FBI and New York City Political Police Smash Another “Terrorist Plot” JUST IN TIME to Pressure Congress for More Money

What a very very LUCKY coincidence, I thought to myself a couple of days ago, when the boss of the New York City police (NYPD), William Bratton, announced with great fanfare to the media the Great Work his department and the FBI did in smashing a deadly terrorist plot. Seems three hapless schlubs from Brooklyn (one of the five boroughs of New York City) had planned to fly to Syria to fight with ISIS. Seems like this is a deadly threat to the U.S. (You might think it would be a threat if they wanted to stay here and kill people. Nah.) Of course they’d be fighting in Syria against the Assad regime; which, if you recall, Obama and his then-Secretary of State, Hillary “Queen of the Democratic Party” Clinton were insisting “had to go.” (Well, that was then. Staying in sync with U.S. foreign policy is like playing a game of Simon Says.)

Bratton used his latest Big Media Splash to pointedly say that This Goes To Show Why Congress Must IMMEDIATELY Vote More Money For The Department of Homeland Security. (See my previous essay on this ginned-up hysteria. As I pointed out, if Congress fails to appropriate new funds for DHS, all that happens is that 15% of DHS’s personnel get temporarily furloughed, the other 85% have to work while waiting for their paychecks to eventually come through. Oh, and various pass-through grants to the secret police and paramilitary terror units of local, county, and state police departments and sheriff’s departments have less money to gorge themselves on.)

Well, lucky thing that this latest “terrorist plot” just happened to land in Bratton’s lap! 

I figured it was a case the secret police were keeping on the shelf in case they needed it for just such an eventuality. They’ve done this numerous times before when it seemed like people were starting to awaken from the hypnotic state of terror they’re kept in by the government and media, or when some politicians started getting cranky at the ever-increasing police state power being amassed.

Turns out it’s worse than that. It’s yet another case of the FBI manufacturing a “terrorist conspiracy” itself and then “foiling” it. It simply baits a trap for losers, and reels them in. They’ve spent a year or even two ensnaring their victims into their webs at times. The same pattern, over and over. [1]

Meanwhile all that the establishment media is “reporting” in New York is regurgitations of the propaganda Bratton and the FBI fed them at the “press conference” called to brag about the addition of three more scalps to their “anti-terrorist” belts and make alarmist statements about DHS having to go a few days with only 85% of its personnel. I’ll have more on the media’s complicity in this latest secret police propaganda offensive in a later essay.

NYPD commissar Bratton has continued to beat the drum for more money for repression, continuing to feed his propaganda into the receptive ears of the local “journalists.” Not throwing billions of dollars at DHS RIGHT NOW would be “reckless and irresponsible,” Bratton brayed. He needs more money for his “intelligence analysis unit,” yet another political persecution section of the NYPD.  

The NYPD is already lavishly funded. It is the largest police department in the U.S., with between 35,000 and 40,000 police, plus thousands of civilians employees. There are also auxiliary police on top on that.

The latest public count of the NYPD’s cameras spying on us and tracking us with facial-recognition software and license plate readers is 8,000, all monitored in real time from their gigantic headquarters towers in lower Manhattan. NYPD paramilitary units sport automatic  weapons, armored vehicles, and more. 

The NYPD deploys spy-vans to capture people’s cellphone transmissions at demonstrations it doesn’t like.

But like any bureaucratic empire-builder, Bratton always wants more. To hear his ilk tell it, there are terrible threats to everyone’s safety lurking out there and he needs MORE MORE MORE to “protect” us.

The police state method of fear-mongering to enable them to suck up yet more resources and funds and increase their already-oppressive power has its analog in the military-industrial complex, which does the same. Both are crucially enabled by the establishment propaganda system (aka “the media”), without whose connivance and willingness to act as credulous shills for the self-serving propaganda of the police-secret police and military-corporate complex (with its assorted “think tank” propaganda nests as auxiliaries), none of this would fly. The populace needs to be assiduously brainwashed and manipulated to ensure their acquiescence in this gigantic system of self-serving parasitism whose output is political repression and violence, domestically and globally.

As for the DHS, Congress just voted a seven day extension of their budget, which Obama hurriedly signed. As I explained at greater length in the previous essay, DHS doesn’t “shut down” if the money “runs out,” contrary to the deliberately falsified impression conveyed by U.S. media. I’ll have more on media mendacity later.

1]  See for example “Confidential Informant Played Key Role in FBI Foiling Its Own Terror Plot,” the intercept, Feb. 25, 2015, and “Why Does the FBI Have to Manufacture its Own Plots if Terrorism and ISIS Are Such Grave Threats?,” the intercept, Feb. 26, 2015.