He may be an idiot, but there is another agent next to him who doesn't say, "Joe's a jerk. He's full of it." Rather, she seems to be hushing him up.  

Then they make further inquiries, and instead of a "Nothing has been found," they get a vague and carefully worded statement that has what we used to call "plausible deniability."

The way to defuse this type of story is to say, "nothing of that nature has been found by any agency."
When they can't make that statement, it is very suspicious. Don't know what it is, but it's suspicious.

When ever someone has to engage in plausible deniability, you should wonder why they can't give a straight answer. It was Springstein who said that trusting in your leaders will get you killed. Now, they want absolute trust and no question clearly answered.

Also, yes, I have a lot of dangerous stuff in my house.  But I have never vowed to kill anyone, I was never trained to kill anyone, I was never a member of a groups dedicated to killing anyone.  If a person fits those three classes, his possession of an item I have may raise some eyebrows.  I have a box cutter. No one is dead from it.

I remember after 9-11, one of the frequent attackes on The Evil Bush was they did warn the people when there had been increased chatter detected.  The left was saying "if there was that danger, he should have told us."  

Of course that was all vague, so there wasn't much to say. Now, it seems that they shoud obfuscate and minimize.

Posted By: willywonka4u

I once got lost in Quantico and found myself facing an Apache helicopter. Yeh, there's a LOT of WMDs in the USA. It's our number one export.

But I wouldn't draw any conclusions from this. This guy is obviously a stone cold idiot. Oh, and if you're worried about a dirty bomb, the Department of Energy did research on it, and found that for a dirty bomb to cause any damage from radiation, you'd have to stand where it exploded...and not move...for about a year. As for chemical weapons, you probably have more dangerous things in your house than anything terrorists have ever smuggled in.

Funny how you jump to an insult of someone you don't know as a
"stone cold idiot."  The average person gets a mike and camera shoved in his face, and he may not be very articuate.

Even the Teleprompter Kid screws up after rehearsals.  He can't even promounce "corpseman."  Screwed that up twice in a row, with all his Harvard degree.

But a low level employee gets jammed by a reporter for info he should not be talking about, and you want him to spout the King's English like Churchill

FYI, there is often no correlation between ability to speak well in publc and either veracity or intelligence.  Dumb people can tell lies with great ease.

The replies here have been most illuminating. Everything from conspiracy jujitsu to "eh, at least it's California". You guys are priceless.

That other gov't agent is a public affairs officer, who didn't want this stone cold idiot making her job a lot harder.

How hard would it have been for this guy to say, "no comment" or "I can neither confirm nor deny"? I gotta tell ya, I don't get much attention in my office from the media, but I have had to talk to a few Congressmen in my day. You learn real quick how not to make waves.

Given that the whole Muslim world is in the middle of a democratic revolution, which in and of itself, delegitimizes everything al Qaeda does, then I'd have to say the danger of Islamic terrorism is quite possibly at a 20 year low right now.

Meanwhile, North Dakota is working on making Christian domestic terrorism legal.

So this low level employee (I thought he was an assistant director of something) would also be an idiot, a horrible public speaker, would get on camera with a public affairs officer standing next to him (talk about stupid), and also would happen to have personal knowledge of "Weapons of Mass Effect" in the port of San Diego. Riiiight.

I'll just say that you don't have to go dumpster diving to smell a rat.

-- Modified on 2/16/2011 7:52:57 AM