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A New Kind of War
Americans think of D-Day or the invasion of Iraq when they think of war -- massed fleets, armies and planes, tanks and fortifications. But the National Security types and military brass were clearly talking about something else completely.
This sort of offensive, confusing and strange-sounding to non-tech laypeople and those outside the military, will clearly rely heavily on security technology -- surveillance, wire-taps, electronic ID's from cards to voice and fingerprint scanning, biological warfare and defense, e-mail encryption and interception, satellite photographs, the digital tracing of money, the use of pin-point troops and weaponry to go after small numbers of terrorists located in inaccessible cells in distant countries. Such a conflict raises all sorts of policy questions, from our grasp of different cultures to the nature of religious fundamentalism to changes in traditional ideas about civil liberties, to use of the Net as a communications medium for terrorism, to technologies that might make airplanes and buildings safer. People have suggested more sophisticated X-ray devices to spot weapons and bombs, stronger pilot cabins, buildings less massive and vulnerable than the World Trade Center towers.
Most officials were quick to say the war would like unlike any other, and that drafting vast numbers of people wouldn't be necessary. This war would be fluid, varied, combining weaponry with diplomacy and economic pressure.
The intelligence experts who came out of the cold last week were nearly unanimous in agreeing that old-fashioned spies -- sometimes unsavory humans -- were crucial to get close to terrorist "cells" but also that new forms of communications -- e-mail, cell, the transmission of encrypted files -- required new laws and better technologies to monitor them, since they were terrorist tools. Also needed, they said, are computer programs to better track the movement of money.
Is such a war possible? Technologically feasible? Can encrypted terrorist communications really be followed online? Is it possible to trace money so precisely by digital means? To what degree can civil liberties or privacy be protected in this context? Is there technology that can spot a knife in a briefcase or hidden in a human body? How close can satellite surveillance take us to small terrorist hideouts in urban or rural areas? Is the idea of the mobile, tech-equipped soldier feasible? What weapons would he or she carry?
Over the last few years, I've gotten e-mail from academics, defense researchers, satellite trackers, government cryptographers about various issues relating to technology. It would be interesting to hear from some of you who know more about this than most people. In fact, some of you might be directly involving in working on these things.
America's defense and policy planners are calling for a new kind of war and a new kind of warfare. Few people have any idea what it might look like or how it might work.
Recently we gave G.W. Bush 60 billion dollars to spend how ever he'd like... I'd like to question the wisdom of this. What can we do with 60 billion dollars.
Can we buy hope instead of terror?
With this 60 billion dollars could we start enough "rebuilding" efforts in Afgan, Iraq, and Palestine to turn would-be terriorists into brick-layers?
You don't have to break the crypto to get information. Traffic analysis can tell you a lot. Who is talking to who? If person "A" gets lots of messages after an event, but only sends a few, then "A" is probably in charge of the organization being monitored. And if you know where "A" is, you can target him. Thus, you've gotten valuable strategic, and possibly tactical, information from his commo, without having to break his crypto.
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First off, I think that I actually liked this article.
Nothing scares me worse than the fear of losing freedoms. I don't mind the new restrictions at the airports, or anything like that. Those are things that I don't consider a basic right. I just don't want to have to worry about encrypting all of my email, or even about possesing a strong encryption program without a backdoor.
As far as terrorism is concerned, I think that we need to treat the sickness, not the symptoms. We need to fix our foreign policy, to help stop things like this. We need to not use violence, as it begets more violence. No more innocents or civilians need to die.
I'm all for giving Osama a fair trial, but how is that possible? How do we extradite him from Afghanstan(sp?), and if we manage to, who is going to serve on his jury? I would try to be impartial, but could I, could you?
I know this is sorta off topic, and doesn't even follow any sort of logic. I just felt like rambling.
garc
I have to admit I was astounded that I heard that current US policy was that informants could not have a criminal background, or some such nonsense (anyone know what the standard actually is?). I mean, who the hell expects upstanding citizens in criminal organizations?
I think that is definitely one law that needs to be reviewed.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
A quote
BIN LADEN COMES HOME TO ROOST (From MSNBC)
At the CIA, it happens often enough to have a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.
Before you call me naive, let me concede some points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia's Lon Nol, for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes, there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the devil for the long-term good of the planet.
But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.
