My Tuesday column begins like so:
If you see any remaining daylight between the rapidly converging spheres of the Glenn Greenwald Left and the Alex Jones Right, you’ll have to point it out to me because not only have those two factions begun to merge, but they’re locked together in what could be a permanent Venn diagram overlap.
Over the weekend, the U.S. government issued a travel alert and the State Department temporarily closed a lengthy roster of U.S. embassies and consulates in response to intercepted communications between Ayman al-Zawahiri and Yemeni al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) leader Nasir al-Wuhayshi that included “clear orders.” Officials have credited NSA’s usage of Section 702 powers contained with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which is the section of the law that spawned the controversial PRISM database.
And so the State Department pulled the trigger and, out of “an abundance of caution,” closed upwards of 25 diplomatic facilities. By the end of the day Monday, however, a number of the embassies were reopened while several other closures were extended.
I’ve always been hesitant to pay too much attention to officials who abuse the “terrorist threat” panic button. After a while, it not only sounds disingenuous, but it also serves to desensitize us in classic Chicken Little fashion, thus undermining serious threats. For more than a decade, I’ve been writing about the astronomically long odds of you personally being killed in a terrorist attack (your odds of dying in an airborne terrorist attack is roughly one in 10 million), and I stand by this assessment. It’s not a matter of denying the existence of terrorists, but more of what I consider to be a rational view of the threat, rather than remaining permanently on alert without a legitimate cause for alarm.
Nevertheless, this administration hasn’t bombarded us with the same serialized fear-mongering about terrorism — at least not with the same histrionic Mukasey-cried-on-stage melodrama of the previous gang.
But that’s not what The Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald wants you to believe.
With predictable form, Greenwald not only attributed the actions of the State Department to a nefarious “Wag the Dog” false flag scenario as a convenient real-world means of tamping down the anti-NSA, anti-surveillance debate that’s gurgled to the surface this Summer, but he also exploited the embassy closures and travel alert as a means of scolding Democrats who, during the Bush years, criticized the suspicious timing of Homeland Security orange alerts and the like, but who currently endorse the embassy closings… [CONTINUED HERE]