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As I discussed in this previous post, one of the things that hampers MSM so much is that its expertise is in acquiring and reporting information, rather than in analyzing what that information means. I'm reminded of this by a Reuter's article today, which shows severe internal contradictions:
President George W. Bush's administration has crippled al Qaeda's ability to carry out major attacks on U.S. soil but at a political and economic cost that could leave the country more vulnerable in years to come, experts say.
Even as al Qaeda tries to rebuild operations in Pakistan, experts including current and former intelligence officials believe the group would have a hard time staging another September 11 because of U.S. success at killing or capturing senior members whose skills and experience have not been replaced.
"If the question is why al Qaeda hasn't carried out another 9/11 attack, the answer I think is that if they could have, they would have," said a former senior U.S. intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
...Look at al Qaeda's plans," said Michael Scheuer, who once led the CIA team devoted to finding al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. "They're very simply defined in two phrases: spread out America's forces and bleed the United States to bankruptcy. I'd argue America has been under attack successfully every day since 9/11 from that perspective.
"If you're looking at it from the cave, or wherever al Qaeda is hiding at the moment, you have to be pretty happy with the way the world is moving," he said.
So per this analysis from Reuters, the al Qaeda members hiding in a cave, due to the success of the U.S. in killing and capturing so many of their senior members, are pretty happy about the way the world is moving, due to what it has cost the U.S. to accomplish their destruction.
As I noted in that previous post (same link):
The Strengths of MSM
MSM excels at gathering information. They can often get it even when many of the people involved don't want to reveal it. This is a totally different skill set from analyzing that information. There is no reason to expect anyone to be good at both. MSM is so unskilled at information analysis, that it even applies the same pre-packaged analysis, to almost every story. According to MSM, almost every story means that GWB is bad, the Iraq war is bad, America is bad, capitalism is bad, and whoever the Democrats are running should be elected. Stories that can't be made to fit this analysis -- for example, the current Air America scandal, the Swift Boat vets of the 2004 Presidential campaign, or the U.N. report that Hussein had busted up giant factories capable of building WMD's and shipped them out of Iraq before and during the war -- are either ignored altogether, or printed once on a back page, and never discussed again.
The Strengths of the Blogosphere
Analysis, however -- figuring out what things mean -- what they were caused by, what they will cause, and how to apply that understanding to make new decisions -- is precisely what the blogosphere excels at. Go to any of the biggest blogs, and you will note that the majority of posts cite facts from MSM and elsewhere, and provide new analysis.
That post was from August of 2005, and now in April of 2007, it still rings true: "According to MSM, almost every story means that GWB is bad, the Iraq war is bad, America is bad, capitalism is bad, and whoever the Democrats are running should be elected."
THE LATEST GOOGLE SEARCH is for a snake loose in Google HQ.
"What you have heard is in fact true and not an April Fools' Day joke," a Google spokesman wrote in an e-mail to technology news site CNET News.com.
..."Should you see the snake, please do not attempt to touch it or pick it up. Call security immediately."
