Selective Moral Apathy

Earlier, I wrote a post entitled href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/06/selective_moral_outrage.php#more">Selective
Moral Outrage, in that post, I discussed the fact
that some site, particularly conservative sites, picked on the New York
Times for reporting on the monitoring of international money transfers.
It wan't just two-bit pundits who got on this bandwagon. href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,201549,00.html">Senator
Bunning openly accused the NYT of treason.
Now, we see a similar situation, but this time,
everyone is curiously silent.



I wonder if this could be evidence that the whole thing is being played
up for propaganda purposes?

The similar situation I was referring to is this:
There was a href="http://www.nypost.com/news/regionalnews/fbi_foils_path_plot_regionalnews_.htm">news
item in the New York Post
on 7 July, 2006, about the apprehension of persons who allegedly were
planning to explode a bomb in a tunnel leading in and out of Manhattan.
In their story, the Post mentioned the following:

Officials said the FBI had been monitoring Internet
chat rooms and cited the arrest of the Lebanese suspect as a
significant break in the investigation.

Incidentally, the Associated Press href="http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--tunnelsplot-optio0707jul07,0,7111448.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork">confirmed
this:

In the latest case, a federal official said FBI
agents monitoring Internet chat rooms used by extremists learned of the
plot in recent months and determined that tunnels were possibly being
targeted after investigators pieced together code words from their
conversations.

As though to make it even more bizarre, the article states this:

"This is an ongoing operation," one source said.

Now, the question is, if it was "treason" for the NYT to write about
the methods used in antiterrorism operations, why is it OK for the NYP
and the Associated Press to give explicit details about a different
method? Especially, why is it OK for "a federal official" to reveal the
information? Even more especially, why is it OK for an official to
reveal this in the midst of "an ongoing investigation?"



The paradox apparently escaped the attention of The American
Spectator. They have href="http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10058">an
article in which they discuss both the NYT disclosure, and
the disclosure of the chat room monitoring. They mention that they have
a "source" inside the Department of Justice who confirmed the
information about the chat rooms:

Our Treasury source wouldn't comment on the case. One
DOJ source indicated that this case initially took off from monitoring
of chat rooms that had been identified as havens for some of the
plotters

In the same article, they continue the attack on the NYT, but they
apparently feel that the disclosure about the chat rooms is no big
deal.
Does this mean anything?



When I see logical inconsistencies like this, it alerts me to the
possibility that maybe, just maybe, there is a little of the good old
propaganda going on. It's not conclusive, but it is a clue. (People
don't have to have a reason to be illogical.)




So if we hypothesize that there is a propaganda aspect to this, can we
confirm that by finding more evidence, or refute it in some way? Well,
it would be hard to prove that manipulation is not taking place, but we
might be able to find some confirmatory evidence.
Let's look at href="http://www.rollingstone.com/nationalaffairs/?p=252">an
excerpt from Rolling Stone National Affairs Daily:

Now let’s turn to the timing.
Here’s the most important line in the piece:
FBI and New York City Police Department officials would not comment
about the investigation, which has been kept under wraps
for months.




In other words, this is old news . . . of an incipient plot . . . that
was defused before it left the chat room. [UPDATE: ABC’s
The Blotter reports that Andalousi has been in custody for roughly
three months, since href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/07/plotters_plan_m.html"
target="_blank">April.]

They are quoting from the AP article that I linked to above. So we have
the Daily News and ABC confirming the information. Rolling
Stone points out the obvious question: if this story has been
brewing for three months, why did it happen to come out on the
anniversary of the London bombings?
As an amusing aside, they also point out the ludicrousness of another
passage in the Daily News story:

The plotters wanted to detonate a massive amount of
explosives inside the Holland Tunnel to blast a hole that would destroy
the tunnel, everyone in it, and send a devastating flood shooting
through the streets of lower Manhattan.

That, of course, would require that "the plotters" also have a means of
making water run uphill. I would add that if "the
plotters" can do that, then we are in big trouble, even if they do not
set off any explosions. Once they perfect the technique, they might be
able to flood Denver, Colorado. Or Tibet, for that matter. Maybe even
the Moon.




If my hypothesis is correct, we should see, over the next four months,
a carefully-choreographed, well-financed media campaign that plays up
the threat from "the terrorists." It will appear to
be sporadic, will come from multiple directions, and the mainstream
media will be completely duped by it. Hell
Heck, they'll gladly play along. Furthermore, there
will be evidence that the response of progressives and moderate
Republicans was anticipated, and those responses will be met with
planned replies. There will be character assassinations. There will be
charges that "liberals" are treasonous and politically-motivated.




Of course, none of the individuals who are running for office in
November will be in a position to do anything about terrorism, so the
whole thing will be a waste of time if people are logical in choosing
for whom they vote.