The Iranian Terror Plot: A Matter of Trust

I’m finding it harder to trust our federal government or the mass media to tell us the truth.

Especially when it comes to the latest “terror plot” that’s allegedly surfaced.

Like the little boy who cried “wolf”, too many federal officials have sought to further their foreign policy ambitions by telling us outlandish tales of foiled terror plots that turned out to be monsters of their own creation.

Meanwhile, the major news organizations endlessly parrot official government press releases without a second thought or a probing question about the validity of the claims being made.

For instance, the Beltway experts and pundit classes who act as Washington’s official stenographer pool have been trumpeting an alleged Iranian “assassination plot” that was “foiled” recently.

The official narrative claims that elements of the Iranian government sought to hire a Mexican drug cartel operative to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Washington D.C. Whoa.

This plot really covers the bases, doesn’t it?

Let’s see:

•Terror on American soil. Check.

•Terror against the Arabs. Check

•Terror against Israel. Check

•Mexican drug cartels involved. Check.

•Iranian government to blame. Check.

•Casus belli for war against Iran. Check.

The conclusion the American people are supposed to draw from this official accusation is that anything their government tells them regarding Iran and alleged terror plots = truth.

For such an accusation to come on the heels of months of official U.S. sabre-rattling and war-drum beating directed toward Iran is certainly a remarkable coincidence.

That the announcement also diverted our attention on the very day that U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder was subpoenaed by Congress over the Fast & Furious perjury scandal currently rocking the Justice Department, is also just amazing timing, right?

Iran’s stubborn refusal to accede to the demands of certain globalist policy makers has made it a problem child for some time now.

Iranian defiance of the U.S. interventionist agenda has also made it a promising target in the open-ended War On Terror.

But with this latest terror accusation, it appears that U.S. power brokers are cranking the rhetoric up to 11 in order to justify their long-desired preemptive aggression against Iran.

Am I suggesting that the same policy makers that insisted they “knew exactly where the WMD” were located as they agitated for war in Iraq, would fabricate a terror plot to justify using their sucker-punch strategy against Iran?

In a word: Yes.

One of the great things about being in power is that when your initial justification for war falls apart like a soup sandwich, you simply make up another one.

This tactic worked beautifully with the Iraq war when talk of WMDs eventually gave way to talk of Al Qeda connections which, in turn, gave way to talk of regime change and spreading democracy.

As each falsehood became undeniably apparent, a new one would arise to take its place.

The fact that Iraq had never materially harmed the U.S. was not considered relevant enough to deter an unconstitutional, unnecessary and unjust war that policy makers were bent on pursuing.

A just war is one that is fought as a necessary, though regrettable, last resort–after all other means have been exhausted.

 It was never intended to be a method of hammering recalcitrant nations into submission.

Sadly, with many Americans still fearful after 10 years of War on Terror, a few official pronouncements about a “very scary” terror plot is generally all that’s required to elicit a predictable, bloodthirsty Pavlovian response.

In the absence of critical thinking skills, the more a lie is repeated, the more widely it becomes accepted.

Mac Slavo puts it into perspective:

“Consider that the President – yes, the President of the United States approved this latest “terror plot” information release – just overtly accused the Iranian government of attempting to assassinate an ambassador on U.S. soil. These are extremely serious charges, the kind that have led nations to war throughout history. The Saudis are calling for Iran to “pay the price,” while Secretary of State Clinton says this is a “dangerous escalation of the Iranian government’s longstanding use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism.” Israel, parroting Mrs. Clinton, agrees, saying, that this is “definitely an escalation.”

This type of diversion should be familiar to all who remember the August 20, 1998 cruise missile attacks on a Sudanese aspirin factory that coincided with then President Clinton’s admission of an “inappropriate relationship” with a White House intern.

More missiles flew against Iraq later that year as Clinton’s impeachment proceedings moved ahead.

Those million dollar fireworks were supposed to keep the American public from looking too closely at the scandals of Washington’s elite.

But there’s an even seedier side to the kind of manipulation of public opinion that accompanies each alleged terror plot that our Protectors-on-the-Potomac claim to have foiled: most of the plots were hatched by federal officials themselves.

Glen Greenwald of Salon.com describes how the fabricated terror template is used to convince apathetic Americans that government is their savior, albeit by thwarting its own terrorist plots:

Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack, supplies them with the money, weapons and know-how they need to carry it out — only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.

Think about that for a moment.

The very terror plots which are used to justify the need for more government and less freedom are, more often than not, a creation of the very entity that’s supposedly saving us from them.

Judge Andrew Napolitano points out that of the 20 terror plots that have been foiled since 2001 in the U.S., three were interrupted by members of the public, but 17 were foiled by the feds.

Care to guess what else those 17 plots had in common?

Napolitano explains:

They were planned, plotted, controlled, and carried out by the federal government itself. In all of these seventeen cases – from the Ft. Dix Six to the Lackawanna Seven to the Portland Parade Bomber – the feds found young men of Muslim backgrounds; loners who were bitter at America. They befriended them, cajoled them, and persuaded them that they could change the world by killing Americans. In all these cases, agents worked undercover and portrayed themselves to the targets as Arabs of like un-American mind. In some cases, the federal agents used third parties to act as middlemen. The third parties are typically persons who have been convicted of crimes and who, in return for leniency at their sentencings, were willing to work with the same feds who prosecuted them in order to help entrap whomever else those feds are pursuing.

Every time a supposed terror plot is broken up, we’re expected to grovel in gratitude at the feet of those leaders who claim that they are keeping us safe from the world’s boogeymen.

Each incident is supposed to remind us why we need less freedom, less privacy, more government intrusion into every corner of our lives.

But what if our leaders were using this fear and uncertainty to manipulate the populace into support of things that are harmful to our liberties and our national character?

Is it so unreasonable to believe that those in power are also subject to the effects of human nature when it comes to the desire to exercise dominion over others? Our government’s track record of telling us the truth is not very encouraging.

My once healthy sense of skepticism has finally reached outright distrust of the state and its media enablers based on how we’ve been lied to and manipulated before.

Which brings us back to the question of the alleged Iranian terror plot that was also hatched by our own government.

Cracks are already beginning to appear in the official story.

But two very important questions about the latest alleged terror plot remain:

1. Will we Americans be as gullible this time as we’ve been in the past?
2. Are we ready to start demanding straight answers by asking the tough questions that the media gatekeepers are apparently unwilling to ask?

The answers to these questions will determine, in part, whether our liberties are preserved or our government is allowed to become a law unto itself with no limits on its power.

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Bryan Hyde is a husband, father, disciple, teacher, guardian, reader, writer, truth seeker, stirrer of pots, radio talk show host, and PITA to those who seek dominion over others. He’s also a proud member of the Pro-Freedom Conspiracy.

He does professional voice work through his company One Clear Voice. He is also a frequent and popular contributor to St. George News.

Bryan and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

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