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British Intel Shuts Down al-Qaeda Sites
DarkWolf0 writes "I guess it should not be too surprising --
the British Times Online discusses the recent shutdown of multiple websites associated with al-Qaeda. I wonder how easy it would be to associate any particular activity with 'terrorism.'"
We criticize terrorists for choosing violence over speech to make their point. Then we take away their ability to speak.
Even from a tactical point-of-view this doesn't make sense. They cite one web site as offering technical instruction on how to commit terror, OK, but what about the rest which undoubtedly contain information authorities could be using to predict and prevent future attacks?
Do they actually think that this will hurt their recruitment efforts? That some guy who is already of the mind to commit suicide for the cause is going to change his mind when his browser gives him a 404?
How is it in this most important of issues we see the least intelligent people making all of the decisions for us?
--
Why didn't you know?
I'll bet they were doing that.
Whether or not allowing the sites to stay up for the intelligence info was probably a hard choice all along, and after the recent bombings, they probably just changed their minds.
I don't think they are shutting down, 'Voices of dissent.'
What they are doing is shutting down a conduit for the organization of groups whose purpose it is to kill civilians, disrupt society, and bring down the current government.
If all they were doing was 'voicing dissent' then most Western governments would allow that. It's when they go a step further, and start killing people, that it becomes a problem.
No reason to lie.
The root causes of terrorism
OK, I've been giving some thought, and I think I've got a handle on The Root Causes of Terrorism. Just why do people turn to terrorism to achieve their goals?
1) It's simple. It has an ease and ready accessibility that essentially any group, of any size, can pull off a "terrorist" attack with very limited resources.
2) It's flashy. Terrorism is "the new coolness." It gets a lot of attention, very quickly.
3) It's empowering. The one element that all terrorist groups have, at the start, is far more passion than power. They care a great deal about their cause, but they simply can't get anything done through more legitimate means. So they start getting violent, to increase their profile and extend their power.
4) It's deniable. If a government wants something done, but doesn't want to risk the backlash of doing it openly themselves, they can try to get some "terrorists" to do it for them. This way, they can stand back and say "tsk, tsk" when something bad happens that benefits them.
5) It's cheap. Modern weapons and training cost far, far more than an average individual or group can afford. But bomb belts probably cost less than a couple of hundred dollars to make. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols put together the Oklahoma City truck bomb on their average salaries.
6) It's tough to fight. A long time ago, a bunch of countries laid out a set of rules for warfare. These rules were designed to, among other things, minimize the number of civilians killed in war. In exchange for some serious restrictions on what combatants could do, large groups of people, institutions, and buildings were declared "off limits." The terrorists systematically look at those restrictions and use them as guidelines for how to best attack our forces.
Many people look at the terrorist attacks [in the civilized world] and wonder why it's happening. I look at the above and wonder why there haven't been more.
I believe Juanita
"The Anarchist Cookbook" book reviews seem to contradict your review
I believe Juanita
How do you know what those sites actually were about? I certainly don't.
Furthermore, "encouraging" violence is part of everyday political opinions: US politicians do it just about every day.
So, do you have a specific argument for how shutting down those sites is going to make us all safer? Because, a priori, restricting free speech and political discussion would seem to only strengthen the arguments of the terrorists.
>> But the fact that you nowadays could 'get flagged' or even get a very nasty visit by looking at such content is silly. More, it makes me both afraid and angry. Terrorists attacking our freedom. Oh yes, it seems that they are very effective now.
The focus of any act of terror is typically not to maim or kill a few dozens, but provoke reactionary policies by the government, inconveniencing millions. Look at the basque movement for classic example of this, where concilliatory gestures from the spanish government were met with increasing violence. Admittedly they were attacking targets within their own country, but the dynamic is identical.
No terrorist organization can do a fraction of the damage to a government that it will do to itself in reacting... How many lifetimes worth of hours have the American public lost in increased airport security checks alone? There are no bombs going off on US soil, but you're getting screwed every day to prevent it.
