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What's Your Terrorism Quotient?
unassimilatible writes "From the Department of Pre-Crime, the AP reports: before helping to launch the criminal information project known as Matrix (Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange), a database contractor gave U.S. and Florida authorities the names of 120,000 people who showed a statistical likelihood of being terrorists - sparking some investigations and arrests. The 'high terrorism factor' scoring system also became a key selling point for the involvement of the database company, Seisint Inc., in the Matrix project. According to Seisint's presentation, dated January 2003 and marked confidential, the 120,000 names with the highest scores were given to the INS, FBI, Secret Service and Florida state police. Seisint and the law enforcement officials who oversee Matrix insist that the terrorism scoring system ultimately was kept out of the project, largely because of privacy concerns."
I'm 24 years old. I don't want to go through the next 50 years of my life living in an international air of worry and uncertainty. I don't want to live in a permanent state of fear, generated by a megalomaniacal American government taking advantage of the majority low IQ populous' capacity for being brainwashed.
I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner. The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs never are).
The world is fu*cked up enough as it is. The food chain has been poisoned so badly the average human is full of chemicals normally found in plastics and toxic waste. I'm sick of global warning and environmental damage to the planet and the fact the all this time the greenies were right. I'm sick of America being the biggest wilful contributor to the pollution of the planet.
I'm sick of an American school system that produces children who are brought up to believe that America IS the world and anything that goes on outside is irrelevant. Children so stupid they think America invented the Internet, computer, motor car, light bulb, telephone etc ad infinitum....
The Internet or it's successor is the future of entertainment and I'm sick of stupid low IQ, ignorant Americans infecting every corner of it with their insular, jingoistic mindsets, their whiny voices and manifestations of their low self esteem driven by the fact that despite it being their turn as the world's super power, no one actually takes them seriously or gives them the respect that the British or the Ancient Greeks got because a superpower best known for producing mass produced crap is never going to get the respect that one who gave the world Shakespeare, culture, philosophy or mathematics will get.
I'm sick of hypocrisy and two facedness. I'm sick of Gangsta Rap and hamburgers, Political Correctness and TV programmes that begin with 'When' and end in 'go bad and attack people'. I'm sick of reality TV and I'm sick of news programmes that are more censored than accurate. I'm sick of tokens, token minorities, token universities, token degrees, token attempts at the truth, tokens. I'm sick of fat people, ugly people, stupid people, gay people, coloured people, female people, whiny people all complaining they don't have the opportunities in life they would like and it must be someone else's fault. I'm sick of women that act like men and femininity being a crime, unless you're a man in which case you're a new man which nobody ever wanted because there was nothing wrong with the old one. I'm sick of people falling over and suing the ground and people watching nipples and suing the TV and I'm sick of coffee cups with 'don't pour over yourself, you may get burnt' on the side to try and counter this.
I'm sick of stupid Americans who don't know the difference between patriotism and jingoism and who think flag waving should be an Olympic event. I'm sick of Americans who cry that people hate them or are jealous of them or who are anti them because someone dares to point out that the America they've been programmed to believe in from birth bears no relation to the one that exists in real life.
I for one welcome our new Matrix overlords.
Wait a moment...
I'm sorry, that's so scary it's not even funny.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
I wonder what they prefer when they make a system like this, false positives or false negatives. It's like a spam filter, only it tries to separate the bad guys from the good ones.
I prefer false negatives (spam messages that end up in my inbox) over false positives (real mail that end up in the bin) from my spam filter, but when you're dealing with humans it's a lot more serious.
Martin
>>Seisint Inc., is a Boca Raton, Fla., company founded by a millionaire, Hank Asher, who stepped down from its board of directors last year after revelations of past ties to drug smugglers.
Anyone care to guess one of the main sources of terrorist income?
who can refer to the USA as "The Land of the Free" while keeping a straight face.
sweet f'ing christ. do people not see similarities to the Red Scare or McCarthyism? Are people really so dense?
save me jeebus.
What if the software is accurate?
What if 120,000 Americans are latent (or blatent) terrorists?
What then?
yes, because there are 120,000 terrorists. And they've been identified by software. we should arrest them.
