Slashdot Mirror
Body Scanners for the London Underground
Ronald Dumsfeld writes "In a report in the TimesOnline, it is alleged that those lovely see-through-your-clothes scanners are to be installed in London's Tube stations. Part of the UK's Military-industrial complex, QinetiQ stands to make £150,000 to £2 million per station ($260,000 - $3.4 million) with their
Millimetre Wave Imagers."
Essentially it boils down to this. However you believe a government should spend tax dollars, they're going to get spent in two ways: to benefit campaign supporters and cronies, and to do things that mollify the public just enough to make the re-election fight a little easier. A terrorist incident makes people feel less safe, so politicians spend money on things that make them feel safer. Good, bad, effective, useless... doesn't matter. It just has to be perceived as responsive.
Expensive scanners in tube stations? Brilliant!
Security costs money. Of course, the money gets spent on expensive and showy equipment, not on better training of security personnel (or screening of security personnel - some TSA screeners look like they should have their mittens safety-pinned to their coats). But it's all bread and circuses. It's about the perception of security. And governments are great at spending money to create that.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
If this had been suggested a mere week ago, it wouldn't of been given a second thought... invasion of privacy... something about perverts you know...
Sorry, the "hot nekkid chicks" guy got first post. At least it wasn't some GNAA d*ckhead.
Start a happiness pandemic
* Population of London: 5.5m
* Average deaths per day: 215
* Increase of death rate on 7 July: 23%
If there had been 50 extra heart attacks in London on 7 July, do you think that it would have been noticed? If it weren't for the wall to wall media coverage, this would have been a non-event.
Britain used to have a really good track record on terrorism. When the IRA blew something up, there would be a brief note about it on the news, then nothing. Terrorism is about publicity, and over-reporting it simply feeds it. But it seems that the dymanics have changed. Now there are too many organisations who have a vested interest in a continual state of terrorism.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
That's quite some gap. Suggests that figures are being plucked out of the air, perhaps?
Cheers,
Ian
Add the new transparent thin-film transistor (TTFT) material to a glass wall and you have the scanner in Total Recall!
WOOT! Hot nekkid ch1cks!1.
Not if you're sober.
These scanners still can see through clothing, but they can't see through all materials. This means that (a) there's a security hole or more likely (b) anyone carrying anything that cannot be seen through and is large enough to potentially carry something dangerous will have to be pulled aside and taken a closer look at. In the second case this will slow things down just like airport security slows things down making it even more of a hassle to take the tube.
Here(In Israel) we got used to this long time ago.
You can't go to anywhere without passing thru metal detectors(full size or hand used) and surface body checks.
Armed guards are common view.
I can't remember when was the last time that I've entered a mall and nobody have checked me.
The terror is taking over our lives, Now all over the world.
Wouldn't they be better off putting in devices that can detect explosives? I'm sure such things exist. 390,000 people use the Underground during the morning peak - is it feasible to scan all these?
You know, pay me a tenth of what is being charge and I will set up a few of these Sony cameras for them that will do the same trick! Although I would hate to give them up from my collection. What else will I do at the beach each weekend now?
And when someone does try to proactively think like a terrorist asshole and says something like "Hey, it'd be pretty easy to contaminate the nation's milk supply," our politicians try to censor them instead of saying "Oh shit maybe we better fix that!" I know dealing with terrorism is a hard problem and our politicians would rather be securing pork for their home districts but we're paying them to provide real leadership. Maybe it's time to start evaluating how good a job they're actually doing...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
These machines are expensive, I doubt they would be able to afford to get as of them as there are turnstyles in each station currently. As such, it would seem that this will be a terrible bottleneck in getting people on the trains, I mean, everyone will have to line up to go through these scanners. Sure, some stations might have several, not just one, but in any case they're not going to have one for each turnstyle in the station currently, so it's going to be a pain.
I don't think so..
I'm regularly in and around London, use the underground and the trains.
This scanner deal will be as much use as a chocolate teapot.
Do you get stopped for carrying an iPod, or some other music device?
No?
Then what if that's just the cover for a bomb?
There is no protection from terrorism. If somebody really wants to get you, they will.
If you spend your life worrying over it, stress'll get you before the bomb.
Be vigilant, yes. Watch out for the unclaimed baggage on the tube or the bus.
Keep your eyes open.
If everyone does that, you've got the best intelligent surveillance network in the world. The general public.
My first reaction to seeing the bombs go off was sadness for the people hit.
The second was a wave of resignation that phoney Tony would use this as an excuse to get additional surveillance in, and railroad the ID scheme.
Part one dead of track.. We see what happens next.
You see every other little thing on the security cameras, people dropping their packages. People picking their nose. People bending over.
But when it comes to something like this, it's amazing that you never see anything.
Could a secret government military unit do this? Ex-military? It's worth billions in revenue for some companies out there and that includes a tax increase for the government to cover the expense.
Follow the money. If this becomes profitable, be ready for more attacks like this.
What good are all these cameras? And now they want more expensive stuff that isn't going to help much anyway? Can government agents simply pass right through them or go around with the "proper credentials"?
Why not figure out the expense of all this ahead of time and then realize it would just be cheaper to just stay out of other countries' business. (if this is a real outsider attack)
"After today, I expect the travelling public will be more prepared to put up with a greater level of surveillance." Mr Stringer said.
I find it personally very disturbing how much people are willing to sell away their liberties for "security". We've all been to see Episode 3, but did we let its message get lost in the pretty effects? Better security could be gotten from not inflicting massive suffering on the world through plain wrong foreign policy.
This guy are sick.
I see two issues that will probably render this very expensive piece of macherinery fairly ineffective.
First, it is designed to view scads of people at once on video screens. Pinpointing just which person in a mass is the one carrying the "questionable object" may be difficult, particularly during hours of peak use.
Second, after this quote...
"We can solve the modesty issue by overlaying the body with graphics except for the area which causes concern."
The terrorists now all know just where to carry bombs to remain undetected!
You can already see those for free as in beer on the Intarweb.
What you can't do, in either case, is touch.
So please explain how this is progress?
Stick Men
If youve ever used the underground extensively youll be aware that a) Its a nightmare getting in/out at many stations at peak hours. b) On off-peak hours gates are often unmanned/broken meaning you can just walk right on. c) Many stations have gates that you can just jump over to enter/exit. d) Once in the underground system you can transfer between lines without going through any gates.
All the above means that any form of scanning system would be so easy to circumvent as to be entirely useless....unless they were to more than TRIPLE the manpower at non-central stations...and trust me that NO-ONE will be happy at seeing these costs passed onto them via ticket price increases.
Technology can only go so far. It seems that most of us Londoners have forgotten the lessons we learnt from the IRA. Ten years ago, you would never, ever let an unattended bag go ignored, and you would never leave bags unattended. Until three days ago, you saw both happening all the time. We need to remind people how easy it is to beat terrorism if everyone works together. I would also like to add a personal view on this, which is; these guys are pathetic. We have grown up with the IRA, and there is nothing special about these. Why the fuss?
BLAM!
Then, of course, there's the problem of needing a scanner at every bus stop too -- and what do you do about bazookas? A missile defence system on every double-decker bus?
All this is going to do is annoy the passengers and force Al Quaida to bomb places like Heerrods on Christmas eve (or worse yet -- boxing day!)
Oh yeah -- and inconvenience passengers.
And give the security 'droid a woody.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
There are 4 billion people on earth. 237 are Scanners. They have the most terrifying powers ever created... and they are winning.
What you can't do, in either case, is touch.
On the Underground? At the right time of day you'll be worrying more about the risk of being crushed by the bodies around you than thinking about who's touching whom.
To summarise the summary of the summary: people are a problem. ~ h2g2
Well that's one way to alleviate congestion on the tube.. prepare to see passenger numbers drop to 5%. Oh and ill be demanding copies of my scans under the data protection act just to slow things down.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
I think exploding heads would be more visually appealing.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
The other cost that the article doesn't even mention is the cost of additional security staff, I mean, at every station entrance you've got to have a few employees who are going to pull aside somebody who looks suspicious on the scanner.
If bombs are illegal...then only the terrorists will have bombs. We need to legalise them for everyone. That way, the next time someone plans on blowing something up, they'll think twice, 'cause they'll know that everyone else has a bomb just waiting for them.
...will have heard about a Private Equity company known as Carlyle Group. This is one of biggest and most profitable Private Equity firms in the world. The shareholders include the Bush family, the bin Laden family and former British PM John Major may still be their Chairman. It's a bit like Milo Minderbinder's outfit in Catch 22, where everyone benefits, because everyone is a part of the syndicate. Well anyway they own QinitiQ. And please don't assume that I am suggesting anything other than the fact that the war on terror, has been quite profitable for some parties involved.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
Did anyone see that episode they did on how security goes awry because of a bored person is the one watching the monitors and decides to move the camera away from the subject's house and car to the subject's neighbors' house because some hot and heavy action is going down there. Of course, while the person was watching a domestic steamy soap opera, the subject left his house via his car, unbeknownst to the surveillance person.
if you haven't seen it, try to find it.
The point: people are the weakest link in hi-tech.
Giving them something interesting to look at (naked bodies/ underneath people's cloths) isn't going to do anything except allow them to alleviate their boredom by paying attention the wrong things. Bad solution.
Good Solutions: metal detectors. bomb sniffing dogs. hell, bomb sniffing monkeys would probably work well too.
So we make Tube entrances secure.
Bombers then attack concert halls.
We make concert halls secure.
Bombers then attack football stadiums.
We make football stadiums secure...
There is no purely defensive solution to this problem.
--
Toby
It'll keep the generally rude and indifferent London Underground staff attentive for a change with exclamations like "Phwoar! Get that camera-fingy on err!".
"It's not your information. It's information about you" - John Ford, Vice President, Equifax
All the above means that any form of scanning system would be so easy to circumvent as to be entirely useless....unless they were to more than TRIPLE the manpower at non-central stations...and trust me that NO-ONE will be happy at seeing these costs passed onto them via ticket price increases.
Technology can only go so far. It seems that most of us Londoners have forgotten the lessons we learnt from the IRA. Ten years ago, you would never, ever let an unattended bag go ignored, and you would never leave bags unattended. Until three days ago, you saw both happening all the time. We need to remind people how easy it is to beat terrorism if everyone works together. I would also like to add a personal view on this, which is; these guys are pathetic. We have grown up with the IRA, and there is nothing special about these. Why the fuss?
If governments really were interested in protecting the people they supposedly represent, then you would see them trying to cure the disease (incredibly bad foreign relations) rather than the symptoms (terrorism).
One last thing to keep in mind, as much as I don't often give governments the benefit of the doubt:
You can take all of the preventative measures you like, but you will never know if they are actually working. You can only know when they are not working at the times when these incidents occur.
Not saying that this has happened in this or any other case of terrorism, but just stating what I believe to be true.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
Being squased like sardines in amongst a bunch of smelly people doesn't count.
How can that possibly compare to a consenting handful of naked female breast? My original question still stands.
Stick Men
How many copies of that book can you get for the cost of one scanner? It doesn't have all the answers - how could it? - it is designed to get you asking. So you install an expensive scanner at the entrance to Piccadilly Circus tube station. A huge queue forms, waiting to walk through the scanner. Add in a "queuing system" (tansabarriers etc.), so you have 200+ people waiting patiently in an enclosed space. Bang.
(this is not a
Before people start getting their knickers in a twist, they might want to remember that:
a) This story is being denied by the government and QinetiQ.
b) Tony Blair has specifically stated that he does NOT intend to bring in a raft of draconian laws and new surveillance powers.
Both of these were reported on the BBC.
Can't these kinds of scanners be defeated by a $10 lead film protection bag? No way they see through lead foil...
"Dummy devices could be installed at some stations to reduce the overall cost."
I read that as: "we won't be bothering to install them on stations with low traffic."
It probably isn't too difficult to set these things off with something that looks suspicious but if you should get stopped lets you off the hook. As others have pointed out, once you're in, you're unencumbered to go to any other station you please.
Should it come to that, I also don't see this stopping suicide bombers since all they need is a crowd; the fact that they'll get detected probably doesn't deter them a whole lot.
Even assuming the system is completely fail-safe it still won't prevent anything, it just means they'll try it somewhere else.
If it's really about offering protection and making a difference then taking the whole budget and using it to train and deploy security guards all over the city would be a lot more effective. It's not fancy or much of a guarantee but at least you'll have a minimum level of security all over instead of pockets where you just need to move a few feet and you can get away with trying anything.
The chances of this being carried out by some secret government conspiracy are precisely zero. Do you honestly believe that you could find any UK "secret agents" that would be prepared to carry out an act like merely to increase profits for some defence contractors? Wouldn't it be a hell of a lot easier just to cook the books to give them the money?
Perhaps that kind of thing could happen in America where it is even more evident that profits are more important than human life, but it would not happen in the UK.
Stop wasting everyone's time with stupid theories.
I'm sure it won't occur to them to simply set their bombs off in a commuter train, or a bus, or a concert, or a cinema or anywhere else with a sizable crowd.
It's actually scary to see the massive lines of people queuing to go through security at most airports thanks to more stringent screening. It would be trivial enough for someone to walk up to that line with a suitcase full of explosives and kill several hundred people.
If these things did exist in the form given above it would be the easiest thing in the world to defeat it: If you're a terrorist, get a little bomb-making material (a real tiny amount), rub it on your hands and thenjostle people on the street, on the buses, in shopping malls; dissolve some, put it in a mouth spray bottle and spray it on door knobs, floormats or clothes that are left hanging somewhere (I'm sure you can think of more ways to get that "smell" undetected on people). Soon enough the number of false positives will
a) bring the system grinding to a halt
or
b) cause the people at the sniffer to turn the detection sensitivity way, way down (probably enough to get a good sealed package through).
I'm not encouraging this behaviour, but it should be obvious that this particular solution is pretty much worthless for this particular application.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
they think this is such a clever way of avoiding saying microwaves ...
wonder how long it will take for websites to start collecting and distributing pr0n collected from these scanners.
from tfa:
Simon Stringer, managing director of QinetiQ's security division, said: "We have been asked to deploy some of this equipment.
"It would certainly assist in preventing this sort of thing from happening again.