Beginnings
As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.
As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the outside world into the Afghan war.
What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation.
By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan's mujahedeen. His money gave him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died for Afghanistan's freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured nation - were Afghan nationals.
Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to "read" than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the "reliable" partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
Intelligent Agencies
Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante - a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero.
In fact, while he returned to his family's construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.
Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt's Gamat Ismalia, which has massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.
Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. "It was worth it," he said. "Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important role in the downfall of the Soviet Union."
Tunnel Visions
It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden's connection to these activities is mostly classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein's monster like this.
It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA's Afghan adventures than it was when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party's grip on power in Moscow.
Even Hatch can't be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its "mission," had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union. The CIA, as its deputy director William Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992, had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual "Soviet Military Power" report right up to 1990.
Given that context, a decision was made to provide America's potential enemies with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.
That decision is coming home to roost.
One of the first things that the U.S. Government is going to need to do is to go on an offensive against individuals who are writing virus code and propogating it on the internet.
This type of act is, at it's core, a terrorist act and could contribute to the confusion surrounding other events.
Imagine if a particularly nasty computer virus had been released on September 11th... even if it had nothing to do with the actual attack, it would have contributed greatly to the feeling of helplessness that so many of us experienced that day.
So who exactly are we going to war against? An individual, bin Laden? His 'network of terrorist cells'? The Taliban? The Afghani people? Terrorism in general?
It's a fundamental question, because how will we know when the war is over?
New kind of war, indeed.
Erasing Afghanistan from the face of the Earth won't do you a bit of good. By the time your bombs hit Afghanistan, terrorists will be long gone. Terrorists are everywhere, and they're way more mobile than your bombers or troops. They can easily avoid attacks of this scale.
The only effective way I can see of getting rid of them is infiltrating their organizations, gathering as much intelligence about them as possible, then assasinating them one by one. No fussy and cumbersome war procedures, no large-scale military operations, no pointless delays with diplomatic BS; just a few elite troops of trained assassins, quiet, accurate and deadly.
This is an excerpt from an email my Dad sent me last Tuesday: "People you know and some you care about are probably going to die in terrible ways because of today. There is a time for war, but people should not be lead to die for the wrong reason. We rebuilt Japan and Germany after destroying and defeating them and thereby created powerful friends in the world. I don't know if there is a way to create "friends" from enemies without destroying them as enemies first. When this is over, however you solve it, make sure it's better than the way you found it. "
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
umm, when isn't propaganda an important part of war strategy? Any war throughout history has been plagued by leaders handing out pro-whatever information.
Other "police actions" that we have taken part in were less than popular b/c of the fact that the propaganda was ineffective. Honestly there was little worry by most of the American public that communism would spread to the US or large European states (yes the domino effect -- no it never really truly happened -- yes this is IMHO)
This "police action" already has very little need for propaganda due to the graphic impression it left on the public.
I myself am already quite annoyed w/Bush's statements and his bullshit (yes I voted for Bush and I am a republican) but I find his "wanted dead or alive", "new war", etc to all be over-stated and obvious propaganda.
We are going to start a serious war that IMHO will have very little effect on stopping future terrorism from happening again on American soil. Take out Bin Laden and who is left? Tons more...
That's just my worthless rambling.
"Some companies were at least taking the minimal step of blocking out encrypted e-mails to their networks, said Russ Cooper, surgeon general of TruSecure, a security services provider based in Herndon, Virginia."
How the hell can blocking encrypted e-mails improve a companies security against terrorism?
Never never never smoke crack before geometry class!
I thought this article at News of the World was interesting. It lists some of the weapons the U.S. could use to fight a modern war: a two-barrelled rifle that shoots shells that "explode in the air over the target and unleash a rain of death"; a helmet with visor that highlights enemies in red and friendlies in green; wrist-mounted keyboards for sending text messages to other soldiers' visors; Robot Swarms; a 2-megawatt, 747-mounted laser that "is so accurate it can pick out and destroy an individual in a crowd 180 miles away without harming people around him".
UNDERSTANDING BIN LADEN
SOURCE: Iran News
William O. Beeman teaches anthropology at Brown
University in Providence, Rhode Island. A specialist on
Middle East Culture, he has written extensively on
fundamentalism and terrorism. He has worked for the
past four years in Tajikistan, where he has been able
to monitor developments in Afghanistan.