I think that the ACLU is not worried about arresting terrorists... i think that they're generally for it. I think they're more worried about the ratio of actual terrorists to non-terrorists in our investigations being way, way, way to low.
~dijjnn
Who would of thought not knowing the history questions on your SAT's would be such a big deal. It's the 1977 California Personality Index all over again. You would think society may have matured just a bit over the years.
"But the ACLU is still, predictably, concerned."
As they should be.
120,000 people could be arrested this week-simply for being in a database. I think that 9/11 has simply turned our government against anyone who might come within a hundred miles of overthrowing it-even it's own citizens. Listen to Fear Factory's "Obsolete" and look for the not-too far off future.
Think: this kind of thing, if your "quotient" was too high, could conceiveably prevent you from getting a job, or maybe a loan. I don't think this helps everyone. It's all a product of feelings of racism and vengeance.
I'm sure all the tin-foil hats will come out of the woodworks about this. Seriously though, do you not expect the agency reponsible for anti-terrorism efforts to actually do its job well? If this could have stopped those planes from killing thousands of civilians, people would be screaming in outrage about how we didn't use it when we should have. The problem is this country (this world, really) is that everybody wants to be reactive and not proactive. This is especially true in the computer security field, as we all know.
Everyone bitches and moans about systems like this that can prevent terrorist attacks, but then they make a huge stink about some memo from Richard Clarke that had next to nothing useful in it. Go figure.
Interestingly enough Osama and his men were paid and trained by the CIA for just what the parent poster said.
Agnostic : ---------------
Democrat : +
Male : ++
Moderate : -------
Young : ++
Yuppie : ---------
White : --------------------
<i>I'll</i> be fine, but thanks for asking.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
This is ridiculous. They don't have a 'likely to commit a murder' database.. or a 'likely to rape young women' database.. unless those people have already committed crimes. Now, we can be likely to commit a crime yet still be someone that has never commited a crime.
I'm sick of what the government has done in the spirit of 'fighting terrorism.' Terror is the least of my worries. Ya, 9/11 was horrible.. but it isn't worth giving up our way of life to prevent. I'm more likely to be struck by lighting while being bitten by a shark than to die from an act of terror.
These 'preventative' databases are stupid. American Citizens should not be subject to a 'likely to commit terror' database without ever having done something wrong. Some of the most patriotic people are also the most criticizing of the US.. Should they be on the database?
If there are 120,000 people on the list, shouldn't there have been more acts of terrorism in the US?
IMO, there's bigger problems on which to focus. Why fix the windshield wipers when the brakes aren't working?
--- We need more Ron Paul!
I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner. The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs never are). You just completely contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. You don't want the threat, but you don't want to do anything about it, and you want your children to grow up in a militarized world, and you want your government to default to surrender because it can't allow itself to fight guerrilla tactics because somehow they are impossible to employ in the persuit of victory? After such blatant and simple to unravel contradiction, where you are speaking crosswise to yourself without pausing to take a breath, why should we listen to anything else you have to say? The world is fu*cked up enough as it is. The food chain has been poisoned so badly the average human is full of chemicals normally found in plastics and toxic waste. I'm sick of global warning and environmental damage to the planet and the fact the all this time the greenies were right. I'm sick of America being the biggest wilful contributor to the pollution of the planet. America is not the biggest polluter, intentional or otherwise: China and Russia are, followed by many of their previous holdings in Africa and South America. I'm 24 years old. I don't want to go through the next 50 years of my life living in an international air of worry and uncertainty. Whether you worry or not is your choice. Grow up. We all have to be adults here and face the real world. A world where like it or not, be at peace or not, people are just going to come out of the woodwork and try and kill you. This is NOT a "live and let live" world. You think it is? Talk to Neville Chamberlain. The threat is not dumb Americans you pompous arrogant condescending coward, it's terrorists who want to fecking kill us. You know how we fix this problem? We MUST destroy BOTH their ability and desire to wage war with us, and we don't stop until those have been absolutely achieved. The Japanese were a far more brave and zealous enemy than the fascist militant Islamics are, and we won. Our current enemy is far more dangerous because of their tactics and capability. Wishing for the threat of new attacks to go away will not take them away. Myself and hundreds of millions of other American citizens are not going to let snide "armchair quarterback" academics try and reason-away responsibilities. We're not going to let them establish moral equivilance between the U.S. and it's current aggressors, brutal murderous terrorists. Other than those things, you did have some decent rants about the sillyness of modern living. But TRUST ME! Those silly "cultural behavioral patterns" are not at all limited to the U.S.A.