No, it won't. Sorry. It just won't. Would you be willing to stake your company on it? Yeah. Didn't think so.
Nearly 300 stations, including a couple of dozen where access to the tube system is gained by walking across the platform from another train service.
There are still dozens of stations where there's no ticket gate operating for half the day because the station's unstaffed.
The system can't be sealed around scanners, and if it can't be sealed, there's no point.
And if you try to get over half a billion sterling wasted like this past me and my fellow Londoners, we'll take you out back and beat you with a shovel.
Y'know, millimeter wave imaging works because the wave passes through clothing, but not water or metal; so you end up "seeing" the 70% water surface of the human skin.
How many Londoners carry bottles of water into the tube??
How many rainy days does London have in a year??
How many metalic briefcases or laptops??
(or will you have to pass a metal detector TOO? What about the buses?)
Just another defense industry boondoggle.
It seems to me that terrorism only funtions because people way over react to it.
Think about it. How likely are you to die in a car accident, or from a heart attack, or just some other stupid accident/conincidence? Now how likely are you to be bombed? You should be "terrorised" of the free way, not a bunch of extremeists!
So many people die of hunger, disease, and civil war in developing countries every day. I don't know the figures, but I immagine more die daily than in all terrorist attacks in the last few years combined. <i>This</i> is where we should be spending out money. Just maybe, if we did that, people would stop hating developed nations, and stop bombing them!
And how much news coverage do the attrocities mentioned above get? A 30 second blurb on the news once a week, if that at all? Maybe if we treated terrorism that way, it would stop as well!
Think like a terrorist. Your objective is not to kill people, it's to get a message out. Unfortunately, killing people is the easiest way to get attention. Shitloads of attention. Days of prime time TV coverage. Of course you will resort to this method.
However, would you do it if the evening news went something like, "and in other news, London was bombed today. 30 to 50 people are believed to be dead. Now, back to the Simpsons."
Think about it...
To make matters worse, a gas can be made to have its effects way much later, say an hour. Now, wait a minute...think about that.
Imagine for example many ice cream cones with TNT in them(some with detonators) thrown into the same waste paper bin.
FRA: STFU GTFO
You're a deluded fool if you think that will help.
We could bring back every soldier, throw Israel to the wolves, quintuple aid to the Muslim world, and not one thing would change.
Osama and his crew are still bent out of shape about the reconquest of Andalusia in 1492.
They harbor bitter resentment about the Balfour Declaration and Sykes-Picot Agreement and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, dating back 80 years or more.
They planned the September 11 attacks long before Bush ever came to power, at a time when the American military was fighting Christian Serbs to protect Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo.
The Islamists have made it abundantly clear that they will not stop fighting jihad until the whole world lives under a Muslim caliphate. There is no reasoning with such people. We kill them, or they will surely kill us. Now they have nuclear weapons in Pakistan and are on the verge of obtaining them in Iran. Next time they attack London, there could be a hundred thousand casualties rather than 50.
And with the relative birth rates of Muslims vs. the native populations of Europe, the time is rapidly approaching when Europe will have to decide whether to submit to Sharia law, or expel their Muslim population by force. I'm not kidding. Italian and French women are having 1.2 babies per lifetime, while Muslim women in the same countries are brood mares producing five or six little jihadis each. Demography is destiny, and there is no third option.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
1. allow democratic secession of any region that does not want to be part of your country;
2. do not meddle in internal affairs of other countries unless officially asked to.
2.a. when you *do* meddle in internal affairs of other countries, do so in a pacifying way -- offer a negotiation table to all interested parties.
3. don't condone predatory commercial practices by your onw nationals;
4. respect minorities inside *and* outside your country.
It's quite simple, really.
Follow the recipe and *no* terrorists will *ever* want to bomb your country.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I don't mind being scanned if it catches the guy behind me with a bomb strapped to his chest.
Is being scanned a privacy issue? I guess so. But being murdered is th real issue, isn't it. I'm no more worried about the loss of privacy involved in being scanned than I am in stripping off at the doctors for a medical exam. It's a no-brainer tradeoff to potentially save my life.
(Please. no braindead testosterone-laden out-of-context quotes from Ben Franklin.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
For that kind of money I'd be willing a hire a 'terrorist' or three to blow something up just so I could propose a nifty - and very timely - security product to politicians trying to make themselves look good to the general public. The payoff is simply mindboggling, and far outweighs the risk.
Oh wait, did I just say that out loud? I was speaking purely hypothetically, of course....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
I feel my privacy and liberty slipping away again.
blog and junk
You have an interesting perspective - "gentlemen's terrorism".. this is a rather romantic expression... can I ask your nationality/ usual location? I am guessing you've not lived in one of the towns bombed at the time of the threats? Can I ask if you live in a place which is regularly the subject of bombings? I'm really interested in your perspective and your choice to post anonymously.
"It is alleged that those lovely see-through-your-clothes scanners are to be installed in London's Tube stations."
Since when have geeks and nerds became interested in things usually hidden under clotching?
Not that it matters any. It is said the french have sex in their beds and the britons have hot water bottles... English girls are the coldest and least desirable females on the planet.
Dogs and pigs both have extremely well developed senses of smell. Both are intelligent animals and could be trained to detect explosives. The cost would be a mere fraction of the two million pounds quoted by QinetiQ. Pigs are used in many countries to find valuable buried fungi. Dogs can find and recognise people by their smell. To start finding the murderers I'd start looking for the explosives. Perhaps now is the time for the Law to be 'adjusted' so that in times of emergency a mans home is not quite the castle is was before 07-JUL-2005.
because they have locked themselves safely in their parent's basements.
Some stations (Olympia for example) don't even have barriers, let alone staff - especially late at night. Others have barrierless interchanges to rail (Ealing Broadway, Greenford etc). How many people will you need to man Dagenham East on a Friday night? Are you really going to stop a gang of youths tha already ignore the need for a ticket?
More people have died in the UK from road accidents or MRSA this month than from being blown up. The biggest issue on Thursday was the shutdown of the tube, but now it's pretty much back to normal, especially for the weekend. If they had a reversign siding at Finsbury Park for the Piccadilly hardly anyone would notice. Had they bombed Oxford Circus it would have been a major inconvienience (no Bakerloo or Victoria line), had they bombed both ends of a deep tube carriage it would be a major loss of life (1000 people, no way out, oxygen starvation by the fire and smoke inhalation), but they didn't.
Sounds nifty - just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene
And I'm quite sure some enterprising chemist can produce that stuff in his home lab, and then hide it in iPods, laptops or other electronic appareil.
And so the cost of last week's terrorist attacks rises by another £500 million...
I assume this is only the start of the damage to Britain.
London will invest 100M$ in tube security, then the terrorists will simply place the bombs in museums, schools or even pubs. Safety result = 0.
Security is useless unless you change your texas-made mind.
Rather than spend it on a feel-good measure, gather evidence to find those responsible and wipe them out.
Where's the Kaboom?
There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering Kaboom.
At this point, I'll say that I work for them as a summer student. QinetiQ are the organisation formerly known as DERA, or the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency. As defence spending has been dropping year on year for a long time now, it was felt it'd be better to privatise the organisation rather than simply let it fade away.
These days, while a large amount of their work still comes from MoD contracts, they're diversifying at a fast rate.
As to whether there's some secret keiretsu involving QinetiQ, Caryle and the Bin Laden family (who IIRC disowned Osama many years ago), well that's a matter for conspiracy theorists and documentary writers. I see a simpler explanation: Carlyle have a history of investing in defence contractors so they know the territory, and they're one of the biggest private equity groups because they have a lot of investments. At some point there will always be overlap, and what you see there says more about yourself than anything else.
When it comes to terrorism the following saying couldn't have been more true: A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears! - Michel de Montaigne.
If you let your life revolve around an instance of terror then you had made living in terror the rest your whole life.
And what homes were being occupied/invaded/bombed when September 11 happened? What homes are non-Muslims in Nigeria, Thailand and Sudan occupying/invading/bombing right now, to justify their being on the end of even more Islamic terrorism than the West has yet seen? You're a moron, as are the fools who modded you up as insightful.
They own a minority share in QinitiQ with the MOD retaining a majority share. To say that they 'own' QinitiQ is slightly misleading even if there is still a connection.
suggest try wikipedia for qinetiq and links to carlyle - who own 33.8% of qinetiq. Bin Laden family sold up their small stake after 11/9
This is on the news all day. Everyone going "OMG WE WANT ID CARDS!", but the general public are over it already.
It seems like years ago to me, the bombings made no difference to me at all nor many others. We'll just see them try and force ID cards through and waste money on this sort of thing.
If they really do want to prevent another bombing they should spend the money on more coppers and make them do less paper work. A scanner can detect things but can't detect when someones acting very suspicious.
I like muppets.
This whole entire story reminds me of a discussion that I overheard in Boston while waiting to get on a train. Man:I want to get on the train now. Conductor:Im sorry I can't let you get on the train. Man:Why can't I get on the train? It's just sitting there. Conductor:I am making sure there are no one left a bomb on the train so it doesn't blow up. This was a lovely thing to hear especially since a funky looking package in the train.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Now I realize that it's other people we should be afraid of. Other people who want us to act the way they want, or kill us if we don't cooperate. So to defend ourselves from them, we put expensive security devices in markets, subways and other crowded places.
How about pollution? Pollution kills more people than terrorists. How about smoking? People are afraid from terrorists, but they aren't afraid to smoke cigarettes, or breathe the polluted air that surrounds them, or even eat food with tons of additives and chemical stuff.
Doesn't anyone realise how screwed up this is? People are crazy, just plain crazy...
If everyone is getting scanned, you probably aren't going to be paid any more attention than anyone else unless you are carrying something that trips the scanners or are a celebrity (and in the latter case, there are legal options if someone gets too intrusive). It's kind of the difference between walking around unclothed on a public street and doing the same thing on a nude beach.
33.8% is still a minority share and far from 'owning' Qinetiq when the MOD own 56% of Qinetiq (according to the latest financial statement).
The only thing that limits the carnage that terrorists can inflict is the resources they have available, not the level of security in a country. There will always be soft targets packed with hundreds of people available to them. The police are trying to play down the suggestion that suicide bombers were involved. Suicide bombing is the ultimate terror tactic; the terrorist version of Kamikaze. In London we are used to seeing posters that tell us to look out for unattended packages, but these obviously become useless when suicide bombers are involved.
I can't be the only one to have noticed that the war on terror is making it more likely I will be blown up, not less. They keep talking about blitz spirit and "they will never destroy our way of life". If fact anything to prevent discussion of the real issues.
Do you really want to be blown up just so that some rich oil executives can get a bit richer?
Stop invading other countries and pull out of the ones you've already invaded. It's cheaper, it's much more ethical, and it's going to give you a far safer solution.
Fly to USA: Fingerprint scanning. Slight increase in time creates larger backlog. Clearing customs takes longer.
London Underground: Simple platform overcrowding at London Bridge Station, creates hour long waits *to get through the barriers*
---------------------
But I think the biggest parallel I must draw is between Israel border protection and the London Underground. In Israel a large amoutn of the suicide bombers detonated their packages at the border entry points, killing soldiers and innocent fellow border crossers.
If they install these machines at Tube stations, then terrorists will have a new target: at the point of inspection. They will be able to take out staff as well as passengers and entrance facilities. They do not have to even get on a damn tube.
Why spend money creating both a target and a delay???? The money would be better spent on building dialogue with the dis-enfrachised Muslim community. I mean who is going to be the main targets of 'spot-checks'? The man with the beard and skull-cap.
[% slash_sig_val.text %]
Look Ma! I'm co-opting the pejorative!
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
yeah ice cream cone shrapnel will ripp right trough your flesh.
:)
a can of soda will do the trick a tad bit better.
sad part of it all, a lot of us would create more damage by them selves if they were to put their minds to it.(this is not a chalange)
7/7 could have been done by 1 person
in less then a day of planning if he/she had the explosives ready. a scanner like this could make it harder for 1 person teams to do this sort of thing
now those scanners would be a lot more deterant if they were to make the explosives detonate when passing trough
direct copy of this comment
karma police: arrest this man, he talks in maths; he buzzes like a fridge, he's like a detuned radio. [radiohead]
the provisional IRA (the largest, most active and linked to SF) usually did three types of bombings, Prestige targets such as bombing of the docklands (a finantial district) in London mostly code worded depending.
Bombings to kill a target or targets eg police officers, marget thatcher, or a loyalists eg UVF memeber planted in a shops, restaurnts, hotels, bars. these would not be code worded.
the third type of was plain old planting of cars bombs etc to disrupt life and business.
the main reason you hardly see an IRA bomb defused is because a controled explosion is alot safer than sending a bomb dispolal expert only to have their limbs blown off. The government quickly learned its better to save life than bricks and mortar.
nothing to do with "breaking the trust between the IRA and police".
London has one the most dense forest of security cameras of any city in the world and it did not stop the latest terrorist attack. These sort of items provide the illusion of safety and profitability to electronic snake oil salesmen at the cost of the private lives and dignity of citizens. The only true way to prevent terrorism is to capture, interrogate and kill terrorists. Its cheaper and more effective than having minimum wage bozos who have no other quantifiable skills watching your every move with the latest technological gizmo. Unfortunately, our fellow citizens would rather trust these mouth breathers and cry out against the treatment of those that mean them harm to conform to the trendy PC chic.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
We were doing so well on Thursday - people were saying "life has to carry on", the media were saying that we wouldn't be pushed around by this. Then it all has to go down hill. I blame the mother fucking tabloids they are basically raping this for everything, cover to cover, give it a fucking rest! It was a terrible thing to happen but do we have to drag it on? News is supposed to report things that are happening, when bombs are going off i want to know about it, when the bombs have stopped going off and there is no more fucking news about it then stop trying to make news out of it, stop trying to agitate everyone. People haven't even been buried yet and already the agendas are coming out - ID cards, scanners, companies who just want to make money selling us this crap are already pitching their bids. You know what? the end of the world is NOT here, the risk of another attack is low, our current security is strong enough and if there is another attack then it will happen no matter what security is in place. Put scanners on all the stations and someone will blow something else up. We can all carry ID cards and have check points every 10 meters and someone with a card will do the attack. Where will we be after that? more people dead but instead of being able to spend all that money on contingency, hospitals and policing we will have wasted it on useless £2m scanners. Just for fucks sake stop this mother fucking knee-jerk bullshit.