UNDERSTANDING BIN LADEN
The United States risks a severe miscalculation in
dealing with the destruction of the World Trade Center
and the attack on the Pentagon on Tuesday. This event
is not an isolated instance of violence. This is not an
"act of war." It is one symptom of a cancer that
threatens to metastasize. The root cause is not
terrorist activity, as has been widely stated. It is
the relationship between the United States and the
Islamic world. Until this central cancerous problem is
treated, Americans will never be free from fear.
Merely locating and hunting down a single "guilty
party" in this case will not stop future violence: such
an action will not destroy the organization of
terrorist cells already established throughout the
world. Of greater importance, it will do nothing to
alleviate the residual enmity against America that will
remain at large in the world, continuing to motivate
violence. The perpetrators of the original attack on
the World Trade Center in 1993 were caught and
convicted. This did not stop the attack on Tuesday.
The chief suspect is the Saudi Arabian Osama bin Laden
or his surrogates. He has been mischaracterized as an
anti-American terrorist. He should rather be thought of
as someone who would do anything to protect Islam. Bin
Laden began his career fighting the Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan in 1979 when he was 22 years old. He has
not only resisted the Soviets but also the Serbians in
Yugoslavia. His anger was directed against the United
States primarily because of the U.S. presence in the
Gulf Region, more particularly Saudi Arabia itself, the
site of the most sacred Islamic religious sites.
According to bin Laden, during the Gulf War America
co-opted the rulers of Saudi Arabia to establish a
military presence in order to kill Muslims in Iraq. In
a religious decree issued in 1998, he gave religious
legitimacy to attacks on Americans in order to stop the
United States from "occupying the lands of Islam in the
holiest of places." His decree also extends to
Jerusalem, where the second most sacred Muslim siteâ^À^Ôthe
al-Aqsa Mosque. The depth of his historical vision is
clear when, in his decree, he characterizes Americans
as "crusaders" harkening back to the Medieval Crusades
in which the Holy Lands, then occupied by Muslims, were
captured by European Christians.
He will not cease his opposition until the United
States leaves the region. Paradoxically, his strategy
for convincing the United States to do so seems drawn
from the American foreign policy playbook. When the
United States disapproves of the behavior of another
nation, it "turns up the heat" on that nation through
embargoes, economic sanctions or withdrawal of
diplomatic representation. In the case of Iraq
following the Gulf war, America employed military
action, resulting in the loss of civilian life. The
State Department has theorized that if the people of a
rogue nation experience enough suffering, they will
overthrow their rulers, or compel them to adopt more
sensible behavior. The terrorist actions in New York
and Washington are a clear and ironic implementation of
this strategy against the United States.
Bin Laden takes no credit for actions emanating from
his training camps in Afghanistan. He has no desire for
self-aggrandizement. A true ideologue, he believes that
his mission is sacred, and he wants only to see clear
results. For this reason, the structure of his
organization is essentially tribalâ^À^Ôcellular in modern
political terms. His followers are as fervent and
intense in their belief as he is. They carry out their
actions because they believe in the rightness of their
cause, not because of bin Laden's orders or approval.
Groups are trained in Afghanistan, and then establish
their own centers in places as far-flung as Canada,
Africa and Europe. Each cell is technologically
sophisticated, and may have a different set of
motivations for attacking the United States.
Palestinians members of his group see Americans as
supporters of Israel in the current conflict between
the two nations. In the Palestinian view, Ariel
Sharon's ascendancy to leadership of Israel has
triggered a new era, with U.S. government officials
failing to pressure the Israeli government to end
violence against Palestinians. Palestinian cell members
will not cease their opposition until the United States
changes its relationship with the Israeli state.
The Mujaheddin fighters in Lebanon also direct their
hostility against Israel and the United States. They
also operate against the Maronite Christian community
in their own country, who were supported by the French
from World War I until the end of World War II. They
will not cease their operations until the region is
firmly in Islamic hands.
Above all, Americans need to remember that the rest of
the world has an absolute right to self-determination
that is as defensible as our own. A despicable act of
mayhem such as those committed in New York and
Washington is a measure of the revulsion that others
feel at our actions that seemingly limit those rights.
If we perpetuate a cycle of hate and revenge, this
conflict will escalate into a war that our
great-grandchildren will be fighting.