The ACLU is the only organization that ever has the balls to look at what the Federal Government is doing and make a stand against the overarching, draconian measures that many government officials would *love* to see happen. Guess what? The Federal Government wants to control your actions as much as possible, not only so that you are not a threat against Americans, but more so that you are not a threat against them.
Protecting us from random acts of terror is about as possible as landing a 747 on the Brooklyn Bridge. We're too open, too easy, too soft. Guess what? I LIKE IT THAT WAY.
"Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither".
Did you see the latest FBI Suidice Bomber Warnings sent out today? Here's a pointer from the alert: Be on the lookout for people with clenched fists!!
Living in the United States used to be about living out a free existence with minimal government intervention. In the last few years we have become an Orwellian society where you are stamped with a number and contstantly tracked by the government for 'threat status'. Your primary purpose is to receive advertising, consume products, and pay the government a share of it all.
I have bad news for some: the War on Terror is not a war anyone could win, and even fighting it for a thousand years would not end the cycle of violence that perpetuates it. I wonder how many young Iraqi children are thinking about their bombed out homes and dead parents and swearing vengeance on the United States someday. Those will be the next generation of people who fly planes into our skyscrapers.
They understand that they're going to sometimes be defending unpopular positions and people. They defend the rights of white supremacists to march in public, for example. They've also defended Rush Limbaugh against what they view as intrusive attempts by the police to get at his medical records and show that he was "doctor shopping" to feed his addiction. They're making those choices consciously, according to principles which they state conspicuously.
You, meanwhile, don't seem to be doing anything more than bitch for reasons you haven't thought through.
First off: when, exactly, has the ACLU complained that not enough is being done to fight terrorism? Hello? Anyone home? Or were you just confusing "liberals" or "Democrats" with the ACLU?
And more to the point: "Potential terrorists"? When you start using a term like that, perhaps you'd like to devote some thought to it. Because the FBI has, in the past, regarded people like Martin Luther King, Jr. as a "potential terrorist." Because, you know, that let them bug his hotel rooms and accumulate evidence that he wasn't faithful to his wife, which put some nice blackmail material in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover.
The ACLU tries to protect American citizens from the abusive use of power. You, meanwhile, resent them for 'getting in the way.' What does that say about you, exactly? Maybe you want to think that through rather than sleepwalking through your life vaguely angry at those pesky liberals.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Yeah, actually some of the terrorists who were involved with 9/11 ended up being flagged as terrorists by the system.
Now, I know they were working on this system befor 9/11 but I've got to wonder if they didn't do a little marketbenching and alter it so the names of the terrorists would end up on the list so they could goto the government and say "See, see, the system works!"
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
My sig says it all.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Karma be damned....
Seisint's Proposed Questionnaire for next stage of study:
Are you or have you ever been a member of any of the following
(check all that apply):
- Amnesty International
- ACLU
- Nature Conservancy
- National Academy of Sciences
- Any non-GOP political party
- Any GOP group that has ever disagreed with the White House
- Any non-Christian religion
- Any Christian sect that fails to see that creating all-out war in
the Middle East that melts down Jerusalem will invoke the
Second Coming.
Do you associate with anyone to whom the above may apply? (Yes/No)
Do you get your news from any media sources other than the White
House Press Office, Fox News, or conservative talk radio? (Yes/No)
Do you associate with anyone to whom the above may apply? (Yes/No)
I'm SO sick of all you liberals blaming Bush for 9/11, while things weren'te perfect, he didn't fly the planes into buildings. And you all complain incessantly about how the gov't didn't do enough. Well now we've got President Bush who is trying to do something to try to improve the world and try to make it better for everyone and all you do is bust him for it. ITS NOT HIS FAULT.
Now you all say, "how did we have these terrorists training in our country for so long and not know about it?" How are we supposed to know? Now they are trying to set up a system, I'm not advocating it I don't know enough about it, to find the people we might want to watch a little closer and all you do is complain and talk about how horrible the US is. If you live here and hate it, get out...we don't want you.
