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UK Academics Arrested For Researching al-Qaida
D Afifi writes "Two political researchers at the University of Nottingham, in the UK, have been arrested under the Terrorism Act for downloading Al-Qaida material from a US government website. The material was to be used for research in terrorist tactics. There has been a huge public outcry, with university staff planning a march to demonstrate against the attack on academic freedom. Yet, one of the students, an Algerian, is still held in custody under immigration charges and is being fast-tracked for deportation."
The UK is the country furthest along the road to 1984.
in order to control the masses.
Fear is a common tactic used since the begging of civilization to manipulate people.
- Zeus will destroy you all!
- The devil will come for you and burn you for all eternity!
- Terrorists! omg! seek shelter at once!
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
There are 2 issues here that I can tell.
;) ) therefore should not be treated as a terrorist.
:p
#1 Arrest under Terrorism act for having al-Qaida-related material.
#2 Immigration charges and subsequent deportation.
The two are related insofar as discovering 1 resulted in 2.
#2, the illegal immigration, *should* result in deportation - he is perfectly able to make a claim on humanitarian grounds or claim asylum. The fact remains that illegal immigrants should be deported.
#1 should be approached as:
a) person found with dodgy material
b) person was investigated
c) things happen
Now, the main objection is vs c). he was engaging in legitimate academic research (you COULD argue he is a terrorist and this is a clever coverup, but I wont go there
The fact that "An illegal immigrate faces deportation" is no surprise and should not impact your judgement here.
This probably comes acros as a bit confused - its been a long day.
à_à
http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/terrorism/alqaida_manual/
As I RTFA I realized that this looks like standard jobsworth cops at large and could happen any day here in the U.S. Too much responsibility too little brains.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Well, we (the U.S.) did invade a foreign country, kill their leader and throw it into violent chaos. Sounds like terrorism to me. Maybe those UK folks are onto something.
No one else seems to have covered this angle, so I'll bring it up. WTF is wrong with the University of Nottingham? I cannot believe a supposed institution of higher learning would sell its scholars down the river like that. This whole thing flies in the face of what a University is suppose to stand for. Perhaps I'm just naive.
It's just as baseless as global warming. If Bush's pipe dreams (there not being any other intelligence supporting his actions, and he had hardly any plans at all, let alone support from the international community or the UN), it had to be for oil. Bush is an oil man. His father was an oil man. His brother was in real estate (remember the S&L crises in TX in the '80s??).
It was about oil. No tin foil hat. Oil. It wasn't about Saddam. He had a fat mouth that got him lynched. Yes, he was a murderous SOB but then there are loads of them around and we don't do even a fraction of them justice.
And the plan backfired. A commodities market has grasped the weakness of the currency and the high demand, and they now are poised to raise oil until it's at the blood-letting levels, where they'll back off and ride the profits until 'something happens' to deflate the market. In the interim, the economies of the middle east, Venezuela, and Mexico (although Mexico can't capitalize assets to reduce their bleeding) are pretty much glowing with petro-currencies, largely worthless dollars.
If we were going to halt terrorism, we should have targeted the perps in the 9/11 fiasco, and dealt with them. We have not, only serving as poster boy enemies for recruiters of psycho-jihadis. And the rest of Islam looks at us, like the rest of the world, like we must be insane. Indeed our gutless leadership is just that. It takes guts to admit you're wrong, and they'll never do it. This while deficit spending is far out of control, the Fed inflates the currency instead of forcing banks/derivative holders to take a bath, and the average Joe and his grandchildren go broke.
Oddly, we don't have cameras watching our every move, and have at least a modicum of academic freedom, contrasting with the poor researchers in TFA in the UK.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I'm guessing that Mr AC doesn't remember that other 'terrorist' attack in the US. Down in Oklahoma? Memory getting better? There is very little reason to think that a Muslim is more likely than a white to create an act of great violence inside the US borders... school shootings anyone? Kent state? There are lots of examples. My how the black man cheered when the DC snipers turned out to be black... their first notable serial mass murderer. Up till then, all mass murderers were expected to be white.
How many Muslims are in the world? The Muslim population in 2006 is 1610.42 million. from http://www.islamicpopulation.com/world_general.html That's 1.6 BILLION or so Muslims.