________________
Copyright 2001 William O. Beeman. This article may be
distributed for any non-commercial purpose.
Second, we will not be attacking ("offensive"), we will be defending ourselves against terrorism - in a way that European countries already have for years.
Third, before asking for new toys, how about those in charge of this defense started by using the info they already had? See
(According to La Repubblica, this "memo" dates from October 20, 2000. They don't say how they got it -- I couldn't find the complete text online, but another part is in "Jeff"'s guilty plea in "USA v. Ali Mohamed", dated the same day.)
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
Well the new kinds are going to suck more. In the last half of the 20th Century, with the introduction of TV, etc, we got into the idea of being moral in our actions in a war. This has been used to pummel the US into a guilt complex. in my post Alternative Courses of Action I pointed out some of the more colorful suggestions being floated in some fourms. The point being, that with current events, certain moral inhibitions are no longer going to be present. War can be waged on many fronts, and many venues. the example given in the other post harken back to the tactics of Rome, and the Crusades
Bin Laden even views the infiltration of western culture (tv, etc) as an affront to Islam. So we can wager cultural war against him. A set of Levis in the middle east may be worth as much as a hundred bullets, because to that extent, we have won some portion of a mind.
This opens the door to a wider range of possibilities, where our marketing will be as an effective weapon as any other type of campaign.
Imagine the conquest of Afghanistan by MS lawyers and Marketroids!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
href=http://www-cgsc.army.mil/milrev/English/DecFe b99/bowdish.htm
Psyops is in full force. We are at an extremely high threatcon level. The rage against the machine message board was closed by the Secret Service and there were some credible tactical reasons for doing so, but that shows you where we have went today.
The big radio companys are under orders not to play a huge list of songs and that is really, really wierd, I was just at the page where the list of songs were, I went back to memepool to grab the url it was gone. This goes way beyond extra security checks. This is scaring the shit out of me ten times as much those planes. I'm not even going to try and clean up my post as I'm worried that the first link I posted will disappear as well. Maybe the sky really is falling.
Here, read the interview with bin Laden, it's all right there.
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/tra nscript_binladen1_990110.html
Not only is bin Laden pissed at the U.S. being mostly Christian, he's pissed because we aren't allowing them to literally exterminate the Jews in Israel. But it goes farther than exterminating the Jews in Israel, he really wants to exterminate all non-Muslims around the world.
And for all the Liberal Europeans blaming U.S. foreign policy on the whole mess, watch out, he doesn't like you much better and wants you dead too.
note: I'm not condoning U.S. foreign policy, there's plenty I don't agree with, however, preventing other middle-eastern countries from taking over Israel and exterminating the Jews is not one of them.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
It's interesting to note that the countries we have fought and occupied, not just a negotiated peace, not just a withdrawl after a few good kicks, have done extremely well.
;)
Look at Germany: we fought them tooth and nail, clashing on levels not seen before. Yet now they are among the world's most prosperous nations.
The same, and even more so, with Japan. We slagged Tokyo on the scale of Dresden as well as her other cities, and then nuked two more. Now Japan has the world's second largest economy in the world, but the fact is we went in and rebuilt her after WW2.
Perhaps what we really, truly ought to do, even though it will be unpopular in the long run, is to go in, kick ass, take names - baring in mind the xUSSR's experience there and ours in Vietnam - and then...rebuild her.
There are enough volunteers here in the US that would probably be willing to go over and help rebuild. Plenty of patriotic americans that are muslim as well. Send them over as the teachers while the rest of us build roads, factories, and more. Build their economy from nothing to something. Take 10-15 years to do so. Just like in Europe and in Japan.
Then transition things back into their hands like we did before...and leave. well off people rarely rise in revolt.
Let the people who want to die fighting us, do so...those that want to live, live.
Then we can work our 'infamous' reconstruction project and go home. It would be great - and amusing - to see Afghanistan as one of the top 4 economies in the world.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Allow me to disagree. First, assasination won't make martyrs out of them. Sure, for them it's a great heroic thing to go down in flames taking a thousand "enemies" along and making the news worldwide. But to die in their own secret compound, killed by a silent bullet without even knowing what hit them? That doesn't sound very heroic. Second, fast and merciless assassination would save a LOT of time. In order to bring them to "open trial" you would first have to capture them, and that implies a whole diplomatic mess. By the time you manage to persuade (one way or another) governments like those of Afghanistan or Iraq to hand them over, they would have plenty of time to organize the next attack. If you just go after them with Rambo-style assassins ("if they catch you, we don't know you") you avoid the diplomatic hassle and you do essentially the same job a lot quicker and cleaner. With the added bonus that without their leaders, terrorists aren't worth much and certainly won't be capable of planning a second hit.