There's just no way to respond to all of you liberal drones, it makes me sick that there are so many people out there who don't think for themselves or who think that tucking our tails between our legs and running like France is a good idea. Are you ready to convert to Islam? That's the only way these terrorists are going to leave us alone. Voting Bush out won't make them like us more. With someone else in office it will just be easier for them to attack us again.
I think systems like these are perfectly legitimate. For one thing, the terrorist quotient (TQ from here on) isn't evidence of terrorism; it is an indication of possible terrorism.
The police or FBI should investigate people who have patterns of behavior that are similar to known terrorists. They should gather real data to either confirm or deny the possibility. Then what they find should be fed back into the system.
Having a high TQ is only enough to make someone suspect. Having a low TQ is not enough to clear someone. As long as police and FBI realize this, the system will work fine and do exactly what it is intended to do.
If you're wondering how they calculate TQ, they examine country of origin (terrorists tend to come from a few countries), age, length of stay (terrorists will return occasionally to known terrorist locations), location of residence (terrorists may live close together), income source (terrorists will get large sums of money suddenly), and behavior.
For instance, a guy from Saudi Arabia who is 35 and visited Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran, and who inexplicably received several hundred thousand dollars, and who ordered several tons of fertilizer when they live near downtown New York where they work as a taxi driver, and who rented a large truck would score high.
A geek who was born in Canada and only visited the Far East and/or Europe, who has a steady income from his job as a (insert IT job here) and who bought a large supply of fertilizer (along with farming supplies and tools) and lives in a rural location in Montana would not have a high TQ.
The system won't be perfect as it won't detect every single terrorist and may render a few obvious false positives. But it will identify a large enough number that it will give the police and FBI a start.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
> I don't want to live like Israel, fighting militant Muslims round every corner.
>The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people
>who have done nothing to deserve it. I want my children to grow up in a world free from military
>oppression and I want a government that understands that the wars of the future are
>guerrilla ones which can never be won, even if they are waged for noble purposes (which theirs
>never are).
You just completely contradicted yourself in the same paragraph. You don't want the threat, but you don't want to do anything about it, and you want your children to grow up in a militarized world, and you want your government to default to surrender because it can't allow itself to fight guerrilla tactics because somehow they are impossible to employ in the persuit of victory? After such blatant and simple to unravel contradiction, where you are speaking crosswise to yourself without pausing to take a breath, why should we listen to anything else you have to say?
I believe his logic can best be explained as:
a)"When you poked the wasp nest you got stung"
b)"Poking the bee nest just to get back at the wasps will only make things worse"
We need to find a way to get the moderate muslim majority off of their asses and get them to do the work of cleaning up what is really their problem not ours. Personally, I don't give a f**k if the moderate muslims hate us, so, I would pursure a disproportional response strategy. If you start killing tens of thousands of moderates to get a few bad guys the moderates might get the idea that it is a far, far better thing for them to take care of the bad guys than waiting for us to do it.
The problem of Muslim extremists exists and needs to be dealt with, not encouraged by invading innocent countries and waging war on people who have done nothing to deserve it.
What does 'dealt with' mean? Muslim extremists want to run your country under strict (their interpretation) Islamic law, or they want you dead. You deal with them by killing them. I say lets fight for the next 100 years if necessary.
an ill wind that blows no good
The crux of the debate I think is how best to handle terrorism. If you are for a military solution then I can see only two options:
1) Wipe all terrorists off the face of the earth.
Is this really realistic? You can kill every single terrorist that lives now, but more are being born (by non-terrorist moderates) every day.
2) Strong arm potential/future terrorists with a display of "shock and awe". This is an often stated reason (among WMD, spread of democracy, etc. etc.) for invading Iraq.
I think this is touching in its naivete. All you have to do is think if the situations were reversed what would you do? If someone killed your brother, would you be docile and take it? We (the US) as a people rebelled against another country because we didnt like TAXES for gossake, what would we do if another country started killing some of our population?