Either way the terrorists win a little bit.
http://request-header.info
So... it is a-okay to bomb a terrorist camp and kill everyone in it... but suddenly their 'rights' are violated if someone knocks out their websites? Get a little fucking perspective please.
As to what is accomplished, that is easy. First, it makes low level support more difficult. You want to prevent casual supporters from throwing a few bucks in their direction.
Second, it is a propaganda war. If a terrorist blows himself up in London, murdering a pile of innocent civilians, it is best to deaden whatever benifits they get out of it by making it harder for them to get their message out.
The reason why this is being done is the exact same reason why Britian didn't let the USSR set up a Soviet Army recruiting station in London. Is it going to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? Probably not. Is it worth while to try and disrupt a terrorist's cells propaganda machine? Sure, why the hell not.
Put another way, if a British rapist made a website and posted movies of him raping 13 year old girls, would you be terribly upset if it got shut down? Get some fucking perspective.
How do you kill someone with a web site? Or is that classified?
I can't tell you who originally said this, but I agree whole heartedly, and I believe it answers your question quite well: "The most dangerous weapon in the world is a set of trained eyes and a radio."
Communication is a military neccessity--removing your enemy's ability to talk amongst themselves makes your job easier, and theirs alot harder.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
And yet a government cannot do 'nothing' in response to a terrorist act or threat. That would merely invite ever increasing acts, until they HAD to do something. (WTC I, Khobar, USS Cole, Nairobi, WTCII)
Either way the terrorists win a little bit.
Exactly. In this sort of dissimilar warfare, 'winning' by the 'good guys' is extremely difficult, if possible at all. It may take decades or centuries.
But in the meantime....ignore it at your peril.
Exactly. Clarke is right there.
Al Qaeda and most of its adherents are old-style "shoot 'em and blow 'em up" terrorists - no different and less sophisticated than most other groups thirty years ago.
The idea that they have some sort of advanced biochem/nuke weaponry is horseshit. They jack off to that stuff - they don't actually have any.
It's trivial to bring a city to its knees with some guns and some hand grenades - you just have to pick your targets and, most importantly, KEEP DOING IT. This business of pulling off one attack, then either not doing anything else for three years, or screwing up a second attack, just makes the first attack worthless.
Terrorism does not work unless it is CHRONIC. Look at Italy and Turkey in the 1970's - THAT was chronic terrorism and it nearly brought down the governments of those countries. Or the IRA in Northern Ireland.
The stuff done in Europe and the UK, let alone the one significant attack in the US, simply isn't on anybody's radar screen on a day-to-day basis.
Everybody's dancing around now because four bombs went off in London. Three months from now, nobody except the relatives of the injured and killed will remember it happened (and those relatives probably will get screwed out of any compensation they have coming by the bureaucrats in charge.)
Meanwhile, though, it will be used as an excuse to ramrod more laws giving the UK government control of everything. And the US will follow suit.
Look at the idiocy of starting random searches on the New York subway. Totally braindead. Nothing but CYA for the idiots running New York.
Anybody can walk into any crowded transit vehicle in the US with two hand grenades in jacket pockets, pull them out, pull the pins, flip the levers, say "Imshallah!" and toss them - and twenty people within twelve feet of him will die or be seriously injured. Get five guys to do that in New York - totally bypassing the cops (unless these guys really LOOK wacko) - and there will be no New York subway the next day. Do it on San Francisco's BART and cripple the city's transportation system for months.
As Rutger Hauer, portraying a "Carlos" type terrorist in "Nighthawks", said: "Remember - there is no security!"
There are only TWO ways to stop terrorism:
1) Find them and kill them BEFORE they act (only works for small, geographically concentrated groups.)
2) Remove the social and political reasons for their acts.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Are you kidding? The terrorists spent a couple years planning their op, and spent 19 lives (and plane tickets) to take out the towers.
Let's ignore the direct casualties and property damage, and instead look at the whole picture.
In response to what twenty people did, we have, in response, killed tens of thousands of people, lost about twenty thousand of our own soldiers (dead and wounded), and have spent nearly two hundred billion dollars in a War On Terror, with no end in sight. For the money we're paying, we could lose a World Trade Center EVERY OTHER WEEK and STILL be ahead on costs.
