Using shoebombs to blow up the cockpit door would, um, blow up the cockpit, wouldn't it?

Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post on the ludicrousness of Bush's claim of the foiled terrorist plot in Los Angeles back in 2002 (Why did he even have a press conference about it in 2006?); Greenwald also describes the way, with which we're all familiar, that the Bush administration uses the fear of terrorism to manipulate the public, and in so doing serves the interests of the terrorists who we are supposedly fighting:

The reality is that the White House doesn't care how transparent their manipulation of terrorist threats is, because this manipulation is not aimed at our rational faculties. What they want is for there to be scary pictures constantly flashed on the television screen of Muslims wearing ski masks with ground-to-air missiles on their shoulders and prolonged shots of our tall buildings and hastily arranged news conferences by city officials talking about security measures and faux terrorism experts parading around on TV talk shows with gravely concerned expressions as they warn us, yet again, of all the different ways that we are at risk.

Unleashing all of those images over and over triggers, as intended, fresh waves of fear that we are all about to be blown up or zapped with radiation. How absurd the underlying facts are is irrelevant; anything that serves as a pretext for new waves of frightening images does the trick just fine.

This is really the aim and the work of the terrorists -- to keep the targeted population in the grip of fear. Here is how the Department of Defense describes the defining goal of terrorism:


"the calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological."


Terrorists don't expect to achieve their goals through the physical destruction of a society using violence, the way a nation at war attempts with its military. The violence inflicted by terrorists is simply a tool for ratcheting up the fear level, and the fear of the violence, rather than the violence itself, is the primary tool of the terrorist. The greater the fear of the targeted population, the closer the terrorists are to achieving their goals.

When it comes to Al Qaeda's targeting of the U.S. in this manner, nobody helps the terrorists achieve those objectives more than the Bush Administration, which (like Al Qaeda) really does have as its principal goal -- particularly in an election year, and particularly when it faces all sorts of political difficulties on an array of fronts -- keeping the fear level as high as possible. The more frightened people are, they believe, the more likely they are to support the President and his party. And so fear-mongering becomes the first and really only political weapon they have.

The orange alerts aren't really that effective any more. Orange is so un-scary. But tales of thwarted terrorist attacks on our cities always give rise to the same set of images and warnings which keeps the fear level nice and fresh and edgy. It's only February -- I have no doubt we will be treated to many, many more episodes like this. The question is, with 9/11 now more than 4 years away, is there some limit to the water in this well?