I personally think terrorism can never be eradicated. We live in a world where individuals have a disporportionate power to wreck havoc. The only thing to do is police everyone, NOT attack them, but be vigilant. Now there is no way to police every single person in the world, so we must rely on our allies, and do everything we can to support them in their policing. This might not lead to flag-waving moments, but ultimately this is the only way I believe to contain terrorism. This requires that we have smarts and finesse, by coaxing/bribing/cajoling other countries to do our dirty work-performing raids, intelligence, surveilance. It requires us not to snub our noses at the UN or any countyr who doesnt have a cowboy mentality that our administration seems to have.
Strutting around with guns cocked may be psychologically satisfying, but ultimately it just brings out every single person who wants to challenge us, and that line will never end.
I made the move a little over two years ago, Now I'd be hard pressed to go back.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
It didn't read that way to me. Put it this way, if you get stung by a wasp, do you grab a stick and hit the nearest bee's nest?
The complaint is not that we should sit back and do nothing, but that we should only attack after first thinking about things. Properly. Otherwise, things go wrong, no matter how powerful you are.
Without public acceptance this can only be a tool of a "gestapo" secret police. I'm not saying the FBI shouldn't exist. I'm saying that guardianship requires honest and competent debate in good faith, or else there WILL be problems and some might be drop-dead killer problems. After all, who wants to go to sleep each night wondering how much their "terrorist quotient" changed today, and in what way?
BTW, America is still free and will remain so as long as we the People remain certain in our right to be protected from unwarranted search and seizure. If we ever trade democratic freedom for the safety of an Autocratic police state, we're f*kt. (And as a democrat, I feel that Bush is angling for a police state every time I hear him ask me to "trust" him. He seems to gloss over the fact that he was not elected by a unanimous landslide. I don't trust Bush. And I won't until his spinmeisters stop telling me that it's "OK" because black is white... because black is not white.)
I never said I was a centrist.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
A list of 120,000 names does not really narrow it down much. Perhaps there are a few hundred foriegn terrorists operating in the United States. 1% of 120,000 is 1200 and I would venture a guess that there are no more than 1200 foriegn terrorists in the US even by the widest stretch of the term terrorist. If my assumption is accurate then that mean MATRIX has a 99% false positive rate and sorting through 120,000 names to find 1200 or less is not a very useful tool. If there were really 120000 terrorists or even 12000 don't you think they would have gone to the store bought some guns and started shooting people by now. 12000 is a small army and could easily cause a lot of damage before our military could respond. Even 1200 could all get together and really do a lot of damage. That leads me to believe that they are a few hundred at most in a number of different groups espousing vastly different ideological and political goals. This system is just one more tool to turn America into a police state. Who are the real terrorists here?
Afghanistan...arguably in worse shape than when we invaded
Then your standard for what an argument consists of are low. I wonder what the average Afghan woman thinks of that statement?
an ill wind that blows no good
You just completely contradicted yourself in the same paragraph
True. Youthful exuberance in the parent poster. It's true you can't live in a safe world by capitulating to every terrorist organization, but at the same time, spending billions of dollars to invade countries that have zero involvement with terrorism is also a little quixotic. But also, just being the guy who swings the big bat around on a whim, even when directed at the right organizations, can often make you more of a target. It's far better to use diplomacy whenever possible. Bush doesn't believe in diplomacy, he always takes the low road and always creates more trouble than he settles.
America is not the biggest polluter, intentional or otherwise
Also true. We're SUPPOSED to be the "good guys" though. America, despite all the hatred you hear, is loved by the world and we're looked up to virtually everywhere. But it's like when you catch your father having sex with your sister. You still think he's a god deep down inside, but now you hate him and think he's off his fargin rocker and needs to be netted, tagged and neutered. You can't hate someone the way you hate someone that you love deeply who has betrayed you, disillusioned you and made you feel alone, without any real guidance for your future.
The threat is not dumb Americans you pompous arrogant condescending coward
We are, though. Not directly. The terrorists started us on this current steamroll of death and dismemberment, to be sure. But our reaction is acidic. We made things worse. There will always be terrorists, so we need to learn to react properly and engage them properly. 3000 dead from 9/11 is no reason to kill Iraqis. They had nothing to do with the attack. It's this fact, that we launch into countries who have nothing to do with anything, that makes the whole world see us as overbearing, sick and twisted. We are, too. We have no common sense about things anymore. We just do what we want and justify it as we go along. "It's for safety! It's for God! It's for the children!"