Political dissidents, you say? Nonsense. We would be going after *known* terrorists, people with quite a few claimed terrorist attacks on their records, not some guy who just opposes his country's government.
Well, I guess you *could* try them and put them in prison. But what do you do when, a few months later, 10 guys carrying concealed plastic containers walk into the Empire State building and threaten to release Serin gas (or Anthrax or whatever) all over Manhattan unless you let bin Laden or whoever is currently in jail walk away free? Not much you can do, eh?
No, these guys *must* die. And they must die in such a way as to discourage others from becoming terrorists: quietly and anonymously.
If Osama Bin Laden was assasinated tomorrow, what country would be assumed to be responsible? The U.S. of course. Hell, if the Israelis did it we'd still get blamed. The people who think Bin Laden might have a point are just going to get further evidence that maybe he's right after witnessing further agression by the U.S. Furthermore, since it's not like he was even given a trial, we haven't really presented proof that he really is behind this. If he doesn't get a chance to defend himself against accusations, how do we know he isn't just a scape goat?
:).
Political dissidents, you say? Nonsense. We would be going after *known* terrorists, people with quite a few claimed terrorist attacks on their records, not some guy who just opposes his country's government.
We'd be going after *known* terrorists? How do they become *known*? By killing people. So by then it is too late. So then how do we stop them from getting to that point? We have to infiltrate organizations who *might* harbor terrorists. And hey, while we are there, why don't we do a bit to keep them quiet. It's a very slippery slope when the government starts lashing out secretly. If there's no oversight, no judge, what's to stop them from infiltrating more benign organizations?
Well, I guess you *could* try them and put them in prison. But what do you do when, a few months later, 10 guys carrying concealed plastic containers walk into the Empire State building and threaten to release Serin gas (or Anthrax or whatever) all over Manhattan unless you let bin Laden or whoever is currently in jail walk away free? Not much you can do, eh?
So we kill him. And then 10 guys carrying concealed plastic contaners walk into the empire state build and release serin gas (or antrhax or whatever) all over Manhattan. The only way to defuse their fanaticism is to show to the world in a fair way what he has done and how it is truely a blight on humanity. The most fanatical won't be convinced by this, but then shooting him won't convince them either (and it may convince less radical elements that the United States is just a VERY large rogue nation).
No, these guys *must* die. And they must die in such a way as to discourage others from becoming terrorists: quietly and anonymously.
Yes because we all know that people who aren't afraid to die are likey to be afraid that we will kill them.... uh, okay, sure
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
My personal opinion is that this is pure propaganda. It's precisely what politicians and the media would want you to believe. Why? Because this approach leads to an emotional response, rather than a rational one. And we all know how easy it is to manipulate people's emotions. This is an incredible opportunity for politicians to push their own agenda, and stirring up people's emotions is the first step in that direction (if you have trouble believing this, look closely at any statement made by any politician during the last week and notice the abundant use of metaphors and symbols, rather than logical reasoning in their speech). The real reason, IMHO, for this display of hatred towards the USA has to do with how SOME of the Middle-Eastern people perceive the interventions of the US in what they call "their own business". They see the US as a country that uses its superior military power to brutally impose its own selfish interests to anyone who might not agree. Whether this perception is accurate or not, it's beyond the scope of my argument. The fact is that it exists and it's leading to despicable acts of terrorism against innocent people like the one last Tuesday.
Now what US politicians seem to be trying to do is feed a constant stream of propaganda to the population, with the apparent purpose of getting the public to identify Afghanistan as "the enemy" and to believe, exactly like you stated, that these people hate the "American way of life itself", which, logically speaking, is nonsense. These people have probably no idea of how American live and what they believe in. How can they hate something they don't know? They're probably manipulated into mindless hostility towards Americans, the same way Americans seem now manipulated into mindless hostility towards Afghans. THIS CANNOT LEAD TO ANYTHING GOOD.