London is absolutely fine the way it is, this country is fine the way it is we do not need radical changes. The risk of a bomb going off is exactly the same has it has been for the last 5 years, just like the chance of the lottery numbers being "1,2,3,4,5,6", its only peoples perception that has changed.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The tube is a significant piece of infrastructure. Estimates I've heard over the last few days said it carries about 3 million people a day. As such there is still value in protecting it even if terrorists do move on to somewhere else.
Not to say that these scanners are necessarily a good idea or a reasonable way of spending the money. But just because there will be other targets for terrorists doesn't mean it isn't a good idea to try and protect key assets of your society.
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
The conclusion is left as an exercise for the student - do your own work, no peeking at anybody else's papers.
www.eFax.com are spammers
...I have regained my consciousness about the subject.
locks are for honest people. What we make we can break.
terrorism will be removed when the excuses for supporting such is no longer existing.
And supporting such can come even from those claiming to be the good guys on any side, but who benefit off the existance of "terrorism"
whats the real excuse for 9/11? do a google search on "trillion dollar bet" and read the transcript
do we know how to remove "terrorism"?
do a google on '"what the world wants" world games' to see how some military spending can be better used against "terrorism".
The most terrorism I have seen in my life is from the Bush administration banging war drums, 24 hours a day on ever news channel.
Was the anthrax letters used to get the new media to say what the Bush Administration wanted them to? Richard Jewell was wrongly blamed for the 1996 olympic park bombing..... Does anyone know the name of the us military person they tried to blame for the anthrax letters?
I'm just barely old enough to remember some war time propaganda against russia.... funny how today thru the internet we all now know the truth about the people of russia.... they are just like us.
Did the politicians and military leaders really belived the bull shit propoganda they were preaching? One thing is certain the world doesn't need this sort of Bull Shit.
Now we have a phantom evil called terrorism.
Of the percentage of the population of the world... something around 6 billion... isn't that a lot of military spending, tax payer revenue, being spent on what is some fraction of something quite less than even 1%?
1) Create a problem that otherwise doesn't exist.
promote (provide excuse) and motivate terrorism indirectly so as to be safe from proof.
2) Create expensive but incomplete solutions to the fabricated problem.
3) profit!
Don't we all really know who the terrorist participants are?
This is getting ridiculous!
I have been surfing around the conspiracy-ish sites and I have found a lot of information that is availible for anyone (maybe not north korea...) with access to internet. On Indymedia.co.uk I found a comment about that the CEO Managing Director of Visor Consultants said in an radio interview (radio 5 bbc) that they had an 1,000 person strong exercise which drilled the London Underground being bombed at the exact same locations, at the exact same times, as happened in real life.
Thats right folks!!
As if that wasn't crayzy enough, think about the fact that he actually tell us about it! (bbc radio 5 recording ).
WHY??
Why telling us about that??
Are we suppose to think -"wee, think of the odds of that"?? Huh??
What REALLY blows my mind is that it's NOWERE to be found in the MEDIA!!!
Is the journalists at bbc on drugs??
There is a whole lot of other strange stuff to be found on the "conspiracy" sites (whatreallyhappened.com et al), but this comes from the horses mouth!!
I am confused, my brain has deadlocked. KernelPanic type of thing..
Right now the nastiest grit throwers are the terrorists, but we are so far fortunate that they are even more stupid than Rumsfeld. We are *SO* lucky that this attack was just conventional explosives and not chemical weapons. I was actually trying to use the Tokyo subway the day the religious crazies attacked with a relatively weak form of sarin. In fact, I'm kind of amazed that Al Qaeda hasn't done something like that yet, but this new scanner would do nothing except show a bottle of liquid. The problem the Aum Shinri Kyo had was that they didn't have a supply of suicidal maniacs in their organization, or they could have killed thousands of people... Al Qaeda is probably saving it for the States.
It's an infinite loop of insanity now. I see no real hope for America's future. At least Blair seems to understand that we need to go after the causes, and reduce the pressure that is driving the insanity.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Hey how about we just close the tube? If saving lives is really worth it then this is the only way.
No? why? because then they will just attack something else? Piss off QinetiQ.
I really think we should ban all cars - that way all those traffic deaths that occur every day would be stopped. Then we need to think about limiting the number of people that are legally allowed to occupy any volume of space - ban concerts for a start, rush-hour crowds, protests, orgies?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Anyone who is too scared to go on the tube can just not use it. That way, only brave people who are not swayed by terrorism will use the tube network and thus the terrorists will realise that its not a useful target because no-one who uses it is scared of terrorism!! Same applies to buses and just generally walking around the streets.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The mistake in the article is right here, IMHO:
I'm not sure that's true. Londoners and others have been remarkably resilient in the face of last week's attacks, with many transport staff and regular travellers being interviewed and saying that while they were shaken by the attacks, they absolutely wouldn't let it change their day-to-day lives, and they'd be back on the Underground the next day.
The greater level of surveillance implied by these machines may or may not make a difference to security, but will certainly cost a lot and upset a lot of people who don't like the idea of several random LU staff seeing them naked every day. They caused a stir with this when they started talking about using it at airports, and AFAIK the only plans currently in place at airports make it an optional alternative to a traditional "patting down". TFA does mention some methods QinetiQ have considered to address this issue, and I think the public would want to know that one of them was in place before they accepted this particular system.
I'm kind of in two minds about this whole thing. On the one hand, I'm about to go and send a message to two friends who were in one of the carriages that exploded, and were hospitalised as a result. Of course I wish they hadn't been there and no-one had been hurt last week. On the other hand, I know some other friends who seem to get stopped and anything up to strip searched almost every time they go to an airport, obviously causing them significant inconvenience and distress. Being checked out, either closely and physically or by a machine that essentially strips you, is not a pleasant experience. I find the fact that this happens to a couple of very attractive female friends far, far more often than any of the guys, even where they're travelling to or from the same home country, pretty telling.
If this actually helps security, maybe it's a price that most people would be willing to pay, though I'm not sure I entirely believe that. OTOH, this sounds like something expensive and good-looking that actually does jack to make anyone safer, and these systems do get abused, as those friends of mine can testify first-hand.
At the end of the day, you can never directly protect every key government installation, transport link, utility supplier, military base, and 101 other potential terrorist targets. It's just not possible, no matter how much technology and how many people you have. You can make it a bit more difficult for the bad guys, but the best ways to counter terrorism are based on intelligence/awareness (including the general public, not just some secret-agent-type mole), not creating unnecessary motivations for terrorist reprisals in the first place, and simply refusing to be intimidated by it so the tactic is shown not to be effective (as Londoners are doing so well today).
Cue profound wisdom from Franklin etc...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I find it interesting that the chief difference in the UK vs. USA reaction to terrorism is where the UK [proposes to] increase security measures, the USA reduces civil rights and almost ignores increases in security.
Some writers here have pointed out that
1) Government is only doing this because they want/have to be seen doing something, and are taking this expensive, invasive and technically complex measure to only to make people think they are safe.
Others have said that
2) Many more people die of natural causes, accidents etc. in London every day than were killed in the terrorist attack. The danger of you yourself being bodily affected by a terrorist attack is low.
For most part I do agree, but this leads to me to a conclusion that not many seem to have come. First though, I have to make one more statement (of fact).
3) The fear is real. Fear exist: regardless of what the statistical probability of becoming a casualty in terrorist attack is very low, people do fear it more than many other things they probably should fear. (I will get back to this.) Fear has an effect: it saps joy, causes stress, makes people (including the politicians) forget the really important matters, it gives power to the worst people.
My conclusion would then be that any government action should try lessen the fear, which is high enough to be harmful to individuals and society. The bodily danger from terrorist attacks is already low enough to be a secondary concern. Note that this is a bit more general statement than I would really want to make and has at its center an assumption of the people as stupid masses that need to controlled, which may nor may not be true but is a position that I refuse to take. Statement I would like to make is: promoting perceived security is addressing the actual effects of terrorism.
A bit more about how people react to terrorism. Some of us, and I often fall into this category, are quick to point to statistics like you are more like to be killed by X and argue that people should not feel afraid. I don't think anyone quoting statistics expects it to convince many people not to fear, we are just pointing out the fallacy. In my opinion at the root of such behaviour is an inability to relate to people. It takes a certain hardness of character to look at a terrorist attack and note that economic effects are limited and statistically one if very unlikely to be killed or seriously injured in such an attack. This hardness of character is not courage, it is rationality but it is also detachment. A normally empathic person feels part of the horror and pain the people subject to the attack. This may cause them to feel fear, anger and sadness. They may be the cause of some stupid reactions, but there is no lack of logic in those feelings.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers - Pablo Picasso
I am quite bothered by the over-simplistic view of the middle-east situation, represented by this kind of post.
Don't get me wrong. As a left-wing Israeli, I do believe we need to get out of the occupied territories and evacuate the settlements, but yet the view of Europeans (and some Americans) who view the Terror as being Israel's fault, and only Israel's fault, is not only misguided but over-simplistic and patronistic.
First, the Palestinians have choice: Terrorist acts that kill civilians is not the only possible way to resist occupation. Actually, it is the least effective way of resistance. The Palestinians are grown-up people, not children who can not be held responsible for their own actions, and by choosing a morally wrong way of resistance, they are guilty as charged.
The main problem with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is mistrust between both sides. Most Israelies would be quite willing to leave occupied territories and evacuate most settlements if they would believe such move would end the conflict. Most Israelies are not convinced this is the situation, and the suicide bombers just play into the hands of the extreem right-wing propaganda - that the goal of the Palestinian resistance is to demolish Israel completely.
Would a palestinian state over the occupied territories end the ME conflict? I cannot tell. There are sure radical groups such as the Hamas that aim to demolish Israel, and there is no way to know for certain what would be its influence after a possible peace agreement. In the meanwhile, anyone who voice his/her oppinion about the ME situation should first understanding those uncertainties and internal conflicts the Israelies are facing.
You are aware a security company was conducting "exercises" on 7-7 in London simultaneously with the attacks? About bombs going off in the subway and on busses? At the *exact* same time the *exact* attack occurred in *exactly* the manner in which it happened? Reported on BBC audio, poofed away now.
This isn't ringing alarm bells for you over this terrorist attack? You really believe in coincidences of this magnitude? You just blindly accept big brothers government instantaneouly whenever they decide to tell you something?
Same thing happened in the US ith 9-11.
It's morning, enjoy some coffee, smell the aroma, breathe deep and *wake up*. Shake the cobwebs out.
I'm sorry - this story just doesn't add up.
The date on it is the 8th of June - a mere day after the attacks happened. The idea that in the space of a day (when they will have mainly be trying to cope with the aftermath of the bombs) they will have already decided to go for millimetre-wave scanning is ridiculous.
This is what I believe actually happened:
1) A reporter for the Times wanted a story, and knew about the Qnetix stuff
2) The reporter spoke to a London Underground spokesperson and pressed them about whether they would consider using new scanning technologies. They probably mentioned the Qnetix tech.
3) The spokesperson replied vaguely that they might be interested in scanning technology.
4) The reporter then speaks to Qnetix, getting some facts and figures, after pumping them with the idea that 'apparently London Underground are considering your systems'...
5) The reporter writes up this article.
London Underground has enough trouble keeping financially viable as it is. They'll have enough problems with reduced passenger numbers as it is without putting more people off with their 'X-Ray specs see-you-naked-through-your-clothing' technology.
Just ain't gonna happen.
Your point is mostly correct IMHO.
A bit more accurate statistical data to back it up though: the population is actually 7 185 000 according to the 2001 census. Also, in 2004 there were 54 063 deaths. That works out to 147.7 deaths per day (2004 was a leap year, so there were 366 days).
So an extra 50 deaths is about a 34% rise.
Terrorism is entirely a psychological game. It's about bringing out an effect that is greater than what the action is. The perpatrators of this act seem to have succeeded in this regard.
* Please note that 'freedom' in said 'way of life' may go up as well as down.
They got a lot of press/attention.
They reduced our freedom.
They reduced the quality of daily life, due to above point. With the goal of brining it down to their level, as they dont feel its 'fair' we have a 'better life' then they do.
They increased the general persons level of 'fear', and reduced our feeling of safety, and trust.
Yep, just what they want.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Now how are you expected to see that stick of dynamite with those big ole boobs staring you in the face??
I can't believe this was modded flamebait. It may be inflammatory and uses some colorful language, but it's no worse than what some of you commie statist peace-niks say about GW Bush.
A couple of months ago there was a big campaign in London to raise awareness of unattended packages. The slogan was something about don't take a chance, alert someone.
Around this time, I did see a suspect pacakge, and I called the police like a good shitizen. The full story is on my diary, but I'll give you the summary...
The police gave me such a hard time about calling them about the package that I swore then and there that I would never call them about anything again. I will get me and mine out of the way, and that's as far as it goes - civic responsibility be damned.
The woman on the other end of the line just kept asking why I thought the bag was suspicious, and I kept telling her that it was unattended, looked expensive and was out of place. Any two of these satisfied their stupid poster campiagn, but she even phoned be back to ask what made me think the bag was suspicious.
If the police want the public's help, then make it easy. If you've said call things like this in, then don't give me a hard time when I do.
There are no bins on or around train or tube stations in the UK, and haven't been since the 80s when the IRA demonstrated that they're an excellent (a) hiding place and (b) source of shrapnel.
Increase your tin-foil dosage.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Matter of fact, the Americans allowed IRA fundraising (they eventually outlawed them because their criminal activity was becoming an inconvenience).
Congress may have passed some sort of law against it for P.R. purposes, but the fundraising is still going on in the US.
Why not get it over with and create a robotic device that performs body cavity searches?
"Sir, please drop your trousers place your buttocks against the anal probe."
Aside from the fact that this is yet another instance of closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, it will be very easy to overcome.