I see your opinion as the flip side of the opinion of the top poster. You both are hitting the mark, but you aren't dead-on and it's that wild swing left and right that is the real trouble these days. People need to realize there are no more good guys. There are only people doing the right thing or the wrong thing, and America is just as capable of doing the wrong thing as any terrorist is. Iraq is proof of that. Bush is proof that we are NOT blessed by God to be the world's leader for all that is good in the world. We are capable of evil, just like everyone else.
My point is, few people are absolutely correct these days about either side of the issue. We've done good, we've done bad. We're (the U.S.) not the world's knight in shining armor anymore.
Since sarin and other gasseous nerve agents are worthless as single-instance munitions, they'd have to be stockpiled by the thousands to be considered an effective military weapon. Given Hussein's well-known paranoia and lack of trust of even his own military leadership, he likely moved the stockpiles around, deliberately mislabeled them and, this, coupled with his military's incompetance and corruption likely led a few of them to be overlooked or retained by local commanders, either deliberately or out of fear that they would be punished for destroying them.
Arguing that he "had" weapons of mass destruction simply because a few random shells have turned up is entirely pedantic given the circumstances of Hussein's regime and the nature of the weapons.
Why should any regular individual be worried about these systems? From the best essay on privacy and 9/11 laws I've seen (from the former privacy czar of Canada- warning Canadians not to lose rights Americans have already lost):
"...But there also will be tangible, specific harm. The more information government compiles about us, the more of it will be wrong. That's simply a fact of life.
"But if our privacy becomes ever more systematically invaded by the state for purposes of assessing our behavior and making judgments about us, wrong information and misinterpretations will have potential consequences.
"If information that is actually about someone else is wrongly applied to us, if wrong facts make it appear that we've done things we haven't, if perfectly innocent behavior is misinterpreted as suspicious because authorities don't know our reasons or our circumstances, we will be at risk of finding ourselves in trouble in a society where everyone is regarded as a suspect. By the time we clear our names and establish our innocence, we may have suffered irreparable financial or social harm...
"Decisions detrimental to us may be made on the basis of wrong facts, incomplete or out-of-context information or incorrect assumptions, without our ever having the chance to find out about it, let alone to set the record straight...
"The bottom line is this: If we have to live our lives weighing every action, every communication, every human contact, wondering what agents of the state might find out about it, analyze it, judge it, possibly misconstrue it, and somehow use it to our detriment, we are not truly free. That sort of life is characteristic of totalitarian countries, not a free and open society like Canada...
" Compiling dossiers on the private activities of all law-abiding citizens is the sort of thing the Stasi secret police used to do in the former East Germany. It has no place in a free and democratic society."
"...When people are worried about their safety, when we have seen the horrors of which today's breed of terrorists are capable - and there may be more - it's easy to lose perspective. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that security is all that matters and that human rights such as privacy are a luxury. But such extremes can only reward and encourage terrorism, not diminish it. They can only devastate our lives, without commensurately safeguarding them. Of course we all want to be safe. But we could be safer from terrorism - perhaps - if we permanently evacuated all the high-rise office towers, if we closed down the subways, if we forever grounded all airplanes. Yet no reasonable person would be likely to argue for adopting such measures. We'd say, "We want to be safe, yes - but not at the price of sacrificing our whole way of life." The same reasoning should apply, in my view, to arguments that privacy should indiscriminately be sacrificed on the altar of enhanced security..."
A tiny minority of Muslims might actually believe anything remotely near to what you say.
...To further extend the wasp analogy, the "RAID" is causing honey bees to mutate into angry wasps.
The Israel situation has got absolutely nothing to to with "resisting conversion"... that is fundamentalist christian bullshit. It is to do with occupation, repression and desparation.
So we shouldn't have invaded Iraq because Al-Qaeda wouldn't like it?
Uhm..Al Qaeda probably was quite pleased with the invasion. They wanted to get rid of Saddam as badly as the US did. And lets not forget: the war has dramatically increased anti-American sentiments in Iraq and the rest of the world, boosting support for terrorist organisations like Al Queda. No doubt recruitment of these organisations will have gone up as a direct result of the war in Iraq.
And we're losing a guerilla war where we're killing 20 times more of the guerillas than they are of us (at least)?