People, both Eastern and Western, need to wake up and realize there's no point in blindly hating each other. They need to see how their own leaders are turning them against each other, for who knows what reasons, and for once step up and put an end to all this. What the heck would be so wrong in Middle Easterners collaborating with the West in an effort to stop terrorism, and the West revising a couple of items on its foreign policy, especially the ones Arabs find the most sensitive?
Oh well. I'm still allowed to dream, aren't I?
As they rip up the Bill of Rights and
bend us over to take our wallets they will lose
the nation.
The crooks have left us with a centralized
weak infrastructure system unfit to beat
anybody that can hit us.
Some of our infrastructure and systems make us vulnerable. Large centralized
sky scrapers, energy, communications bottlenecks and
financial systems are easy targets of low tech "distributed denial
of service" (DDoS) type attacks, and these systems will fail catastrophically.
Unfortunately, DDoS attacks are difficult to prevent.
Attacks on one building shut down the financial markets of the
USA and killed 5,000 people. The building failed catastrophically
killing hundreds of rescue workers, other buildings were then destroyed
in a "domino effect." The combination of centralized location and a
centralized finance system shut down the stock market.
The other attack killed a couple hundred people but has no real effect on
the military system. Why?
If the terrorists flew 10 planes into the Pentagon they would have
still killed just a few hundred military plus a lot of passengers. The low
building was quickly evacuated.
Killing some defense contractors and desk warmers is not
going to stop the military system. The US armed forces have a deep
distributed structure. For example, National Guard units are
distributed to 50 separate state commands. Coast Guard, Marines,
Navy, Air Force, Army, Reserves all have command structures, bases and
people distributed world wide.
Which system was the most centralized and vulnerable to catastrophic
failure? Which system will have the same problems even after
spending forty billion dollars to rebuild?
To protect our nation some questions should be asked:
Why can an attack on one building in New York City shut down the
national financial markets? Is power and money so concentrated that
we can be totally controlled not just by terrorists but by others
whose motives do not have our interests at heart? The free
market is supposed to be central to our freedom.
It is too bad our leaders (Bush-Cheney) advocate centralized and
vulnerable systems that can be skimmed for short term profits and
used as choke points on our own people.
Bush-Cheney want more nuke plants, higher concentration of
money, power, centralized infrastructure, fewer rights,
less personal privacy, more state secrecy, more spies, etc.
This is tragically the opposite of what should be done.
How long until the terrorists that we created and trained
(Hussien, Bin Lauden, Taleban, Colombians, whoever) figure out that they
can easily stop this country by switching targets to other centralized
vulnerable systems? Systems such as nuclear plants or other
systems that can fail in catastrophic ways.
For example, send cars or small planes filled with fertilizer/oil
bombs into nuke plant control offices. Twenty terrorists the same day and
how many will succeed? One, five, maybe all twenty. The World Trade
Center would look like a toy roman candle compared to Hiroshima.
Forty mile "Glow Zones" near or in the 20 largest cities. Millions of
people sick or killed, trillions of dollars of infrastructure polluted
and lost. Even if the 20 nuke plants all "contained" any radiation
problems the hit to the power grid would be serious. Do the same to
Japan and Europe and the new super powers of the world will be
Brazil and China.
There is an infrastructure and systems solution to avert national
disasters. It is hard to stop a society that has buildings that
are only 10 stories high, gets power from many distributed
non-catastrophic systems and has flexible dense distributed
communications, transportation and other systems.
We can start to make changes in our infrastructure without waiting
for the next terrorist attack. But the policies of distributing
infrastructure, wealth and power are not the policies of the
system centralists that claimed they won the last national election.
Remember Vietnam? Extensive carpet bombing, massive chemical warfare,
assassinations, state terror, propaganda, political manipulation of
a puppet government. Our mighty distributed military system was
victorious in the field of battle.
Yet we were beaten by an even more distributed infrastructure,
political will, and some smart guys that looked at the long term
view. And the policies of that time created and trained most of
the "enemies" we now face.
Do our leaders and our own systems create the terrorists and at
the same time make us totally vulnerable to the terrorism? What can be
done to make the world safer? Will an anti-missile system do it?
How about locking up or killing all that disagree with Rush Limbaugh?
Or is it time to consider real solutions.