My brother Nicholas emailed me with the following great idea:
On C-SPAN today, a professor (he's from Berkeley, but he's a conservative economist and law professor) named John Yoo had a cool idea: the US should create a mock terrorist organization to compete with Al Qaeda. There could be websites, recruiting efforts, they could claim credit for others' terrorist attacks, etc... the whole effort would draw people and money AWAY from Al Qaeda, and would make Al Qaeda's claims and communications suspect in the Muslim world, among common people and potential/current terrorists.Of course, the whole strategy might be illegal according to current
law, but it is totally interesting.I can't find any article by John Yoo describing this, and the
transcript is not available yet....
Anyone hear of anything like this before?
Seems like a fool's errand to me.
Sounds like the Green Party, marginalize the nutjobs!
To be thorough and completely authentic to Al-Q.'s modus operandi, we would have to routinely take Barbies hostage.
Sounds like a plan to me.
Reminds me of The Bourne Identity, where the CIA created "Jason Bourne," a phony assassin who was really one of their operatives. They spread disinformation crediting him with killings committed by others, and built him up as a rival to an arch-terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal (based on a real person by the same name, possibly even with the same bio).
The purpose, though, was to lure CTJ into the open where "Bourne" could confront and eliminate him.
Small difference, but very strongly parallel.
And don't forget Mr. Kaplan in NORTH BY NORTHWEST.
And if you don't forget him, also don't forget the poor Roger Thornhill who is mistaken for the non-existent Mr. Kaplan...