Of that, 25 or so have attacked US citizens. Lets be generous and say 50 have attacked western countries. That amounts to... uhmmmm about 3.1047801194719389972802126153426e-6 percent of the Muslim population seems to be hell bent on knocking down buildings. The rest are trying to survive where they are. That, by the way, is a huge bunch of non-violent Muslims. Racial profiling does seem to make sense on face value, but dig a bit deeper and you find that the risk of violence from not invading privacy and personal rights is smaller than
I don't care if you are afraid of shadows, diminishing MY rights because of your irrational fears is still wrong, will always be wrong, and always has been WRONG.
Thanks for playing
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Two details should be considered before judging the situation and blaming random people:
This is a gross mistake anyway, but it's a quite a bit less 1984-ish than one might think from the summary.
The state you are in while your HEAD is detached... - wait, what?
The plan is going absolutely wonderful - if you are a shareholder in an oil company...
OK, I'll bite. Here is the 1998 letter sent to President Clinton urging the removal of Saddam Hussein. Check out the second paragraph:
Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard. As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat.Three years before 9/11 occurred Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others were pushing to topple Saddam Hussein to protect the oil supply. WMDs are mentioned, but the primary context is stability in the Middle East and access to oil.
So yes, bad intelligence played a part. If there wasn't oil involved, I doubt the US would have used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq. Do you really think these guys care about "our moderate Arab allies" and Israel?
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
So, let me get this straight. In order to uphold peace, freedom, civilization and whatnot, we clamp down hard on the academics. So far, so familiar. Now, just for the masterstroke, We focus out little witch hunt on pro-UK moderates, from middle eastern cultural and ethnic backgrounds, with an academic interest in terrorism. Y'know, because it isn't like those sorts of people might prove useful or anything? WTF. Cracking down on academic researchers under some sort of all-encompassing "state's power to do whatever, to whomever" act is bad enough; but not even doing it pragmatically? If 10 Downing Street were to enter the twilight zone, would anybody notice?
No, those groups seem to prefer acts of genocide accomplished with organized armies. Much more civil, clearly. And much more peaceful, too. Oh, how much those savage Muslims have yet to learn.
And how do we define a terror attack? Is it when you cluster bomb urban areas? Is it dropping nuclear bombs? Supporting brutal paramilitaries? Blockading food and medicine transports?
In fact, why only count terror attacks? Surely all violent attacks should be tallied to see which religion produces most violence in this world.
What do you reckon the results would look like then?
Gnome: A never ending quest to make unix friendly to people who don't want unix and excruciating for those that do.
As an atheist, I am a little disturbed how you said:
or even Atheists.Is this supposed to imply you'd EXPECT such behaviour from those of us with no belief in a higher power?! Or even consider it to be more likely?
Atheists are, in general, far LESS likely to tend towards extreme terrorist acts than religious people, for the simple fact that we are pretty well convinced that when we die it's GAME OVER - no afterlife - NOTHING is worth dying for. Plus of course, we are in general a more intelligent bunch (on the average... there are smart religious people, and dumb atheists, but averaged out, we're smarter) and fully realise that any kind of behaviour like this is pretty likely to get us killed, even if it's not a suicide attack specifically.
Oh that that's right... those damn Catholics... no wait...You weren't in Northern Ireland a decade or two back were you?
only the members of Islam can do that for them by changing the way they preach and practice their faith as a group.I consider most religions to be very dangerous things that can lead people to doing horrible things, but I don't consider Islam to be any more dangerous than Christianity. The religious texts are very similar (in fact, a lot of the religious texts are the same) and the standard teachings of peace and love are also identical. If you go to an average Islamic religious service, you'll hear exactly the same things being preached to the people there as if you went to an average Christian one. You could cherry pick and find an extremist Islamic teacher, and the same could be done for Christianity.
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Actually, he is, and he's right, and you're wrong. It's truly frighting how many people think government investigation of "thought crimes" is a good idea.
There IS something fundamentally wrong with a government if how it treats you is AT ALL based on what you're reading. The fact that the government even knows what you're reading is fundamentally wrong. And I don't have to know a flying frak about what you're reading to be in a position to say that.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."