Our first war front, Afghanistan, at least isn't a complete disaster. The government is not in tight control, but we could 'win' there, where 'win' is defined as leaving behind a stable, democratic government. Now, we probably won't LIKE a stable, democratic Afghan government very much, nor they us (if they're free, one of their fervently-exercised freedoms will be to dislike us), but we don't have to like them... we just have to be reasonably sure they won't bomb us. That's still possible.
Iraq, on the other hand, was completely and totally bungled. It IS a total disaster. We have created the world's best training center for terrorists, where disaffected Iraqis can learn to fight Americans in the comfort of their own homes.... we'll break right in! We face escalating violence in that country, to the point that some people are starting to talk 'civil war' instead of 'insurgency'. The American-intalled government is looking very shaky indeed. The problems there are getting worse, not better. We lost that war at Abu Ghraib; we showed the Iraqis just what kind of people run our country. The Iraqis will never, not EVER, accept any government we impose. It's just a matter of how many body bags we choose to fill before bailing out and watching that place turn into a firestorm.
Back at home, we have lost rights by the score. The government now has many, many powers to intrude into our lives that it has wanted for years, but which we (rightly) refused them. We have few protections against unreasonable search. We are building a surveillance society, the thing we feared most as a country for so many years. We are IN a police state, it's just not one that has shown its fangs very much yet.
We have lost habeas corpus. The government can call you an enemy combatant and disappear you.
Win? The terrorists didn't "win". They hit the FUCKING JACKPOT.
Close. It's not quite that simple.
There's that whole "non-combatant" thing that screws up the curve and makes simplistic answers like the one you gave untrue. Patriots tend to know who non-combatants are. Terrorists don't know the meaning of the term.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
It's said that the Palestinians are simply too backward and dysfunctional to understand this concept. It's said that the Palestinians 'never miss an opportunity to ''miss an opportunity.'' Well, that is their problem, not ours.
Hell, you could take all the Palestinians and put them in the middle of the endless slums of Lagos or Nairobi or Abidjan or Kinshasa and they would just -disappear- as if they never existed.
The Palestinians don't realize how lucky they are to have the Israelis as the occupying force in their land.
Your views sir, are to be frank, extremely odious and an anethema to decent human compassion. You need to take history lessons. Fast.
May the Maths Be with you!
Maybe this has already been done, and its intelligence gathering value is now outweighed by its usefulness to the bad guys. Or maybe the nature of the resource makes tracking the people who are talking problematic at best.
Unless, of course, you don't actually HAVE any information to back up your claims. So yeah, let's all have a big hurrah for this PR bullshit
I'm guessing you didn't RTFA. The British government isn't making some nebulous claims about terrorism--a newspaper is making the claim that:
- there were various websites affiliated with al-Qaeda,
- lots of them have gone dark, and
- all the information on the matter they've come up with points at the british government as the reason for item 2.
It never ceases to amaze me the conclusions people jump to, despite having no evidence of their conspiracy theories, and having access to information contrary to the idiocy they're spouting. For a good example, see all the "goddamn republicans!" posts in the "porn taxing" story further down the page. The tax in question is being pushed by a democrat, but that doesn't seem to stop anyone.What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
"And yet a government cannot do 'nothing' in response to a terrorist act or threat."
Simple answer. The U.S. should have used everything it had to swiftly and massively crush Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, using every civilian airliner and ship it could find to get the forces there as quickly as it could. If Pakistan objected they should have been crushed too because the Pakistan secret service more than any other organization help nurture and create the Taliban and Al Qaeda and they are still unscathed today. They are also most probably still sheltering the Taliban and Al Qaeda today possibly including Bin Laden.
Instead they fought a weak proxy war in Afghanistan using local war lords, with very dubious motives and loyalties, mixed with special forces and air power(though there were very few actual targets to bomb). They managed to scatter Al Qaeda and the Taliban instead of ruthlessly crush it. They certainly failed to strike a crucial blow at Tora Bora. Once Al Qaeda and the Taliban made it to sanctuary in the tribal areas of Palestine and the mountains of Afghanistan they have gone largely untouched for the last four years.
