reflectivepundit

What to Make of Hero's Welcome for Pan Am Flight 103 Terrorist?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
In my mind, the intentional detonation of a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in December 1988 and the killing of 270 persons aboard and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland, marked the beginning of the age of catastrophic terrorism. 

Now, Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahithe only person convicted for mass murder was released by Scottish authorities on "compassionate" grounds so that he can die at home in Libya surrounded by his family.
No wonder, that the families of the victims are outraged. They did not even have a chance to say good-bye to their loved ones beforeFlight 103 was blown out of the sky and disintegrated into billions of pieces. 

Terrorists are not in the business of compassion. They hate and kill indiscriminately.  

But even more troubling than the decision to free al-Megrahithe's release are the incredible images of the hero's welcome that was staged in Tripoli for the Lockerbie terrorist. There is no doubt that Gadhafi arranged for his son Saif al-Islam el-Qaddafi to bring the former agent home aboard a government plane and orchestrated the glorious homecoming.

If Gadhafi intends to tell the world that the festive reception was for a man wrongly blamed for the downing of Flight 103, he will not convince those governments and peoples that matter. The released Libyan was not used as a scapegoat by the United States and other western countries to highlight Libya's state sponsorship of terrorism, but was actually a victim of Gadhafi without whom no Libyan agent would have plotted the horrific terrorist strike. 

The fact that Gadhafi staged the homecoming celebration for al-Megrahithe in defiance of contrary advice by Scottish and other Western authorities raises new doubts about his sincerety, when it comes to his swearing off support for terrorism and the abondonment of WMD-programs. 

Signaling different behavior in the post-9/11 years, Gadhafi was rewarded in that Libya returned into the family of nations and was taken off the U.S. State Department's lists of state sponsors of terrorism that results in a host of sanctions.

Now, Gadhafi, acted once again like the leader of a rogue state.  

Tom Ridge and the Cooked Terrorism Alerts: Selling Fear Works

By Brigitte L. Nacos, Yaeli Bloch-Elkon and Robert Y. Shapiro

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, is in the headlines because he reveals in a book he authored that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national terrorism threat alert level just before the 2004 election. Actually, as noted on this blog in fall 2006, Ridge had voiced this suspicion after he resigned as Secretary of Homeland Security in early 2005, when he told reporters that "there were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it [the color-coded alert level], and we said, ‘For that?" The White House and others in the administration knew exactly for what: they believed that raised alert levels increased the fear of Americans and their support for the crisis-managing president. They were right as our systematic research has demonstrated.

Terrorists, policy-makers, and terrorism scholars have long assumed that the mere threat of terrorist strikes affects societies that have experienced actual terrorist attacks. But so far research has neither validated this conventional wisdom nor demonstrated in detail how mass-mediated threat communications by terrorists and terror alerts and threat assessments by government officials affect the public in targeted countries. Our research fills this gap.

To begin with, we found that in the 39 months after 9/11, network TV-newscasts devoted large amounts of airtime to threats communicated by Osama bin Laden and his associates and to terror alerts and threat assessments issued by administration officials. In the evening newscasts of ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News, the average length of news segments devoted to Al Qaeda threat messages was close to four minutes and five-and-a-half minutes for those reporting that the administration had increased the color-coded terror alert level. In contrast, when the official terror alert was lowered by the administration, television devoted on average only one-and-a-half minutes to this news. Similarly, all cases of increased terror alerts levels were reported as lead stories, whereas only thirteen percent of the lowering of terror alerts were lead stories–if they were reported at all.

These coverage patterns played into the hands of the Al Qaeda leadership whose communications left no doubt about their intent to make the American public more fearful. But President George W. Bush and his administration, too, benefited from the generous coverage of their terror alerts, warnings, and assessments in that this reminded the public frequently why the "war on terrorism" had to be fought. Shortly after 9/11, the administration urged the TV-networks not to air bin Laden/Al Qaeda tapes, but there were no follow-up complaints. Obviously, the White House did no longer object to the media’s attention to Al Qaeda communications. After all, President Bush himself told a White House reporter with respect to a bin Laden tape that  was released and heavily covered five days before the 2004 presidential election, "I thought it was going to help. I thought it would help remind people that if bin Laden does not want Bush to be president, something must be right with Bush."

