginning with the brutal repression of the Filipino uprising against American colonial rule from 1899 to 1902. That war and its related hardships killed 250,000 to a million Filipino civilians and 20,000 Filipino rebels.

How many Americans know that?

Since that time American presidents have intervened, directly or by proxy, in countless places, including Cuba, Haiti, Colombia (Panama), Chile, Mexico, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, Iran, Iraq, Guatemala, Lebanon, the Dominican Republic, Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan. On many occasions American administrations have engineered regime changes (sometimes with assassinations) to install leaders friendly to "American interests." Rarely has intervention occurred without the murder of innocent civilians, degrading hardship for survivors, and arms and (taxpayer) money for repressive "leaders." The paradigm is the 1953 intervention in Iran, when the CIA helped drive an elected, secular prime minister from office so the autocratic shah could be restored to power. His brutal U.S.-sponsored repression of the Iranian people finally provoked a religious revolution in 1979, creating an anti-American theocracy that has been a thorn in the side of U.S. presidents ever since.

Coincidence? Of course not. Americans may be ignorant or forgetful; the victims seldom are.

Iran was neither the first nor last case of "blowback," the CIA's term for what happens when a foreign operation explodes in one's own face.

How many Americans have any inkling of the crimes — yes, crimes — their government has committed against foreign peoples in their name over the last century? Most people don't know and don't care — and that's fine with their rulers because when vengeful foreigners assault American civilians (unjustifiably) or military occupiers, U.S. leaders and jingoist supporters can say "America" was the victim of another unprovoked attack. "Why do they hate us?" they will wonder.

Anyone the least bit familiar with history will know the answer. The CIA is about to release hundreds of documents about earlier interventions (and domestic spying), so there's no more excuse for ignorance. Let's stop whining and get curious. As Walt Kelly's Pogo put it, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine. Visit his blog "Free Association" at www.sheldonrichman.com.

[The Boston Crab]

Some absolutely boss tags here, especially the namedropping one!

I pretty much agree with everything here except from Borboski, of course.

[Still Not George]

Watching whinging Americans is sometimes like watching a serial rapist blaming his upbringing. They are not the victims.

I'm trying to figure out if that post is left or right wing and it's giving me a headache. I'll just settle for "fucking stupid".

[Pinball]

Of course, you are entitled to your opinion, even though it is wrong ;-)

[Ronnie the Raincoat]