Suppose Mr. Terrorist boards the Underground at the same station and at the same time every weekday. Hardly unusual - millions of Londoners use the Tube to get to work. Suppose Mr. Terrorist carries a can of Pringles in his briefcase everyday. He gets searched the first few times, since he seems to be carrying what looks like a pipe bomb. Eventually, the screeners get to know him, and just wave him through. But this time, instead of crisps, his Pringles can is filled with 500g of Flash Powder.
Security is only as strong as the people working it. Hence, we can never be completely secure. But it's the preception that counts, right?
Politics aside, without etering the futile discussion whose fault it is, you can sometime learn from others' experience.
History proved thus far that Israeli security system is quite effective in preventing bombing the Israeli train. Till now there were many incidents of suicide bombers on a bus, but never on a train.
A train is relatively easy to secure, and guards at the enterance to each train station may be a nuisance and may violate our privacy but it is quite effective. The security system at train station does not cause long lines, and it doesn't really slow down passengers.
I wish we could live without it, but right now it is a tolerable and effective way to make the train relatively secure.
Perhaps a small, remote station would only need 150k worth of equipment whereas a large, busy station would need more equipment to handle the traffic.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I admire your great insight in seeing the parallels between the statistically completely differently motivated crimes of rape and terrorism. Why i couldn'e even imagine that large scale attacs where carried out to fulfill deep inner sexual desires, or that rape mostly was done to kill the white devil with pseudoreligius overtones.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Seriously, the logistics just don't stack up. At rush hour there are tens of thousands of people per hour going through many of the stations (20,000 -> 30,000). There isn't a snowballs chance in hell of any meaningful level of scanning of people at those types of rates.
Therefore we either slow the rates down, and turn people away from the tube (*not* going to happen), or (and this is what'll really happen) the scanners will be just for show and the money spent on them should be considered as public relations.
Deleted
Are as idiotic as those who pay attention when Rush Limbaugh opens his mouth. They all have an agenda and you better know that when you listen to all of them or you're in trouble. The truth, most of the time, is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes.
Allah I says I most blow myself up in an ocean of morons.
This is my sig.
Not per day. The bigger stations handle 20,000 -> 30,000 people per hour during rush hour.
So they'll have about 1/10th of a second to scan each person at peak times.
Lets say it takes 5 seconds to scan someone and identify that they're harmless, which is the key bit. That's only 720 people per hour, they'd need 42 scanners + personnel to cope.
Basically they're dreaming. It's not going to happen and if it does, it's not going to work.
Deleted
This is just some dumb reporter trying to stir up trouble. Those machines will *never* be installed on the London underground: a) It's physically impossible. Anybody who's ever been there at rush hour will tell you this. b) There's kids in the crowd. Given the current anti-child-molester atmosphere this alone would be enough to stop it, but see point (a). c) People won't accept it. Period. Tube usage (especially female) would drop to zero. So forget it. It ain't gonna happen. Somebody somewhere may have "considered" it but it would be off the list in a few seconds flat.
No sig today...
With the truly conclusive research available as to the injurious effects of RF on human tissue I have to offer my experiences with RF from 20m to 70cm.
If you make contact with a radiator or counterpoise while a transmitter is operating you will suffer an RF induced burn.
Also ask those killed while servicing naval RADAR systems. Those are centimeter units running at significant power.
Now we have millimeter microwave being used to scan people. This will be used on a daily basis so exposure levels are sure to go up.
I wonder how long it will be before we know the true effects of concentrated RF on the body.
The Bin Laden family sold their stock in the company back in 2001, due to the concern of backlash because of Osama (who was not an investor)
Thanks, now we know.
My point was not even about F 9/11, I used it as a reference because it mentions some details about the Carlyle Group. A curiously powerful and profitable company.
Now back to your post, I couldn't give a toss about American Politics one way or another. You can insult each other all you want and then make funny little films about it.
This is not the sig you are looking for...
I think the way most terrorism like the London one is planned is that the key operatives get jobs as staff... giving them access to the areas they need to, and also making them look inconspicuous lurking around those areas. It's much less suspicious for a janitor to be in one station for a long while (scoping out the place), rather than a passenger (who as soon as they don't board a train, will seem suspicious).
An unpublicized fact about 9/11 was that many planes at various airports had box cutters taped to the rear of over-head storage compartments. All it would have taken to do something like that was to get a job as the staff who cleans the planes inbetween flights.
Huh? The story is about Paris?
In case you didn't know Qinetiq is owned by the Carlyle Group == a Washington merchant bank that specialises in defence sector buyouts whose investors include both the Bushes (Bush Snr is one of their spokesmen at official functions) & the Bin Laden family. Times are good for the Bush clan and fucking awful for the rest of us mere cannon fodder.
that is such a lazy attitude. if you take that attitude, you let extremists dictate the center of public discourse merely by becoming more extreme.
for the record, F9/11 is very well documented and is almost entirely demonstrably true. rush limbaugh, on the other hand, lies and dissembles all the time. check out mediamatters for documented cases.
killing random innocents is distasteful. Claiming al queda did it immediately based on one release at a controlled known about western website is distasteful. Ignoring the *plethora* of evidence that 9-11 was an inside job, and that tons of "al queda" have a long and notorius background as being contract employees or assets of western intel services is distasteful. Ignoring that these various wars were long planned in advance, then lied about repeatedly by the authorities, and that now the evidence is starting to leak more and more is distasteful. Ignoring the fact that your so called "leaders" (or "superiors" if you have chose that life path) are chronic serial liars is distasteful. Realising that false flag efforts are a common tactic in assymetrical warfare (or internal coups, there I said it out loud) is distasteful, but necessary. Ignoring uncomfortable evidence is distasteful. Watching it happen yet again is distasteful.
And watching western civilization slide down the tubes to outright fascism based on heglian dialectic transnational fascist corporate blood profits at any cost "intel" actions run by a coterie of elite globalist bastards is quite distasteful.
Merely pointing it out might make people uncomfortable (believe me I am not comfortable with it, none whatsoever, zero), but it needs to be done.
History, learn from it or re-live it, only two choices you have.
1) Do not allow ANY consequence to come from an act of terrorism, other than the capture of the criminals who are behind it. Try not allowing psychological consequences, even.
If NO consequence come from an act of terror, there are much less people interested in committing it.
In accepting consequence we give some people an interest in perpetrating these acts because of their result or because of the reaction to those results. See the Reichstag fire.
If some consequences are inevitable (as it MIGHT be in case some security hardware gets installed) make sure NOBODY makes a buck out of it.
Of course I also tend to agree with the parent recipe.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
Recipe for Freedom:
1) Check for Rifle and Ammunition.
2) Defend YOU and YOURS.
3) Freedom.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
More useless junk that will defeat the whole point of mass transit. The direct cost of the new equipment will dwarf the total cost of manning the surveillance society and no one being able to get anything done.
There is no protection from terrorism. If somebody really wants to get you, they will.
Just look at Israel. People have been herded into concentration camps, presumed guilty from birth, issued ID cards which they have to present to get out of the ghetto, their trucks have no fenders so they can be searched, walls have been erected, people have even been kept from using roads. I don't even want to imagine the lists of controlled substances. Imagine a farm without fertilizers and diesel fuel. Citizens carry machine guns, and are well trained. Yet, horrible things still happen. As someone else in this tread pointed out, anyplace you have people waiting is a place you can bring 30 lbs of bomb and terrorize everyone. Brute force and paranoia don't work, especially in a place like London where there will be no "us" and "them".
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
"Dictators everywhere will love your rules 2 and 2A - giving them free license to do whatever they want within their borders without fear of international intervention."
And that's different from the present, how?
Most countries, the UK and US included, provide greater rights for their own citizens and permanent residents than for illegal immigrants. The government won't throw out citizens simply because people find their political or religious views offensive.
The London police did take action against the most famous hate-preaching immam, Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri (a British citizen). They arrested him and charged him with crimes including inciting terrorism, encouraging murder, etc. His trial began last week, so there's a good chance that the bombings were actually related to that (as well as the Iraq and the G8 summit).
Reducing the proliferation of powerful explosives would help.*
*This is one of the mistakes made in Iraq. Leaving all that munitions unguarded. Much better roadside bombs than say fuel oil bombs.
You take a muslim fanatic who was jailed for his racist writings about how islam cannot live in comjunction with any other religion or social structure, then you have him tell the world that he is a democrat and that while he cantlive with ethnic groups in the previous country, when the muslims rule other groups will live freely (never mind that during WW2 those same muslims formed an SS unit which butchered the infidels.)
Then you bring in Osama and about 20-30,000 of those lovely muhajeddins and THEN after spending millions on Rudder and Finns great spin work, you get your buddies to help you bomb your enemies while you play innocent victim.
That IS Bosnia, where even the incompetent 9-11 commission admitted that the prime architects were based there.
Of course, you also rely on the media skipping over this 10 years later and saying that terrorism is bad.
I guess those same terrorists in Bosnia were just out for a vacation, right?
Btw, dont forget that the marke street massacres (which were both timed 24hrs before an important vote) were found by the canadian and russian soldiers to not have come from the direction which was bandied around. That report quickly left the media reports and even french minister at the time admitted to a magazine which is their equivalent of Time that 'everyone knew that the muslims used certain planned events to get public symapthy but it suits our needs' in the region.
Seriously, there are very often reports from Bosnia which is hidden in pages A24 and even many about that armpit of muslims and other criminals, kosovo, but american papers seem to gloss over these.
So excuse me while I laugh out loud at the 'terrorist threat'.
If Bosnia was/is still a safe haven for these criminals why havent we executed the ones responsible for allowing them to flourish?
Because a terrorist THREAT, real or not, is a wonderful tool to use on the people.
After trying to get their biometric ID cards in the UK for 4 years, it looked like the bill might die in the house of lords but I get the weird suspicion it will now fly right through with a few bonus clauses added right in.
See, terrorists are good for business.
danny
One of the worrying parts about this story is the automatic assumption that Qinetiq will get the contract to make all these machines. There's no particular reason other than corruption: They didn't invent the technology, and there are other companies who can do it.
But like Halliburton, Qinetiq (or Carlyle) has strong political connections.
Nothing like closing the barn door after the terrorist is gone.
QinetiQ stands to make £150,000 to £2 million per station ($260,000 - $3.4 million) with their Millimetre Wave Imagers. ...And even more from selling the nude images of famous people.
If I recall correctly, you can wrap a gun in a wet towel and these scanners will not penetrate the water.
Or was that only true for Terahertz radiation? I forget.
..yeah baby!!!
Sure, that would work.
The fact of the matter is that are a lot of common household items that can easily be made to "blow up". Just look at Timothy McVeigh. Good luck outlawing the "raw materials" needed to make a fertilizer bomb.
Great, now the London underground will be free from suicide bomber, people with travelers wallet, and people wearing undergarments!
I agree. If you do all of those things, terrorism will likely never be a problem in your nation. If everyone played by those rules, you probably would eliminate almost all conflicts.
So what happens when someone breaks those rules?
If Nazis are incinerating Jews and everyone else who doesn't meet their racial specifications, do you do anything to intercede? What if they go ahead and invade every nation on their border? Can you intervene then? Was Britain and the US wrong to get involved in World War II according to your 'recipe'? What about Korea? Would the world be a better place if the US hadn't gotten the UN to defend South Korea and the entire pensile was under the lovable leadership of the North? Was the US and Western Europe wrong to oppose the Soviet Union? Would the world be a better place if half of it was in the hands of the Soviets?
Your recipe is cute, but it blatantly ignores the realities of this world. The reality is that you can follow this recipe. Many nations in fact do, and as you say, they generally have no problems. The issue comes with the nations that ignore your recipe. Should other nations then go ahead and stand up and beat them back down like they did in World War II? If so, how many rules does a nation need to break before you intervene? Germany and Iraq both broke all of those rules with the possible exception of the economic one. Did they both deserve to be invaded? Did just one deserve to be invaded?
You might as well have just stated that cure for violence is for no one to be violent. That might be true, but it is an utterly worthless tip for those of us living in reality.
Z-backscatter technology can definitely do this, but that's a low-dose X-ray system. It's actually doing an elemental analysis, so you can look for suspicious chemicals. But it's slow, there's a modest X-ray risk, and the AS&E equipment is huge.
Rapidscan has been able to downsize backscatter equipment a bit, but it's still a slow scan.
"In a recent study, 19 out of 20 people preferred a Secure 1000 scan to an invasive pat-down physical search."
raise some pigs. : )
I knew this was going to happen, because governments always want some technological solution that they can just buy, but why the hell not just put a bomb sniffing dog at each station? That has to be cheaper than the backscatter X-ray machines. They could be like mascots. Even better, you could just give every police officer a dog, only some of which were bomb-sniffers. Only the police would know which were which...
Stop libeling the people of Spain.
The Spanish people threw José Maria Aznar out of office because he lied and blamed ETA for the train bombings on March 11, even though the attacks were clearly executed in the modus operandi of Al Queda. In addition to that, he defied the will of the people when he commited Spanish troops in the war against Iraq. Spanish public opinion polls taken before the war showed that almost 90% of the people opposed the war against Iraq. Spain is a vital modern democracy, and the Spanish people are not sheep. They will not be defied or lied to by those who claim to serve them. Viva España!
QWATSCH! Those that think security is about perception should go into a secure building with a gun or bomb and see if they don't end up in jail or worse. Yes, its possible to sneak something nasty into most soft targets, but what makes you think that security measures are only cosmetic?
There are concrete methods, learned the hard way over many years, that increase the difficulty for someone to attack a target. Why do you think they call it a "soft target"? If you want to say the terrorist will go elsewhere, then you protect elsewhere. If I have to travel on public transportation I want a large disincentive to target my train/bus/subway. If I can shift a target away from a certain transportation then it becomes the perferred form of transport exactly because it is more secure. And what makes you think that you loose your personal rights because you're scanned on entrance? Give me a break. Its not a human right to ride a train. If the Government comes into my home, without a warrent, where I'm making a bomb, that is a violation of my rights (even though I'm an asshole- which sounds more appropriate then terrorist), but going out into public and using a public train is not my personal space and my being searched is in no way violating my privacy. My bag and person is subject to search because I want to partake in a public benifit. If they search it for drugs, then I have a problem, but its easy to limit their jurisdiction to items deemed hazardous to other passengers. If they find some other contraband, they can't do anything about it: like in Amsterdam.