Feeding Frenzy Town Hall Meetings: Stop Hate Speech Before It Explodes Into Violence

Rush Limbaugh: “Adolf Hitler, like Obama, also ruled by dictate.” He compares Obama and the Democrat Party to fascists that do not allow private sector, put to death the unfit, etc. 

Glenn Beck, Fox News host: he called Obama a fascist, a Nazi, a Marxist and alleged the establishment of a secret network of government-run concentration camps for dissenters.

Anne Coulter has said that people are rightly worried over health reform, as "one excellent way to cut costs is to let old people die."

Betsy McCaughey has claimed that the House health care reform bill would "absolutely require" end-of-life counseling for seniors "that will tell them how to end their life sooner."

Sarah Palin:  "The America I love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama's 'death panel' so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their 'level of productivity in society,' whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil."

U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told people at a town hall meeting that they have “every right to fear” a provision in a House bill that would provide funding for end-of-life counseling. Grassley said. “We should not have a government program that determines we’re gonna pull the plug on Grandma.”

In short, then, critics of the Proposed Health Care reform claim that it is fascist, it is socialist, it is communist, it is un-American, unpatriotic—it is against everything good in the American system.

All of this plays into conspiracy theories and prejudices of the right-extreme fringe that has experienced a revival since the Barack Obama won the presidential election.

Bill Clinton and the Freed Hostages: A Win-Win for the U.S. and North Korea?

By Brigitte L. Nacos
Who wouldn’t be touched by the images of joyful and relieved former hostages Euna Lee and Laura Ling, their families, friends, and colleagues? As far as the hostages and their loved ones were concerned, Bill Clinton’s humanitarian mission to North Korea was the right and only thing to do. After all, the imprisoned American reporters had conveyed in their phone calls home that the ransom demand by North Korean officials was the request that former president Bill Clinton were to visit Pyongyang. Thus, the deal was struck before Clinton touched down on North Korean soil: A special pardon by Dear Leader Kim Jong Il would free the two American reporters and allow Clinton to bring them back to America.

So, why isn’t there universal praise for Clinton’s successful trip that the White House characterized as a purely private initiative? Well, as one would expect the former U.S. president’s visit to the most isolated and oppressive country on earth was used as propaganda fodder by North Korea’s dictatorial leadership that promptly received the visitor as if he was still in office, when he touched down in Pyongyang. The images of Clinton's reception and those showing Kim Yong and Clinton side-by-side were publicized all over the world. In that, the North Korean leaders got precisely what they and the rulers of other rogue states are after: attention by big names and players on the world stage and the quasi-legitimacy that comes along with sitting at the same table as legitimate political actors. 

John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is very critical of Clinton’s trip and mission. He told Agence France Press, "I think this is a very bad signal because it does exactly what we always try and avoid doing with terrorists, or with rogue states in general, and that's encouraging their bad behavior.”

If Bill Clinton’s marching order from the White House was to solely focus on the release of the two reporters, few observers believe that North Korea’s nuclear ambitions and capabilities were not discussed during the meetings. After all, among the top level officials that greeted Clinton at the airport was North Korea’s top nuclear negotiator Kim Kye-gwan. At issue is whether to criticize or applaud efforts to once again try to convince North Korean leaders to abandon their nuclear weapons program.

Under the headline “Paying Kim’s Price,” The Wall Street Journal, “If it turns out that if a new nuclear negotiation really was begun during Mr. Clinton’s visit, it will also send the signal to North Korea that the worse its behavior, the more it stands to gain from the U.S. And it will mean that Kim’s price will be even higher to spring the next American hostages.”