[Newspoetry] Twisting Plots and Political Transgressions

[Donald L Emerick]

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Italy-Attacks.html?todaysheadlines

What could you have predicted from these fragments of intelligence?
1.  The fragments were recorded in Italy, in 2000 and early 2001.
2.  They were printed <<released -- by whom?>> recently in a Milan, Italy ne1wspaper
before being picked up <<as was intended by whoever directed their release>> by AP.
3.  Milan's DIGOS chief [DIGOS = Italy's anti-terrorism police] authenticated the texts.

NB: anti-terrorism police units are synonymous with "secret police" like Gestapo or NKVD -- in the United States -- for anyone who is suspected of being an implicated alien.

To be an implicated alien means, basically, as far as I can see, that the secret police suspect you of being a foreign national who may possess information that might possibly be connected to someone who is allegedly connected to ... some conceivable (not necessarily real) plot against some alleged interest of the US.

Sub-NB: plots are always secret, as they are always against and never for anything.  The language of the negative thus appears at least twice: once in the idea of secrecy and once in the denial of any legitimate pursuit of a positive interest by the alien -- thus validating, linguistically anyway, the "anti-terrorist" tradition of torture, mutilation, and so on, because the alleged victims (the alleged terrorists and their allegedly alleged confederates) are possibly planning to hurt others, so this denial; of rights pretends to be just as "eye-for-an-eye" by acting before "they" get a chance to take an eye first.

NB:  it will not be long before we hear that the American secret police have an informal rule that any US citizens who aid said plots have constructively disavowed or intentionally forfeited their national allegiance and all of their citizenship rights.  Thus, such persons, as ex-patriots, are expatriated and would fall under the no-rights regime of state terrorism.

Sub-NB: The State Terrorism regime that Bush-Ashcroft are now developing and deploying will finish the political transformation of the United States from a competitive democracy to an oligarchic autocracy.  This has been an oozing authoritarian process that has been underway for at least the last 90 years in the US, as the national security state winds its coils ever more tightly around domestic political activities.  This process only temporarily slowed (stabilized, as doctors would say) for a time in the late 1970's, before resuming its insidious degenerative processes under Reagan.40, Bush.41 and Clinton.42.

NB:  This disease is often closely associated with militarism and jingoism, in which catchy jingoes oppose any opportunity to think of the consequences of some proposed action.  Militarism is usually visible in vast standing armies that do not shrink when foreign threats diminish, and which inflate even larger at every tiny sign of any allegedly foreign threat.  The parasitic security state's answer to unemployment is the slavery of military enlistment (for military personnel, like "free enterprise" employees in almost every respect, have almost no rights at any time against their masters (employers).

Sub-NB:  The condition of military personnel is and has always been one of slavery -- which is why ex-military officers are always deemed by "free enterprise" employers to be the best kind of "decisive" managers.  However, the other way that one might describe the US military system is that it teaches slaves how to be good slaves as it also teaches slave-master wanna-bes how to be slave-masters -- satisfying both the demand and the supply side for increasing slavery in a country like the US -- and the oligarchic autocrats know this and rely on such an instructional system to dilute and wash away the laissez-faire parental bias against most forms of "serious" "discipline", such as slavery fosters.

But, I digress.

4.  The main reason for the release is to provide a pre-textual explanation for various claims about the unusable quality of intelligence information.  '[The DIGOS chief] told the AP. ``After what happened, it's now easy to draw conclusions ... but before, it was difficult to understand.'''   Translation: after the fact, we can understand what a terrorist was planning to do by re-reading the textual transcript to see what it may actually have said.  (Implicit logical conclusion: why waste any efforts to collect such intelligence, then, if it can not be understood for usable purposes, unless (of course) the potential terrorist is a complete idiot (like, say, Bush)?)
5.  The DIGOS chief also said "Authorities eavesdropped on the two by bugging places where they were, not by tapping telephone lines; it took a long time to remove extraneous noise from the recordings and translate them, he said."  Translation: we get a better signal when we tape than when we bug (which may explain why the intelligence agencies so often just tape all phones, anyway, and why they want plain text copies of all Internet communications  -- and why they used to open all mail (allegedly en route to certain destinations or destined people)...  Only sheer volume and inadequate processing systems keeps the state from being able to use all such information "resources"...

which then leads, of course, to the role of the State in creating and manufacturing actions of suspected suspects: by inserting one or more agent provocateurs, to hasten the alleged potential wrong-doers into doing-such-wrong as and when it would be convenient to the governing powers.  (I recall an old cartoon, from the McCarthy era, depicting an alleged "commie cell meeting", but on the back of every person in the scene was printed the label of the "spy" organization (FBI, CIA, etc) from which that person came -- and, strangely, everyone in the cell could thus be seen to be an agent of the USG, all of them no doubt thinking that all of the others were real threats, thus justifying ever increasing surveillance of those "commie cells"...  (Implicit logical conclusion: once you begin to practice spying operations, you never again have a chance to find out what the truth might be.)

6.  The paper also "reported that the FBI helped Italian experts to decipher the bugged conversations".  Now, this is strange -- for it is the FBI and not, say, the CIA who are alleged to have helped a foreign police force.  For, one would have thought that foreign police would go to the CIA, which has a far better set of "translation" services than the FBI (it has to cover all of the rest of the whole wide world, but the FBI only has to cover the USA, for there used to be, so law used to say, a difference between police who spy on anyone abroad and police who spy on anyone at home).

And, just to think, we used to be taught to laugh at the idea of the old Soviet constitution, as just a paper document without any substantiality to it -- that is the words were just marks on the paper and did not even remotely resemble the real rights of the "Soviet" people against the Soviet state!  Now, should we say the same thing of our own Constitution, given that rabid Republican ideologues like Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas are on the Court, matching their counterparts in the rabid Republican White House and the rabid Republican House (until recently, still mostly, rabid Republican Senate)?

7.  Well, I was going to talk about the story and about understanding some of the things that it says, by looking at some of what it says, as to who is behind the story, which is an infinite regress, of a kind, but instead, I find I also talk about just a few features of the news story, starting off on other infinite regresses, and find -- between all of these infinities -- the story, as such, always disappears.  What they taught me, long ago in Political Science, and which I taught for awhile, and still teach, I guess, is that politics is the process of interest aggregation and its resolutions.  So, first identify the conceivable interests that might be affected, in any event, by knowing who might have some interest to promote or to delay -- and, understand, that no one in politics is candid about interests, either of his or her own, or of the interests of others -- so you just have to wade in to this mess, by having some idea of what someone might want and of what they might have done to get what they wanted.  This makes any political analysis both speculative and polemical, as studies of interest lack truth to them.

Thanks, again, for listening,
Donald L Emerick

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