These were not suicide bombers. If they were, it would be very difficult to stop them. But so long as they drop off a bomb and leave, they value their own skin and therefore are easier to dissuade. Use what is necessary to send them elsewhere. And if they go elsewhere, use it there to.
BUT, all this being said, we must eliminate the cause of the terrorism or else we will never have peace. This means negotiation, peace and love (no joke- and I agree with your last comment that for every act against us we increase our aid to the region which perpetrated the act). But if we think that we can not prevent or shift the targets of terrorism with effort, you should go back to school and take more history courses.
"Good, bad, effective, useless... doesn't matter. It just has to be perceived as responsive."
Your point is accurate as long as one myopically refuse to look outside one's local Congressional member's office, but here you are taking a very simplistic look at a very complex question involving a lot more than the perpetual desire of politicians to retain their seats.
As 9/11 pointed out, real world security failures can produce real world effects. While security as a product definitely has an aspect and goal of projecting a perception of security onto the citizenry, it is not its only aspect.
Additionally, you fail to acknowledge the many averted incidences credited to effective security policy and personnel (Millennium Plot/Shoe Bomber/etc). Were they toiling to provide a perception of security, or were they actually trying to project security into their assigned environment? Did they succeed in preventing or displacing some adverse phenomenon? To bring it back to your original calculus, how many lives have to be saved before it is worth the cost of technology like these scanners?
Security doesn't always exhibit a tangible quality, but it isn't a shell game regardless of your characterization. Just because you don't understand the social value or operative importance of criminal displacement through deterence does not alter the benefits it provides our communities on a daily basis.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
Duh, sure you can make homebrew explosives, but generally they don't deliver much bang per unit weight. Mc Veigh needed a truck to transport his bomb. Now let me explain something to you and your fellow leftpondian fatasses: generally, you walk (not drive) onto trains, buses, and other forms of public transport. It'd be a bit tricky to get an SUV down the stairs onto the London underground. And people would notice.
Seriousely it's not like they're gonna get some highly detailed image of how we'd look butt naked. I've seen pictures of this before and the body is just a grayish blob except for metallic objects that show up as being very shiny.
Or you'll do what, el spicko? Kill some drugged up cows? Cry that the limeys have still got gibraltar? You've been cowards since Drake bowled over your armada and you always will be.
Those people who accept anything that Mr Moore espouses will believe that...sadly it isn't that simple. Caryle is the private investor, but it DOES NOT have majority control of the company. The government, through MoD, controls the company. Caryle was just brought on as a source of capital and some management/political connections.
Caryle is a private equity group. Private equity groups make the bulk of their money from spinning off their investments through IPOs, trade sales, or selling it on to another private equity investor (quite common these days). The other source is dividends.
Caryle is not some evil group set to take over the world. It is a vehicle for rich people to make money through investments. I don't see how that should be so frightening.
That said, the UK, SHOULD NOT be giving them an emergency noncompete contract, which is what it sounds like. This needs to be put to a tender, even if it is rushed, so that the taxpayers get a good value for their money.
While I beleive it's a good thing these messures are being implimented, it's far from a sure-fire way of preventing attacks. You could deadonate while in the queue to be sanned, blow up a bus from the extirior, or simply shift the attack to somewhere with less security. No, what I propose is automated versons of these devices be installed into the doors ov every home. The advantages are several fold: -Vitualy every space is now risk-free with citizens unable to exit their homes with guns, explosives, or butane lighters -Much shorter queue to go through the device (Unless you have an exceptional number of flatmates that must leave just before you -A much safter feeling populace. Studies have shown that security checks increse people's feelings of security even more than they increase acvtual security, and what could be a safer feeling than knowing that every person you meet is free of dangerous materials. When implimenting this, you could also solve many other social problems by including with it a breathilyzer as well as a psyc profile, as well as a lie detector and deny enterance to the outside for anyone who fails to pass these favourably.
The opinions in this post are ficticious. Any similarity to actual opinions, real or imagined, is purely coincidental.
What you are describing is called "displacement". Motivated attackers are deterred from attacking a hardened target, and as a result settle for a softer target.
The hope of course is that the increased activity needed to shift a coordinated attack from one target to another will also increase the opportunity of security personnel to detect the plot. It doesn't always work this way, but most public security successes revolve around this very model.
As you suggest, due to the limited nature of governmental spending some targets will always be softer than others. It also exacerbates the mistaken impression that security is for perception only, while in actuality the purpose is to project to potential threats that "this is a hardened target, please move on."
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
Traditional Muslims condemn her and have issued death threats against her. Most Muslims today tolerate or condone mass murder in the name of Allah.
Comparisons between Christianity and Islam are flawed. Such comparisons always involving comparing elements (e.g. burning witches or waging the Crusades) of ancient Christianity and elements (e.g. deliberate use of rape to punish women and indiscriminate slaughter of children in the London subway by a noon-day explosive) of modern-day Islam.
The proper comparison is between modern-day Christianity and modern-day Islam. Mainstream modern-day Christianity is not much of a religion and comes close to resembling deism, which deletes or ignores all Biblical verses that are inconsistent with Jesus' teaching or with modern science. Most people in Europe are correctly called "Deists".
So, too is Irshad Manji. She is a Deist, who rejects all Koran verses that are inconsistent with total love or with modern science.
Therein lies the solution to today's problem with terrorism. We should Westernize the world. The process of Westernization will convert violent religions like Islam into Deism.
The first step in this direction begins at the immigration office. Applications for immigration into the USA will be screened extensively. Muslims who think along the lines of Irshad Manji will be welcomed into the USA. Muslims who embrace anti-Western values (i.e. who threaten lovely people like Irshad Manji) will be denied entry into the USA. These rules also apply to Muslims who apply for an educational visa to enroll at an American college or university.
All those anti-Western Muslims whom we have all met, at the university, in the guise of professors or students will be denied entry into the USA. Our universities will again become places of enlightenment, not hotbeds of Islamic sleeper cells. So, help me Buddha!
Aside from tearing a page out of the Soviet Era Berlin wall manual, they have only treated the symptoms. Try that in NYC or London and you will see the guards shot down, not by terrorists but by regular citizens. In Israel they know where the terrorists are coming form, they hid amide a hostile populace across a border. Armed Guards and checkpoints in the USA would just be proof that BushCORP has gone too far. Neither bush nor Tony Blair has that much justification to pull it off. Boondoggle scanners in tube lines working or not is all they will be able to get away with. In a month or six, they will be quietly turned off and removed.
The voice of the people is rarely hear, and politicians rightly fear it.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
"We should not simply capitulate like the Spanish because that sends the message that terrorism works, and simply passes the problem on to our neighbours."
And pray tell us, how did the Spanish capitulate?
Would that be by voting ouf of office the government that send troops abroad without the approval of the Spanish congress which is unconstitutional in Spain?
Or would that be by demonstrating by the millions nationwide on the street and proving that democracy was alive and well and that the Spanish people would not be intimidated?
Finally, if you are referring to the pullout of the Spanish troops from Iraq, that was a campaign promise of Zapatero, the Spanish prime minister. He said that only through the approval of Congress would Spanish troops be sent abroad.
Given that the war in Iraq was justified on a string of falsehoods and that over 92% of Spaniards opposed the war in Iraq, being part of that farce is nothing the Spanish people wanted.
So pray tell me how is that the Spanish capitulated? By being informed and not falling for the crap that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the WTC attacks? Or is it by demonstrating and making sure that its government did not use terrorism for political ends by attributing the attacks to ETA, in full knowledge that this was not the case?
What your posts shows both in its language and content is that you have internalized, perhaps inadvertently, the propaganda campaigns put out by the neocons and their servants in the media.
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
* marauding: characterized by plundering or pillaging or marauding; "bands of marauding Indians"; "predatory warfare"; "a raiding party"
* predaceous: living by or given to victimizing others for personal gain; "predatory capitalists"; "a predatory, insensate society in which innocence and decency can prove fatal"- Peter S. Prescott; "a predacious kind of animal--the early geological gangster"- W.E.Swinton
Here
* hunting and killing others
Here
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
But ask Bush's puppy TB if he is happy now.
Or his other puppy Aznar, that was ditched after the Madrid bombings.
Maybe it's the plan... Can USofAns ditch Bush after the next (they will happen, you know?) big USofAn bombings?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
>terror is taking over our lives
You started it jews! How everybody forgets when the zio-terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in 1947, which was the center of british colonial administration, killing 90 people, type-writist girls. It was the Oklahoma of Palestine, literally.
That event marked the beginning of the zionist entity and the oppression of the palestinian nation and annexation of arab lands by armed jewish gangs.
Those juden terrorists who did the King David bombing later became top politicians in the zionist entity and the entire west praised them. Only our terrorists are good, your terrorists are bad, says Uncle Sam. That's the great moral of the so-called "free world".
"Last I checked, North Korea started making bombs after George Bush refused to negotiate because you just "can't negotiate" with people like that. I don't know if that's true, but it's hard to imagine how it could have gotten anything worse than it became without negotiating (ie, them now having some nuclear weapons). Nor do I see wholescale military invasion of North Korea feasible at the current time."
It's a little more complicated than that. Clinton signed several agreements via Sec State Albright that essentually gave North Korea money and goods in exchange for promising to abort a nuclear-arms race in southeast Asia. But he did so without consulting with the Republicans in the Senate, and as a result couldn't get it ratified (remember Congress controls all the money in government). This is almost identical to the failed situation whereby the U.S. Senate refused to pass the treaty concluded after World War I (here again the executive failed to allow minority government to participate in the treaty making process and as a result was unable to get it ratified after it was signed).
Shortly there after Bush comes on the scene. North Korea makes the same offer ("buy us off or we make nukes"), but when Bush refused unilateral negotiations of this type they "suddenly" began developing nuclear weapons.
The reality more likely is that these weapons had existed in some form the entire time. As a number of analysists have pointed out, nuclear development in North Korea is a "fuzzy" matter to timeline. Especially since the U.S. is so heavily dependent on signal intelligence through the monitoring of internal communications - this type of intelligence is faulty if uncorroberated by human intelligence (/insert line blaming CIA Director Deutche). Just like in Iraq, we were hearing all the crosstalk, but the communicating agents are often lying to each other as is frequently the case in countries like Iraq and North Korea where each element is trying to bilk money out of the country and protect their position ("Comrade, we have increased boot production by 100,000 units this month, this memo proves it!").
At any rate, Christopher Hill and our other excellent public servents over at the State Department have as of this week re-engaged North Korea in multilateral talks. Unilateral negotiations can never work because the problem of nuclear proliferation within southeast Asia is not a unilateral one, and Bush was correct in accepting the State Department's advice in rejecting North Korea's request for such.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
I really wish the world was as fischer - price / tinker toy simple as you imagine it to be. Live a few more decades, read the news and lots more history and perhaps you will lose your "peace at any cost" mentality.
I found this slightly offensive.
I am not a kid whom you can treat with such condencendence.
I am a 35yo, father of one, street-savvy person.
I know what is to live in other countries, and I know too what is to live in a ghetto (Brazilian favelas).
Be more respectful, please.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
He would have died counting his sheep if Uncle Sam did not finance and support Israel's reign of terror in the Middle East since its creation, or if Palestine was created and structured as a state at the same time, with equal opportunity to its people.
But, as in all your other answers, you'll choose to ignore what I am saying.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
That means they can resolve features as small as two millimetres. Phew, I was worried they'd be able to see my willy.
I do not believe it is, at heart, a religion issue.
You're absolutely right. Religion does not kill people. People do.
Wow, that seige mentality has really gotten to you. You do realize that is exactly what the terrorists (And GWB) want.
How did the Spanish capitulate?
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the perception was that the Madrid bombings were a direct result of the involvement in the Iraq war.
You seem to answer your own question when you say, It was also because of the governement [sic] being involved in the Iraqi war.
There's your capitulation.
While not supporting it in the first place may be a different matter, withdrawing support now only supports the terrorists.
They don't have unemployment in the EU!
+++
My last.fm page
Mr. "I can't ride a bicicle" and Mr. "innumerous bypass surgeries" is...
the puppet and the puppeteer?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
A link to that same picture was posted last time this subject came up (when us Americans started installing these naked-scanners in airports), but... it doesn't tell you much, since there's no picture of the girl without the scanner to compare it to. The picture looks like an "x-ray naked" picture of an 80-year-old woman... and if it is, in fact, a picture of an 80-year-old woman, then of course she doesn't look so hot "backscattered".
I did it, I did it on purpose and I'd do it again.
It's cheaper to assemble people in India or China and just import them.. they seem to be really good at over there!
Yep, it seems to be a copy of this one.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
overthrow rightfully elected democratic states when the people of them elect to do things bad for your Multinational businsees!!! After all, why should other countries elect to have clean air, water, and fair union/labor laws like we do here?
"-- Terrorism may have turned the United States into a nation of fear and aggression, but it won't succeed in Europe."
If that is your sig, please use the signature field properly.
I'm not going to comment on it or the rest of your post, because the way this stuff gets modded +5 insightful around here, *anything* I might say to the contrary would be viewed as flamebait (even what I am posting now), no matter how true.
If anybody would care to prove me wrong, mod this insightful (not that I think my comment really deserves it).
is there any effective measure to be taken besides relying on intelligence services ?
Anybody have an idea if leather clothing would reflect the 'incidental millimetre-wave radiation it receives' the same way human skin does?
No, see in this strange thing called democracy, people get have a--marginal--say in what their government does. When 90% of the population doesn't want something, they should be listened too. Also, as far as I understood it, this wasn't a war on terrorism but a war against a madman with WMDs. So any army that participated in the war can't be expected to participate in a new objective. Another fact that should be highlighted is that Spain didn't capitulate in perhaps the most important way: it didn't change its lifestyle. Every continued as normal, which is the strongest message that can be sent to terrorist. "You can't scare me, punks!" No crazy laws were enacted, people didn't hide in their houses, no new anal probes were purchased. All that changed is that intellegence decided to devote more resources to radical islamist terrorism. Spain won.