You have been playing to many computer games. Wars aren't necessarily won by the ones who score the highest body count.
So we shouldn't have invaded Iraq because Al-Qaeda wouldn't like it?
Actually yes, that should have been a consideration. We should have looked at what we'd get out of it vs what the cost would be. In this case we got nothing out of it and we are paying billions each month for the privilege of occupying the place. And to top all that off we provided Al-Qaeda with the best damn recruitment photograph in history.
And it was okay that Saddam tried to hide and create WMDs, just as long as he wasn't successful?
Do you have any evidence that he was still trying to create them? I'm sorry but we don't go to war on "We think he might be doing this". And quite frankly who the hell cares what Saddam may or may not have had? I'd have started worrying about it when he had delivery systems to actually get the damn things here. And don't come back at me and say "He was in bed with the terrorists" unless you are prepared to say exactly what terrorists he was "in bed" with (Al-Qaeda hated him) and what motivation he would have had to give them WMDs.
And we're losing a guerilla war where we're killing 20 times more of the guerillas than they are of us (at least)?
I don't know that we're losing but we aren't winning now are we? If you think killing 20 of them for every one of our own is a victory then I suggest you check out the Korean War in your history book. 54,246 Americans died -- DoD estimates that we killed over 1,500,000 North Koreans/Chinese. That's one point five million. That's a ratio of slightly over 27 enemy KIA for each one of our own. And guess what? We didn't win the Korean War.
Furthermore the Korean war wasn't a guerilla war -- it was a conventional war. Every time we kill an Iraqi insurgent we piss off the local population and two or three more step forward to take his place. Does this sound like a winning formula to you? Are you prepared to kill every man of military age in Iraq so we can declare victory?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I have a negative terrorism quotient - I own guns and will shoot you if you are a terrorist, so the more of me there are, the fewer terrorist points we have.
If only American lives count, the current tally is three shy of 800;
If one were to argue that ally deaths count too, as I'm sure those allies would contend, 907;
and if the lives of Iraqi civilians are graciously given any worth, on the low side, the body count is currently over 10,000.
I love this analogy. My version:
Isreali Counter-terrorism strategy: If you get stung by a bee, give their nest a couple of hard whacks. This will teach them not to sting you.
American Strategy: If you get stung by a bee go give a wasp's nest a couple of hard whacks. This will demonstrate to the bees that you mean business and they will stop stinging you.
Sig removed because it was obnoxious
I just love how everybody wants to cry havoc when the government starts removing their 'liberties.' I'd just like to take this moment to point out how many people were outraged when the Clinton era 'crime bill' (AKA 'assault weapons ban of 1994) was passed. This was a direct violation of the Second Ammendment (as were previous FEDERAL laws governing firearm ownership/posession), and yet the American Public (you know who you are) did nothing. It's sad that less than 10 years after that putrid 'law' went into effect we have a supreme court that passes a law DIRECTLY abridging the First Ammendment (I'm referring to the law governing the airing of 'negative' political ads for the 90 days preceeding a public election), and the American Public (once again, you know who you are) remains curiously silent.
Oh, and for those of you (contempt warning) "Americans" who actually BELIEVE that the Second Ammendment applies only to the National Guard- I'd just like to point out that the Bill of Rights was signed 112 years before the National Guard existed.
I have not voted to elect a SINGLE in office politician EVER. None of the canidates I vote for ever get even CLOSE to winning, because I vote based on my convictions. If you really want to have our government do something to deterr(sp?) terrorist acts in this country- write your 'elected' representative and tell them in NO uncertain terms that you will not vote for them again if they allow the 1994 'assault' weapons ban to be resurrected. Put some REAL 'antiterrorism' tools out there, where they will do the most good; in the hands of law abiding citizens.
Flame away, but there will come a time that you will remember these words, and wonder if I may have been right.
-Joe Glessner
Absolutely. Since we know that Bush never makes mistakes, anyone who criticizes him must be an irrational liberal, overcome with mindless partisan rancor. The fact that well-being of the United States and the world have nose-dived straight into the toilet over the last three years is completely coincidental, and has nothing at all to do with Bush's radical ideas about how the foreign policy, the economy and the environment should be handled. Move along citizens, nothing to see here.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.