Where did the U.S. focus its attention, and the lion's share of its military, money, and resource instead, Iraq which had NOTHING to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda.
So today Al Qaeda is alive and well, spread around the globe, and using Iraq as a recruiting poster for the malevolence of the U.S. towards the Muslim world. Instead of crushing the problem at the source, the U.S. and British are engaged in a futile strategy to try to stop attacks which are by nature nearly impossible to stop. Israel has been trying for decades, using much harsher measures in a much smaller country and failed. The effort is costing a fortune and its mauling civil rights.
All in all it was a strategy conceived by morons who, to cover their tracks, constantly tell everyone what a great job they are doing, and what great war time administrations they are. In fact they are making no headway in the war and seem to mostly be playing right in to Al Qaeda's strategy. One of Al Qaeda's main goals is to launch a small number of attacks and let the U.S, Britain etc. mangle their own economies and political standing in the war with misguided overreaction.
In Iraq Al Qaeda no doubt sees a replay of Russia in Afghanistan. Tie up the U.S. there with an insurgency for the next 10 years and inflict massive economic, political and morale damage on the U.S and Britain. The U.S.S.R's misguided war in Afghanistan was the single biggest contributor to its ultimate collapse. Al Qaeda came in to being figthing that war with CIA backing and they no doubt want to repeat their victory in Iraq against their former benefactors.
@de_machina
"Patriots tend to know who non-combatants are. Terrorists don't know the meaning of the term."
What difference does it make if you kill them anyway. I mean is it really that important that you feel sorry after you killed innocent civillians?
We bombed the shit our of fallujia twice knowing full well that there were going to be non combatants killed. The second time (according to the bbc) we destroyed 75% of the city. But I guess we are so morally superior to the terrorists because we know we killed non combatants and are sorry for it. Oh and we are so much morally superior then saddam because when he was trying to put down an insurgency he used chemical weapons to kill people. When we try and put down an insurgency we use conventional bombs to kill people.
Yup we are all sooooooo much better then those terrorists and saddam.
evil is as evil does
A website "How to strike an European city" is not a means of two-way communication which could be observed. It's a way of gaining followers and giving them basic training in a cheapest way possible. Observing those websites won't give any new information to British intelligence, since they already know how one could plant a bomb in the Metro. Or, the designers of the website also know it is publicly available and could be observed, and won't include any information which should not fall into Western intelligence officers' ears. All they care is to reach those young frustrated males which are prime species for suicide bombings, and teach them a few things. Making this a little harder for them is a good policy. Protesting against that in the name of free speech is plain absurd, it's like complaining that the British government did not allow Nazi propaganda in the newspapers during WW II.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
It doesnt apply to everyone. For example the tabloid papers that printed satellite shots of "saddams WMD facilities" that incited support for the attack on iraq have not and will not be prosecuted. Neither will people like George Bush or Tony Blair who did their best to ensure the attacks were carried out.
If the police thought I arranged for someone to be killed regardless of whether it seemed good morally they would probably arrest and question me, if however you do the same on a grand scale and are the leader of the labour party they wont even bat an eyelid.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
If you haven't already, you should download and watch the BBC documentary series "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of Politics of Fear".
It has an interesting take on how basically, the cronies behind Bush have created the current situation.
After seeing the Panorama show "The War Party" I'm rather inclined to agree with it.
A group that is organizing with the intent to kill people. Ever heard of 'conspiracy?' ...
Here are some definitions for 'conspiracy.' ...
Hey, be careful with that list of definitions. I'm not saying I'm backing al-Qaeda or terrorism, but shutting down web sites under your definition of "conspiracy" leads to misuse. It just so happens that on US soil around 1776, some people met your definition. Except we called it a "Revolution" and/or "Independence":
It cuts both ways, man. The danger with giving up a little freedom (speech) to have a little security is that you quickly have neither.