"1) Our freedoms will be eroded and we _will_ be terrorised by the spectre of metal detectors, exposive sniffers and body searches when untertaking any normal, day-to-day, things like getting on a bus or entering a shop."
You fail to understand, that by taking away your security, terrorists have already eroded your liberty. Now hard choices need to be made concerning what's the best compromise to maximise liberty through increasing security without undermining other liberties.
Vote for Pedro
If that is your sig, please use the signature field properly.
The reason I don't use the sig field is a nasty experience. On 9/11 2001 I removed a witty joke sig that I had back then, and participated in a huge thread about the tragedies of that day. A couple of days later I put the sig back and took part in other discussions. Then for some reason I checked one of my 9/11 comments, and was horrified to see my witty joke sig under my comments there. In that context the sig was horribly out of place and disrespectful.
If slashdot should offer optionally "sticky" sigs (sigs that stay with each comment), like Scoop sites do, I'd use that immediately.
I'm not going to comment on it or the rest of your post, because the way this stuff gets modded +5 insightful around here, *anything* I might say to the contrary would be viewed as flamebait (even what I am posting now), no matter how true
If you don't express your opinions people won't listen to your opinions. They can't.
But don't worry, the story is more than twelve hours old, so it's very unlikely that a moderator will pass by. You can express your opinion freely now. You have nothing to fear. Or almost nothing. The risk is very small.
Of course a discussion would probably be rather fruitless since by now we're all alone in this thread. That is probably a good reason to save it for some other opportunity with more people participating.
If anybody would care to prove me wrong, mod this insightful (not that I think my comment really deserves it).
If you want to be modded Insightful or Interesting you have to express insightful or interesting opinions. Declaring that you won't say what you think usually isn't enough.
-- Terrorism may have turned the United States into a nation of fear and aggression, but it won't succeed in Europe.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I think the truth is more likely to lie on a completely different axis. It seems to be a popular misconception that you can figure out the truth by listening to right wing whackos as well as left wing whackos; I think it is much harder than that.
>Expensive scanners in tube stations? Brilliant!
You got that right. Especially with suicide bombers. If the scanner picks up the device the bomber will just set it off and kill everyone waiting on line for the scanner. Scanners work for guns and other non-explosive weapons, but they are completely useless against bombs.
Secondly, whats to prevent a bomber from avoiding the security scanner? All the bomber would need to do is pop open a manhole cover and enter the station or train from the tracks. Or a terrorist could flood the station with a nerve agent from a station vent without ever getting near any checkpoints.
The only deterence the scanners will have in a subway system, is to deter law abiding commuters because they become frustrated waiting in line to be scanned! Taxi!
I can't wait to read what Bruce Schneier is going to say about this stupidity.
What next? Body scanners on busses?
In every building entrance?
Every crosswalk?
Every home?
Wait! You forgot the anthrax scanners!
The bomb-sniffing dogs!
Where's my bodyguards?
Or - like George Bush - where's my ten thousand security personnel with the submachine guns, anti-aircraft missiles, the guys to seal up every manhole cover for ten blocks, the bulldozers to wipe away entire towns that might be critical of me if I pass near them?
Humans are pathetic. Kill fifty of them, you get to influence five or fifty or five hundred million more. That was the basis of my original plans back in the day when I was a bank robber - kill enough people (and the right people), you get to control how things go with the rest. While in prison, I decided it wasn't worth the effort - better to bypass monkeys in the first place.
What was it A. E. Van Vogt said in one of his stories? "The only difference between the deaths of twenty people and the deaths of twenty million is the effect on the emotions of the survivors."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"Third, whenever things finally settle, a bomb goes off.
The current situation suggests that there is a small minority of individuals who *financially benefit* from all of this. Peace time means no recruitment. Satisfaction means no desparation, and desparation is one of the leading conditions that facilitate acts of terror."
I've noticed this pattern too. It isn't a cycle of violence, as the media claims it is. There's a terrorist attack, and an Israeli response. Whenever there's a cease fire, the same side breaks the cease fire, usually claiming some lame excuse for doing it.
In reality, groups like Hamas need money to operate. They feed off of hate, and need to keep hatred towards Israel alive and well to line their pockets.
Vote for Pedro
Yeah, like only American politicians lie.
I'd actually venture to guess that 100% of people who voted, did so for somebody who lied.
While not supporting it in the first place may be a different matter, withdrawing support now only supports the terrorists.
A large majority of the Spanish population never supported the war, not before, not during the war, not afterwards. They threw the government out of office on the first occasion they had. That sounds reasonable. Should they let terrorists influence their opinion and their vote?
You lack imagination. Set off one (or more!) of those during rush hour on a busy bridge, in an underground expressway. In front of train station at rush hour.
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
Last I checked, McVeigh blew up an *entire side* of a building. Sure you can't drive an SUV onto a subway.. but 5 or 10 people can walk on, say with big backpacks (you know.. the kind travellers carry) full of whatever floats your boat -- maybe with some nails and such thrown in for good measure.
Not much bang for the weight? Sure.. but try telling that to the 50 or so people with shrapnel embedded in their faces.
Maybe try comparing apples to apples, hmmm?
Well, as long as you are trying to make your sigs fit the subject of your comment, I can't take issue with that.
If you want to be modded Insightful or Interesting you have to express insightful or interesting opinions.
No, you usually have to express opinions that don't go contrary to the prevailing opinions. For example, your previous comment about using terrorism for fun and profit (praphrasing), and your corresponding sig got modded up to +5, which I found neither interesting nor insightful; it just echoed the prevailing anti-US sentiment around here, and got modded up. While I wouldn't call your comment flamebait, I find your sig actually insulting (the main reason I don't view sigs). Isn't your sig using terrorism to support your views?
If you don't express your opinions people won't listen to your opinions. They can't.
That's a very good point. I suppose there were other reasons (along with the stated frustrations) why I didn't comment. Thanks for the nice reply.
Declaring that you won't say what you think usually isn't enough.
I totally agree there, which is why I said in my previous comment that I didn't think it deserved to get modded up.
> Madrid bombings were a direct result of the involvement in the Iraq war.
You're wrong, but only by the implications you draw from this. As the grandparent post said, the Spanish government (already in a fairly tight race) lost support because it was seen as being deceitful and manipulative about the attacks, not merely because the attacks happened.
The result was that enough support shifted away from the perceived-untrustworthy party to their main opposition that the main opposition won. This new government then followed through on its long-standing campaign promise of withdrawing its troops from what had always been a very unpopular war in Spain.
It was not---based on the reports I've read---the bombing itself that shifted support away from the governing party, but that party's deceptive response to it. Accordingly, while "Madrid scared the Spanish into leaving Iraq!!!" makes a nice, simple story, it's not true---the truth is a much more mundane one of an electorate shifting away from untrustworthy politicians, with the Iraq withdrawal happening as a mere side-effect.
Anyone wanna help decide where these should go?
No, see in this strange thing called democracy, people get have a--marginal--say in what their government does. When 90% of the population doesn't want something, they should be listened [to].
Very true, I suppose if the citizens were against Iraq involvement in the first place, and the then current government went against that wish, then the Madrid bombing had no effect; but then Spain capitulated on its own, without needing the terrorists' prompting.
Also, as far as I understood it, this wasn't a war on terrorism but a war against a madman with WMDs.
Then what was the point of the bombing? If one of the reasons was to get Spain out of Iraq, then it would suggest that staying in Iraq is a good thing (and thus withdrawing support would be a capitulation).
So any army that participated in the war can't be expected to participate in a new objective.
So you're saying that Spain was okay with getting rid of Saddam, but when it comes time to stop Al Zarqawi, that's bad, simply because it is a "different objective," and Spain should therefore not fight terrorism? Regardless of whether that's a capitulation, it still helps the terrorists.
Another fact that should be highlighted is that Spain didn't capitulate in perhaps the most important way: it didn't change its lifestyle. Every continued as normal, which is the strongest message that can be sent to terrorist. "You can't scare me, punks!" No crazy laws were enacted, people didn't hide in their houses, no new anal probes were purchased. All that changed is that [intelligence] decided to devote more resources to radical [Islamic] terrorism. Spain won.
I would tend to agree with that point. I didn't mean that the Spanish capitulated in every way, I was just trying to illustrate (as asked) how they DID capitulate.
It was a joke ... and the ones that tell the truth never get elected, so we can't even blame them for it.
When something is less of a threat to your life than eating (pdf) or bathing (pdf), well, it just seems a little unwise to get too frantic about it. Don't ignore it, certainly, but don't blow it out of proportion - dying from a heart attack or stroke because you were stressing too much about terrorism would be painfully ironic.
Before anyone accuses me of not taking terrorism seriously, keep in mind that I took a Newark-to-California flight---just like one of the hijacked 9/11 planes---a few weeks before the hijackings; change the dates a little, and I could have been on one of those flights. It's because I take terrorism seriously---and rationally---that I accord it such a low level of worry.
By all means, we should aggressively combat terrorism---address its root causes, win over the hearts and minds of populations that might support terrorists, and capture or kill hard-core terrorists that cannot be reasoned with---but losing our heads and shooting ourselves in the foot will do nothing to keep us from harm.
Especially our feet...
Sorry, I didn't mean any hard feelings by it. :-)
The picture looks like an "x-ray naked" picture of an 80-year-old woman... and if it is, in fact, a picture of an 80-year-old woman, then of course she doesn't look so hot "backscattered".
Good point. I don't know why my original reply got modded "informative", since it was meant in humor only. I'm still working on presentation.
One of the things that the air force teaches is "everyone's a detector". The idea is that everyone, from the base commander to the airmen walking into their offices are supposed to look for stuff.
Now, this does tend to result in a high false positive rate, in that mysterious packages generate a response fairly quickly, ranging from having a bomb dog sniff it to blowing it up(one contractor tended to forget his briefcase in the chow hall, and had it blown up twice).
People just get to knowing that you don't leave packages around. Backpacks and such are labled, etc.
I don't read AC A human right
"NO! Foster an attitude of freedom. I understand that many people believe that Democracy == freedom. This is absolutely false! I would even go as far as to say democracy is incompatible with freedom but that is an argument for another time. My point is this: If any nation really wants to be free the will find a way. In fact for people to WANT to be free is the only way for them to be free. This has always been true and always will be. The early US was largely free because those who lived there and then wanted to be. The Swiss are very free because the Swiss people guard their freedom jealously. The rest of the western world is rapidly ceasing to be free because WE NO LONGER WANT TO BE FREE!"
Everyone wants the freedom to act as they wish within their own personal lives. What we don't want is for other people to have enough freedom that they can interfere detrimentally in our own lives. This is the basic calculus most of us go through.
Now when an Osama bin Laden, unrestrained by the laws, mores and culture of the society he chooses to interact with, desides to exercise total freedom of action at the expenses of other's lives we start to see the problem.
I agree 100% with your erudite opinion that democracy != freedom. Democracy does provide freedom for some but it does so only by providing the opposite for others. Democracy offers restrictions, though hopefully equally, on the freedom to act within your community. The hope is to reach a point where both sides of every issue have just enough freedom to obtain their own personal goals while being restricted just enough not to be able to do so at the expense of others.
In summary, I want to be free, but I don't want my neighbor to have more freedom than I do.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
To offer some further support for your argument, the truth is that the promise to pull Spain out of Iraq was more of a political move than anything concrete.
From the BBC:
In other words, the same thing the U.S. was planning to do with its own troops. In essense they aren't removing support in any real sense at all.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
Fine, you get the scanners, but they're pretty useless unless someone's watching them.
That means one employee per scanner and alot of scanners would need to be open at peak hour. The personell requirements for this are phenomenal, not to mention you need to rotate these folks regularly.
AFAIK the tube system already operates at a loss.
No matter what you do the terrorists will find a way to cause death and destruction. Take away the tube (and make it unusable for the commuter) and they'll move to buses (which they've already proved they can do), take those away and they'll fill cars with explosives etc. etc.
it just echoed the prevailing anti-US sentiment around here,
The fact that someone is critical of what the US is doing doesn't mean he's anti-US.
I find it amazing that so many Americans seem to prefer that people not express opinions against what the US is doing. Sheesh, America prides itself on leading the world in democracy, and yet people should be silenced? Americans talk so much about the First Amendment, and yet people whose life is strongly and deeply affected by American power should shut up?
No, I'm most definitely not anti-American. On the contrary, in lots of things I'm enthusiastically pro-American. But that doesn't mean that I'm blind and silent. I'm very worried about what's happening.
Isn't your sig using terrorism to support your views?
Not using. It's not an opinion that uses terrorism. It's an opinion about America's self-defeating reactions to terrorism. It's a very deep worry and concern that I can't express without mentioning what I'm concerned about.
It's a serious worry that started way back in the months before the Iraq war. Back then one of the things that were debated most intensely here in Sweden was what solution Bush might have for dealing with the inevitable chaos once the US military would win the war. It seemed obvious to everyone that the Bush administration must have some completely new and absolutely revolutionary plan, because without a solution for dealing with the inevitable chaos, a war against Iraq would make no sense. For anyone knowing anything at all about Iraq, total chaos seemed completely inevitable, unless there was some unprecedented solution.
(Well, to be more precise, some debaters had theories that the Bush administration had no solution and simply didn't care about the inevitable deadly chaos. But there are always some obsessively anti-american weirdoes out on the fringes. Nobody takes them seriously.)
(Or rather, nobody here takes the fringe weirdoes seriously. It seems some Americans think that the weirdoes represent our official opinions, and get offended that "we" have such opinions.)
(I don't think it occurred to anyone here that the Bush administration might not know that total chaos was inevitable.)
Anyway, as it turned out, Iraq did turn into total chaos, and there was no new solution. On the contrary, the US seemed amazingly unprepared and bewildered. And terrorism was certainly not diminished. Whatever tiny trickle of terrorism may have occurred in, or emanated from, Iraq before the war, was turned into a massive continuous torrent of everyday terror and death and destruction.
Iraq is at the backyard of Europe. The United States has turned our backyard into an indomitable breeding-ground for terrorism that is building up and getting ready to swarm over the borders, to spread over Europe and over the world.
Do we want a breeding-ground for terrorism in our backyard? Does it make sense to have such a breeding-ground? Why is it there? What is it good for?
