[livius]

A very, very interesting insight, and one I haven't seen here before. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes that the target was actually the postal system (that is, conventional communications within the US). The internet is probably, because of its non-physical nature and its dispersal, harder to attack; but shutting down mail communications, including things like the delivery of checks and invoices, could make us grind to a halt. Certainly, in many cases, these things could be replaced by electronic means (in the case of checks, electronic fund transfers, for example). But it certainly wouldn't be fast and it wouldn't be easy (or cheap).

Given the diversity and seeming lack of pattern in the targets, I think it's impossible to say that they were chosen for any reason except that they were prominent and attacks on them would get a lot of publicity. Attacking the communications media (with the significant omission of Arab-friendly CNN) is another indication of the fact that the intention was to spread this scare as fast as possible. Perhaps even choosing a scandal rag such as the Enquirer was a failed attempt - by someone who doesn't understand the US well enough to know that most of us look at the paper at the supermarket check-out and believe not a word it says - to spread this fear as rapidly as possible and halt communications within the US.

[Hugh Akston]

Yeah. I think the media was picked to ensure that the fear would spread as far and wide as possible, because the media would play up an attack on itself.

[norton]

I think that disruption and rapid spread of the story were key - the known "targets" could all be guaranteed to call a press conference and tout their sudden importance.
More proof of this is in the dozens of reports of contamination and "only" a very few deaths or hospitilizations.
A pretty flimsy attack unless it intended only to scare and disrupt.

The domestic versus foreign thing just plain pi***s me off but we should be used to the media coming up with 'right wing' as their modifier of choice.
If internal ideology is involved it is far more useful to the left that this side show takes up 98% of the media attention - and that it might cause legislation to be passed durig another "right wing" scare.

Why is is so far impossible to suggest that there is a domestic, not "ethnically muslim" (easily profiled) support group for the islamic terrorists that we know pirated the aircraft?
Why have we so far avoided discussing possible involvement by an American (converted) islamic group - black or white?
(Is profiling so totally "bad" that even FR won't discuss it?)

There were internal (home grown) groups avidly supporting North Vietnam while we fought them, there were home grown allies working against the US for Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union when that was appropriate.
OK, they are probably still there but this is a different war.
It would not take many otherwise invisible individuals to pull this stunt but the stunt itself is more out of the islamist play book than any militia or even racially based group that I've seen advertising.

I think that the offered six-pack will be moot when the source is found to be (a) domestic, (b) neither demonstrably right or left, but (c) somewhat aligned with the pox-on-all-their-houses enviro/anachist/'because that's what they do' wackos we saw in Seattle and elsewhere.
(anyone remember Al Capp's 'SWINE'?)

Final comment: an earlier thread discussed a book called "The True Believer" (Eric Hoffer - in the fifties)
I read that book in a college course that also addressed mass hysteria - consider how much of this srory is just that; hysteria, absent anthrax spores or baking powder, sustained by a media that is not yet ready to condemn Americn bombing of 'poor', 'starving', etc. foreigners. And, therefore, just what the Taliban or any other likely bad guy would dream of!

[angry beaver norbert]

BINGO!