Suspicions

I’ll admit it: I’m suspicious of pretty much everything the Bushies do. These days, I doubt their sincerity and question their competence along with their motives. They’ve given me plenty of reason to be suspicious.

So it should come as no surprise that when the news of the alleged plot at New York’s JFK airport broke, I had a sceptical eyebrow raised. Didn’t it all seem just a little too good to be true, from the Bushies’ perspective?

In announcing the foiled alleged plot, the nearly hysterical US Attorney painted a picture of a plot with shadowy foreigners and a naturalised American citizen committing a spectacular mass-murder terrorist attack affecting thousands of people. It also revealed a new, more local and previously unknown threat.

How much of it is real?

Experts have already pointed out that the scale of the threat wasn’t as big as the US government made it sound, and that’s something us ordinary people could work out, too: Set off a bomb along a pipeline and the whole thing doesn’t blow up, just the part where the bomb was. Heck, we see that on TV and in the movies all the time.

This new terrorist group has never shown any interest in anything beyond Trinidad, but now we are to believe they were plotting a huge attack in New York. Early mainstream media reports speculated that the plotters were motivated by anti-American rhetoric coming from Venezuela’s president Hugo Chavez (Trinidad is near Venezuela). Chavez has been outspoken in his criticism of Bush and his administration, but that’s not the same thing as being “anti-American” generally. Moreover, Fidel Castro has been saying anti-American things for nearly fifty years why would the folks in Trinidad suddenly get interested in listening to a foreign head of state’s “anti-American” rhetoric, and take it as motivation for attacking innocent Americans?

As it happens, Chavez is probably the foreigner the Bushies hate more than any other except, maybe, for the president of Iran. They have a clear interest in trying to paint him as a direct threat to the US. The fact that the alleged plot involved a naturalised US citizen also bolsters their campaign against immigrants and for the national identity card they want to introduce by making immigrants look like a threat.

Most of their information came from an informant who was a convicted drug dealer looking to avoid prison. There have been countless times in which such informants have been found to be unreliable or worse.

And isn’t it all a little convenient coming, as it does, amid Bush’s plummeting approval ratings, an ongoing unpopular war, an attorney general who may yet be found to have broken the law, the continuing disaster of Hurricane Katrina, and numerous other failings? This reminds me so much of the Bushies’ constant references to “9/11” in an attempt to squash opposition or win an election or both.

A few years ago, say in the weeks after September 11, it’s unlikely I would’ve had such doubts. But because of this administration’s behaviour, I do have doubts, and I wish the mainstream media weren’t quite so quick to swallow the story without question. But who knows? Maybe the MSM will investigate and find that this is all for real. Until someone independent looks into it, though, it all sounds like more “Bushit” to me.