What can be worth such a tremendous risk?
I find your sig actually insulting
Unfortunately I've found no way to express these concerns in a way that is strongly thought-provoking without also being offensive. In fact, even when I explain these thoughts at length and with care it sometimes offends people. I get the impression that many Americans are extremely touchy on this subject, and would rather that we didn't have opinions.
But if some people are offended, sorry, that's far less important than what's actually happening to our world.
Personally I find it far more offensive that more than 1700 American soldiers have given their life in the belief that they were defending their country, when the horrible fact is that what they've done is exacerbate the problem of terrorism by several orders of magnitude.
I also find it offensive t
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Aznar and the Popular party lost the election because they lied and used the terrorist attacks for political gain and paid the price, has sould it be. That was a matter of dignity and self-respect. You don't use the dead bodies of your countrymen to win an election.
That's way better than the blind faith that many of the people of Great Britain and the USA have in their goverments.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
If we're talking about Stalin, it was the pinkos (communist sympathisers) who took his side in the west. People like Walter Duranty cheered him on and covered up his crimes.
The WTO meetings a few years ago were similarly done in the media. The media in the US said not a word about what the meetings were about, yet had time daily to focus on the arrests.
More recently, many countries have had huge protests condemning the current war US vs Iraq. Two years ago, in some countries there were record turnouts for each successive protest. The city I was in had about 17% of the population out on the streets for one, yet no coverage was given except that Bush cancelled visits to cities with protests.
Body scanners aren't going to help anything except the bottom line of the scanner companies. They may even increase general tension and anxiety through longer lines, delays and safety factors. Anyway, it's all a distraction from the G8 summit's agenda which covers notably discussion about climate change, sustainable development, peace and stability in Africa and the Middle East, etc.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The fact that someone is critical of what the US is doing doesn't mean he's anti-US.
That's very true. And you're right, people should not remain blind and silent. But that doesn't change the fact that the sentiment around here (meaning slashdot) can be very anti-US, and it didn't start with the current Iraq efforts. So it was certainly easy for me to see you as one of those "weirdos" as you say. I'm not all that convinced that you aren't, but at least now I think you may not be - that's a step in the right direction. Your sig does imply an anti-US sentiment, it seems to say that America has failed, and Europe is somehow automatically better, and morally superior. Maybe that's not what you mean, but it sure looks like it to me.
It's not an opinion that uses terrorism
No, I meant that it takes "advantage of terrorism." I didn't mean to imply that you were going out and throwing bombs at people, but you're not taking advantage of it any less than certain profiteers are. In fact, your statement may indeed be helping terrorism, by the fact that it seems to state that we should stop trying to capture guys like Al Zarqawi, and we are somehow just bullying Iraq by being there.
Iraq is at the backyard of Europe. The United States has turned our backyard into an indomitable breeding-ground for terrorism that is building up and getting ready to swarm over the borders, to spread over Europe and over the world.
If you're so concerned about these terrorists spreading into Europe, why aren't you helping round them up, or stop them in some other way, rather than supporting their views (i.e. that US aggression is causing terrorism - which, incidently, is like saying that a rape victim was asking for it). And I don't you you personally there, I'm talking about Europe in general.
This is the fear that the terrorists want to spread
I thought you just said that you had that same fear.
The terrorists do want to spread. That's not an irrational fear, but a verifiable fact. They wanted to spread before the recent Iraq invasion, before Sept. 11, 2001. They had recruiting and training camps.
So the reason why I have this sig is that I hope it will nudge some people into thinking critically about this.
The sig did not do so for me, it just angered me, and led me to believe that any response you had would be equally non-thought provoking. It happily turns out that that was not the case.
The problem is that I see a lot of highly moderated posts around here that amount to nothing more than "fuck Bush, fuck the USA." Therefore, we tend to get desensitized when any REAL criticism comes along.
I am certainly not saying that you should not have opinions, nor that you should not express them. I just hope that there is some way you could express them more constructively (maybe it can't be done, as you've said you have tried).
For example, when Bush went to the UN and said, let's get rid of Saddam, it would have been very much nicer if the response had been more along the lines of "we agree with you, but we think what you want to achieve could be better served by this action, and heres why we think that," rather than "we will reject any proposal put forward by the US..."
Thanks for the insight on your viewpoint. It wasn't wasted on me. Can you think critically about your own opinions (I'm guessing you did before you came to them)?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/
http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/dublin/dead.htm
> Actually if you ask any mainland Brit about Northern Ireland, most would say, give them their independence. Let them fight it out.
I think you have a different value of "any" to me. Those I know with that attitude are woefully ignorant of the history of my country and it's unwelcome place in British colonialism.
And, before you lump me in with the cake eaters, I am a regular visitor to NI and Eire
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The bbc ran the interview. Data. That's evidence so far. I have also just learned that certain rail "tube" stations might have been shutdown *before* the bomb blasts in london, with heavy police and EMT presence at the entry ways. Was it part of the drill reported on BBC audio, my original reference? Can't say yet. Certainly could be though.
In the US the government was running "drills" about airliners crashing into buildings, yet later they denied at the commission investigation that they had any idea that something like that could happen. So which was it again? How is it that up to 9-11, all previous incidents of major planes off course had jet fighters on them within minutes, but on 9-11 none of that happened? Coincidence? really? You believe that hogwash?
You may believe in political coincidences,in regards such high stakes endeavors as changing the political course of entire nations,not to mention trillions in potential profits, but I sure don't, not when they keep happening over and over again and *always* in favor of increasing big brother actions.
And al queda, what exactly is this al queda thing, where did it come from? Oh ya, it means the "base" or database of cia contracted muslim jihadists who were organized, trained and supplied to be assymetrical warfare fighters. Isn't that interesting.
The US and the UK have a very long past verified history of supporting coups, counter coups, revolutions, take overs, support for tin pot dictators and support FROM the highest levels of blood profits international "commerce". That is who really calls the shots, those that profit the most from it. those are the real "leaders" in the western world, not these spokesmodel doofuses like bush and blair, they are puppets, told what to do.. In asia, africa and south america and eastern europe they have been stage managing events for years, generations really. So why are people surprised when they move into what geographical areas are left for this sort of action? Do people in the US and the UK really think they have some magical cosmic deal where THEY can't be taken over and run by the same behind the scenes forces? Says who?
the evidence is all around you, if you choose to look and can extrapolatte a little from history and present day events.
I mean really,just this morning I am reading, the bus that got bombed, coincidently THOSE cameras installed on the bus were *turned off*. uh huh, another coincidence. uh huh sure it is.
You want revisionism, look to your "superiors" who claim one thing then later on it turns out to be false. Downing street memos perhaps? PNAC docs about taking over IRAQ from before 9-11?
You just go right ahead and keep believing the paid off crooked governments tin foil hat conspiracy theories, eventually they get proven out. It may take decades, like with the *completely* phony "tonkin gulf attacks" that were the major reason the US went to war in nam. That took more than 30 years for them to finally admit it was pure fantasy.
The same is happening now with the phony war on terror and these stage managed events. it's busting wide open in italy right now, turns out a lot of "terrorist" attacks attributed to one faction were actually carried out by fascist factions connected to the government. took years, but it's coming out now. many arrests. Check your own news sources, do your own looking up.
Same deal in the US and UK, just sit back and enjoy the show as the lying murderous rats keep scrambling. They are desparate now.
As a (strongly pro-peace-process) Dubliner, I find that ignorance disappointing -- one of those bombs nearly killed my father-in-law.
Mind you, I agree with you on most of the rest of your comments ;)
I know what I'm talking about, and my country tries to implement -- at a constitutional level, and with varying success quotient -- all but #1 above. We had our bombings during the 64-84 dictatorial period, but no more. Why? IMHO, because in our shiny new Constitution (1988), our country made the promises to be a pacific, non-expansionist (and this includes non-imperialist), extend-our-friendly-hand-to-everyone-that-asks kind of country. And, even if we have more than our quota of corruption, bad income distribution, we try to keep our internal problems internal and our external problems solved the diplomatic way.
One thing I can tell you: the "war on terror" is nothing but a scam. Terrorists (and I know some, I can tell you) are not raving lunatics, they are simply people like you and me that, at some point, start thinking they have no other option and if they want to be heard they'll have to use terror tactics. Or people to whom so much evil has been done that they just want revenge. Even the Unabomber thought, at some point, that he could be doing some for the good of mankind, trying to warn us of the imminent (in his opinion) failure of our society's models.
Keep with me: the "awful truth" is that if the state of Palestin had been created together with Israel, if they were charted with local peace as their objectives (Israel is a predominantly military-oriented state), if the US did not keep the Saudi royals where they are by force and with their oil as their only interest, 9/11 would not have happened.
To those who say that "the Islam makes these fundamentalist mad people", remember that Christian fundamentalist have in the recent past bombed abortion clinics. Fundamentalists are fundamentalists, whichever religion they have. But the sure way to turn a fundamentalist in a terrorist is to ignore him, to despise him. Even fundamentalists can be tought the values of respect to others' beliefs.
Ain't freedom of speech great? Yes it is.
How did we get that freedom? In my country, in a gradual process that involved, among other things, terrorist attacks.
How do we keep it? There are so many answers to this, but the best I can think is: respecting other people's freedom of speech, respecting other people's point of view, knowing that your freedom ends where the other people's freedom begins, ie, being civilized. If enough people do this, everybody will keep their freedom of speech.
Peace to you.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Wrong.
I met a man from Eithiopia; he told me this story about his childhood. He said that when he was young, the King was worshipped as being descended from Heaven. When I asked about this strange religion, he replied: "Christianity". They had taken Christianity, together with the old Christian dogma of the Divine Right of Kings, and wielded it against the people once again.
The only twist was that the people were taught to believe that their King had literally been sent down from Heaven, rather than being born on Earth.
Their King, however, was anything but divine. My friend told me about stepping over dead bodies on the way to school when he was ten years old. He told me about corrupt police, who deliberately broke the bones of his neighbour's hand with a screwdriver, because the neighbour had failed to bribe them when the opportunity presented itself. When a food shortage took place, in his country and the surrounding area, he immediately bought up all the food in the area, and deliberately caused a famine. That's right, he deliberately starved his own people to death, all for higher profits. Despite this, years later, when the King was no longer in power, and my friend spoke of her to his sister, he tried to talk about the bad old days, and mentioned what kind of a monster the old King had been.
His sisters conditioned response was: "You shouldn't talk about him that way!" He reminded her of all the bad things the King had done, and she repeated: "You still shouldn't talk about him that way".
That's the power indoctrination (Christian indoctrination, no less!) can have over someone. It's hard to erase dogma and think rationally after it's been inflicted upon you for decades. Christianity, in the modern era, can still be wielded to the same terrible effect it was during the Dark Ages, where God appointed Kings to rule over us all, and only the wicked dared to speak of freedom or equality.
My point (badly made!) was that the benefit of hindsight allows us to look back upon, and hopefully learn from, the bloody history of religion. Christianity has changed from the old inquisition and crusades days to the current more peaceful "missionary" type of approach, and a far greater tolerance for other religions.
Re-read the Bible again. It's still the same bloody-handed text, full of wars, slaughters, and blood sacrifices that it always has been. And it's still taught as if it's the truth in many places.
The Old Testament teaches us about a vengeful, homicidal God who destroys everything on Earth in a fit of rage (except one dubious little boat), in a flood that lasts 40 days. He then orders a father to slaughter his own son on a stone altar, and later sends an Angel of Death to slaughter little children. This Death Angel is such a destructive and deadly creature that it can only be warded off by special sigils painted in blood.
God's Son, Christ, is more a pacifist, but not entirely so. He still pulls out a whip, and starts lashing innocent people; poisons ("curses") someone else's tree, because he's pissed that it's not bearing fruit in the wrong season, and drives an entire herd of someone else's pigs off a cliff, after first driving a herd of "demons" into them.
He is also famous for his quote: "I have not come to bring peace, but a sword". He is sacrificed to appease the bloodlust of his Divine Father, by taking on the sins of the innocent people. This is a direct parallel to the ancient ritual tradition of placing the blame for all wrongdoings on a goat, which was then killed for it's crimes. Christ is the ultimate scapegoat, in a literal sense of the world.
Modern Christianity tries to soften the underlying savagery of the early mythos by claiming that Christ and Jehovah were the same being, though a quick re-reading of Christ's dying words (spoken to his father, not to himself) makes this a dubious prospect at best.
Anyone claiming a religious right to maim and kill will usually be shouted down the loudest from
this won't amount to a hill of beans against a determined and insane enemy - which is what these nutjob terrorists are.
...and the morning continues on albeit with a bit of gunpowder wafting thru the air...
Let's begin:
1) Nut case brainwashed by other insane nut cases decides to blow something up.
2) Brainwashed nut case agrees to strap explosive device to body and pull the rip cord at location x, on time y, day z... To ensure success, wear an oversized coat... or put the thing in a backpack..
3) Coppers put in this magic device that lets them see thru coats, or backpacks...
4) Dilema for the nut case! What to do? hmmm... what to do?
5) Nut case and his brainwashing clan come up with a solution: Nut case is going to die anyway when explosive device goes off... that's the price of visiting the one true g-d eh? So surgically INSTALL the explosive INSIDE the nut case's abdomen! Trigger with (pick your favorite): GPS, timer, magnetic trigger, radio trigger (maybe one that gets set off by the giant magnetic scanner at the place being protected?)...
What you have to do is to get inside the head of the nut case - then you see how truly useless all this BULLSHIT is that's supposed to protect us. What WILL protect us you ask?
Issue every able-bodied man, woman, and child over 16 a carry permit. LEt them carry a gun. We'll handle it from there...
Nutcase comes on train: I am committing hijack!
Carry permitees: BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG...
Ok, maybe the nutcases will still blow shit up, but ya know what - carry permits are still 100% more secure than this bullshit where the TSA tells you to take off your shoes and confiscates your nail clippers....
This may become long and repetitive, for lack of time for editing.
Your sig does imply an anti-US sentiment, it seems to say that America has failed, and Europe is somehow automatically better, and morally superior.
Clearly I have to scrap that sig. Clearly it doesn't convey what I wanted to convey. A few other people's reactions confirm what you have said.
