Controlled Aversive Environment: NYC

New York City residents have been subjected to quite a psy-ops campaign of late, a "controlled aversive environment" constructed out of the materials of the current and final season of 24, with a plot-line starkly complimenting the events of May the 1st...

NYTimes: Police Find Car Bomb in Times Square

The writers of 24 seem gifted with an uncanny penchant to parody current events. For instance, in last year's season, the March 2, 2009 episodes featured the spectacle of an African dictator seizing the White House and holding the Hillary-esque President Taylor hostage. In the current season, President Taylor is at the UN holding historic peace talks with the President of the Islamic Republic of... (name withheld - but obviously a fictional Iran). During the course of the talks, Jack Bauer and the Counter-Terrorism Unit, with its surveillance drones and its back-door access to every security camera in the city, are racing the clock to prevent the detonation of a nuclear dirty bomb in Manhattan. How curious, then, that on May the 1st, as the real President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is in New York for talks at the U.N., there should be a bomb scare in Times Square... The bomb wasn't much to speak of - described by many counter-terrorism experts as a laughable, fire-works fizzler. Nevertheless, the initial reports undoubtedly would have sparked fears of a dirty bomb, especially among those who had been primed by watching 24.

In the ensuing pursuit of the bomber, police released a video of a white man changing his shirt and looking in the general direction of the car-bomb. Contemporaneously - indeed, many news-casts immediately following the May 3rd episode of 24 led with this video - Jack Bauer has gone rouge, running around Manhattan, breaking things, changing clothes, shooting people, while being pursued by every branch of law enforcement, federal state & local.

As it turns out, the white man in the video apparently wasn't the terrorist, as authorities have now honed in on a U.S. citizen of Pakistani heritage. But the capture of this individual also bore a certain parallel to the current season of 24, in which urban surveillance drones have figured prominently...

The Nation: Were US Special Forces Involved in the Arrest of Faisal Shahzad?

Reports are emerging suggesting that secret US military intelligence aircraft were used to find and locate Faisal Shahzad, the man accused of attempting to set off a crude car bomb in Times Square. The CBS affiliate in New York reported today: "In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport."...


Facial recognition software is another gizmo featured in this season of 24. The technology can be taken a step further, however, to behavior recognition software... So, much as the Christmas undie bomber was used as an excuse to install naked body scanners in airports nationwide, so shall it go with the May Day bomber. The sales pitch:

AFP: Police cameras to flood Manhattan to prevent attacks

New York officials say they could stop attacks like the attempted Times Square car bomb by expanding a controversial surveillance system so sensitive that it will pick up even suspicious behavior...

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And now, for a final word...

New York News Today: The Tau of Terrorism

The terror is up and close, all the time .We are in the grip of terrorism mentally and geographically. The incidences of wanton and indiscriminate killings , once taken as the violence of another kind by the thinkers of the day were later so designed by their perpetrators that a better definition was called for ... The operators of terror always execute their plans to a T as goof ups in this business are not pardonable. From the moment of its tee off till date the growth trajectory of terrorism is continuously on rise. Like a winner of the first few rounds it looks more confident. On the other hand, its opponents, our self proclaimed leaders of peace, are grimacingly worried and scared in their overly securitized environs. Terror is moving more freely on the surface than the forces fighting against it, what if it is born and brought up underground. To strike effectively it has to travel faster then the chasers...