That provocative superior/inferior thing was only intended as a momentary attention-grabber. I expected people to immediately look past the attention grabber and look for the real message. I never expect people to take that kind of mine-is-bigger-than-yours competition seriously. I was mistaken.
No, I meant that it takes "advantage of terrorism." I didn't mean to imply that you were going out and throwing bombs at people,
That's obvious. Of course I meant the same.
but you're not taking advantage of it any less than certain profiteers are.
Clearly I'm still not getting my message across to you. How can I make people aware of a danger if I'm not supposed to mention that danger?
My complaint is that the US has (unintentionally) played into the hands of bin Laden and (unintentionally) fostered and encouraged terrorism by creating a tremendous breeding-ground for terrorism.
I'm saying that the US is trying to put out a fire by pouring gasoline on it. The US will keep pouring gasoline until its people notices that it's gasoline. You need to start noticing, we can't have you pouring gasoline indefinitely. If you don't stop soon we'll have the whole world on fire.
But the citizens of the US remain blissfully unaware of the danger, dreamily fantasizing that the gasoline is water and that it can put out the fire.
The fact that I try to make people aware of this gasoline does not mean that I'm taking advantage of terrorism. I can't make you aware of something without mentioning that which I try to make you aware of.
your statement [...] seems to state that we should stop trying to capture guys like Al Zarqawi,
Where on earth did you get that idea? I said no such thing!
and we are somehow just bullying Iraq by being there.
I don't care whether you're bullying or not. I care about terrorism swarming over the world.
If you're so concerned about these terrorists spreading into Europe, why aren't you helping round them up,
What??? "Rounding them up"???
Why is it that so many Americans think that everybody else is far less cocky than Americans are? Why do so many Americans think that others will submit docilely in ways that Americans would never, ever submit?
If the United States were invaded by a superior power (if such existed), would the Americans submit docilely? Of course not! Could the American resistance be quieted by "rounding them up"? Of course not! The more the invaders killed and captured your sons and brothers and fathers and nephews, the more Americans would decide to join the resistance!
Do you have any reason to doubt this?
So why fantasize about other peoples submitting docilely when you yourselves would never, ever submit that way? Why fantasize about "rounding them up" when you yourselves could never, ever be effectively rounded up? Where do these dreamy hopes come from?
The whole Iraq adventure is based on this weird fantasy that the terrorists are far, far more docile and submissive than most Americans. They certainly aren't! They are suicidally fanatical mass murderers! Their family members are of course normal people, but their life in feudal societies of warlords has probably made them far more aggressive than most Americans. Where's the evidence that they'll succumb if they are rounded up? Sheesh!
Remember this image: Visualize how Americans would react if their country were invaded and the invaders rounded up the American resistance
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
are you really that misguided? No, I am not misguided at all. Read on.
Your statements assume that terrorists are reasonable and rational, operate in good faith... They often are, and do, at least for started. I am from a country that only got redemocratized (?) with aid of terrorist and guerrilla techniques. Terrorists normally are those who have no voice... and find out that nothing talks louder than a bomb or a good old 747 bumping on a big building.
No matter WHAT you do, there's going to be someone with a different viewpoint and beliefs, and often with conflicting interests. With reasoning, good faith, and reasonable concessions, you can negotiate anything.
Simple example: your not meddling in the internal affairs of other countries can be taken as inaction and indifference by one side, and they may bomb you anyway just to get you "involved". This is wrong in so many levels. One: they do not do that. Ever. There is no record of this. Terrorists normally have targets, and they keep their focus. Two: inaction and indiference are not urgent enough to be in the radar of guerrilla people. Three: what many perceive as inaction and indiference is just hidden under a pile of commercial actions and interests.
This is not to say that one shouldn't do the things you suggest, but following your recipie by rote does NOT mean that *no* terrorists will *ever* want to bomb your country. You may be right that there are no guarantees -- to a point. But the politically-motivated terrorist finds some systems more "at fault" than others. There are reasonable reasons why Osama attacked NY and DC and not Brasilia. We do have good relations with Israel, but we also have great relations with most (all?) muslim countries. Our muslim internal community is well-integrated in our society, and welcome everywhere, and has been like that for the last two centuries. We respect them. All of this make us less of a target.
The UK was a target just for the IRA, until Blair thought it was a good idea to put an end to it joining Bush in his anti-rights crusade. Aznar did the same IRT the ETA in Spain. Both (Aznar and Blair) wanted to be known as "the man who ended the ETA/IRA". They failed miserably and all they did was to paint huge concentrical black and white circles in their capital cities.
Even if Ireland/Euskadi people want (democratically) to be integrated instead of secessed (?), more regional financial independence (more local taxes, less federal taxes) is the recipe to block separatists: they usually want to stop the bleeding of resources that usually end up in other places. Spain, for instance, had conceded a lot in those areas, and as a result ETA has much less popular support among the Basque people that it had in the past. All their problems would be solved, IMHO, if Spain just went the "Democratic alternative" way and made a popular referendum on the emancipation of Euskadi.
Even the USofAn constitution (or was it the Declaration) acknowledge the importance of peoples self-determination. Or do many think that it is only valid to USofAns from King George?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
If everyone else is playing by the book? They sit down and talk diplomatically, and make concessions until a consensus is reached. Or, if no consensus is reached, the rogue country is isolated, which can be pretty bad in itself.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
You're forgetting the Gladio policy: http://www.rense.com/general63/sword.htm
Namely, that it is sometimes useful to terrorize the innocent for the purpose of some politicians or technology companies and industrial complexes.
"If everyone else is playing by the book?"
Did you even read what I said? The point is that people are NOT playing by the book.
As far as 'rogue' nations that don't play by the book, by rogue, do you mean every single nation that isn't Sweden or the Netherlands? By your rules most of Africa, China, Russia, every single Middle Eastern Nation clearly are 'not playing by the rules'. France, Germany, England, a smattering of other European nations and the US all also fail to 'play by the rules'.
So... I guess you are arguing that Sweden and the Netherlands declare the rest of the world rogue nations and refuse to deal with them?
Sorry I got a bit sloppy/lazy with the emphasis/italics.
That provocative superior/inferior thing was only intended as a momentary attention-grabber. I expected people to immediately look past the attention grabber and look for the real message. I never expect people to take that kind of mine-is-bigger-than-yours competition seriously. I was mistaken.
Fair enough. There actually are people who seriously have that kind of competition mentality that you speak of, so when I read things like that on line, it is unfortunately hard to tell how serious one is on line.
Clearly I'm still not getting my message across to you. How can I make people aware of a danger if I'm not supposed to mention that danger?
You're right. There was a confusion of ideas there. You're certainly allowed to mention a danger, but your sig seemed to me, to be antagonistic and to take advantage of terrorism to support your ideas in the same way you were accusing the Bush administration of doing. You can't have it both ways, where you get to talk about it in terms that you believe in and they don't get to talk about it in terms that they believe in. Whether you think they believe that way, or whether you agree with that expressed opinion.
What you should take issue with is either that you disagree with the supposed point or that you think that the submitter doesn't believe it. The latter being a less tenable position as no one can prove what somebody thinks. That's a little vague and generalized, but I think you'll get the idea. If your earlier remark (i.e. the "fun and profit" style remark) was made as such for the sake of brevity, then like your sig, the point is made.
My complaint is that the US has (unintentionally) played into the hands of bin Laden and (unintentionally) fostered and encouraged terrorism by creating a tremendous breeding-ground for terrorism.
Now that is a good point, and certainly a defensible position. I'm not sure I agree with it, but it is *definitely* a valid concern. So maybe if you could phrase it in a less antagonizing way, it might work better. (I see you have changed your sig, so I'm sure we get each other's point here). The case could be made that Iraq was already a breeding ground for terrorists, which is the reason we went there in the first place.
What you have said resonates with some of my concerns over the operations in Afghanistan, and figuring out what the terrorists "wanted". I've always said that we should never give in to them, (e.g. if they ask for release of some prisoner, or kidnap someone) don't give in to their demands, because it only legitimizes their actions, and probably encourages others to follow their example.
But the case September 11th attacks was different, the terrorists clearly wanted to kill Americans, and keep on doing so, but for what purpose? To keep us out of Saudi Arabia? This was the stated complaint of Osama Bin Laden. So in order to not give in, we would have to essentially stay there. Also (and probably most importantly) we have to stop them from being able to perpetrate such destructive acts. This is would be best accomplished by getting Afghanistan to turn over Osama, by force if necessary (which admittedly we didn't do very well). And getting rid of Saddam Heussein (like we should have a long time ago) because he was the most capable and most likely force to aid terrorism. If as you say, there was no connection to Al Queda, there shouldn't be much terrorist resistance as they were enemies of Saddam, they should be cheering us on (well ok, maybe not cheering, since they don't like us any more than Saddam, and actually quite a bit less).
But, this is a win-win situation for the terrorists, because then they could claim (incorrectly, of course) that we were "oppressing" them. Those groups that thought we were oppressive before would really have a field day with this. This is where your statements play into their hands, so you have to be V
Sorry about the delay, I've been very busy. And now this has become ridiculously long. I hope you don't mind.
The case could be made that Iraq was already a breeding ground for terrorists, which is the reason we went there in the first place.
Already a breeding ground? The incredible chaos we see now in Iraq is impossible under extremely harsh and cruel dictatorships like Saddam's. Such a chaos would be possible only if a revolution were imminent. But in that case the invasion would have been unnecessary. If people see their children starve to death and don't revolt there's a very strong iron fist keeping order. Any claim that Saddam's Iraq suffered a similar chaos under Saddam would completely invalidate what we have been told about the extreme cruelty of the dictatorship.
Note that today there are terrorist attacks several times a week, with many people getting killed every time. The kidnapping of locals has become an industry, financing and strengthening a growing mafia. To avoid the danger of these kidnappings, higher education professionals like doctors and engineers flee the country, leading to "brain drain", that is, there are too few people in some professions.
Health Now: Kidnappings Bleed Iraq of Doctors
Global Policy Forum: Abductions Surge in Iraq
China Economic Net: Common Iraqis concerned about image as kidnappings surge
What you have said resonates with some of my concerns over the operations in Afghanistan,
I agreed with the war on Afghanistan. That country did not have the tremendous potential for post-war chaos that Iraq had. The war on Afghanistan made sense from the start.
The only mistake, but a horrible mistake, was when the US decided not to finish its work in Afghanistan, and thinned out its forces there, to turn its attention on Iraq instead. A tremendous mistake, with far more dire consequences than when the previous war on Iraq was left unfinished.
I've always said that we should never give in to them, (e.g. if they ask for release of some prisoner, or kidnap someone) don't give in to their demands, because it only legitimizes their actions, and probably encourages others to follow their example.
I agree. Giving in to kidnapper's demands would strongly encourage more kidnappings, by showing that kidnappings are profitable and give power. There would be more and more kidnappings all the time.
It's important to remember that the terrorists are not organised as one strong cooperating mafia. They are an unorganised chaos of disparate small groups without central coordination. There are conflicts and violence between them. Giving in to kidnappers one group would make a myriad of other groups think "Hey, we can try that too." Maybe even a competition for proving their "valor". Nightmare.
But the case September 11th attacks was different, the terrorists clearly wanted to kill Americans, and keep on doing so, but for what purpose? To keep us out of Saudi Arabia?
I suppose it's possible, but if that were their goal they could come much closer to achieving it by turning their anger much more against the government of Saudi Arabia than they have done, and by inciting revolt in Saudi Arabia, and by making threats and ultimatums before attacking, and so on.
I believe more in a combination of anger and despair, along with a lust for power among the leaders. Anger and despair is a dangerous combination. I think very likely it's a feeling of deep despair and frustration with the poverty and the inferior status of their countries and peoples as opposed to the West. There's probably a lot of mob rage, the kind of collective anger that turns into lynching. I also think many of the leaders are drugged
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
I know I said I was done, but I just wanted to clear up a misunderstanding. (I told myself I'd only respond to clear up a misunderstanding or if you suggested another forum.)
You hate it?
What you and I have done with our discussion? Absolutely not. It's more that I feel it is off topic, and what I object to is much of the more inflammitory (or one-sided) stuff that gets modded up aroud here (it wasn't your inital comment that dragged me into this, it was the insightful, though still somewhat off-topic, stuff that came later). I think you'll find that people like you and I that discuss things rationally are a minority.
That's unfortunate because you argue very well. Discussing with you has been very interesting. Too often discussions on these issues degenerate into anger. Your arguments have been thought-provoking.
Thank you.
I give you the link anyway, just in case you like such discussions as long as they are on-topic.
I appreciate that. I've been developing a similar site myself (been wanting to for a long time). I'd love to discuss this further in another forum.
I've been developing a similar site myself (been wanting to for a long time).
Me too! Unfortunately it's taking me a lot of time -- I have some special ideas that require programming.
The guy who started The World Forum was smart enough to use existing software instead. When I stumbled upon his site I recognized many of my ideas, and took a break from my programming for my own site to contribute a lot there. Later I went back to my own programming -- it's difficult to do both when there's very little time.
I'd love to discuss this further in another forum.
In fact several times during our discussion I've wished that we'd been at The World Forum instead, because I'm sure people there would be interested, and very likely some would contribute to our discussion. It even occurred to me that we might copy the discussion we've had so far to that site, so people can comment easily if they want. In fact right now there's a frontpage story where I think our discussion would be on-topic. Or alternatively there's a blog area where this would most definitely be considered suitable. (I never blog, but I could make an exception.)
I might add that I'm sure you'd be warmly welcomed at The World Forum. Most of the careful, insightful contributions there represent opinions somewhat similar to mine. But the site was never intended to be one-sided, quite the contrary! The discussions will become far more interesting if many different opinions are represented. Therefore I think people will be enthusiastic if you show up there.
-- The price of eternal vigilance is a dollar a day and half an hour of your time.
Carefully choose a responsible newspaper. Support it, read it, write to it.
Do your part.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
If you wish to repost this thread at The World Forum, go ahead.
I tried to sign up during the recent upgrade, but I did get a log-on afterwords.
I'm not too sure how much I'll be contributing due to the aforementioned time consumption. I'll do what I can.