Explosion In London

[Jorge]

When I was in grade school, my teachers were saying exactly the same thing: don't retaliate against the campus bully. Don't fight back. That's what the bully wants you to do.

Every one of my teachers was wrong. NOT fighting is what made things worse. The only thing that caused the school bully to back off was to beat the crap out of him.

The real world is, unfortunately, just like the school grounds.

You can not fight back invisible enemies. That´s the difference. It´s not like bullying in the school, where you know exactly who is bullying you.

 

[Lambert Simnel]

I believe that there was a report of an unexploded bomb at the Victoria Station...which I believe is a major station near the House of Parliament. A Londoner to verify?

I don't know about Victoria specifically, but there were many scares yesterday evening and this morning resulting in temporary evacuations - this applied at least to Canary Wharf DLR and Liverpool Street. I think it's just the inevitable hyper-sensitivity which people will have for the next few days to any unidentified, unaccompanied bag or suitcase. And given the number of items lost on London transport, there's going to be a lot of such scares for a day or two.

 

[Jorge]

I think it´s time to adapt, and find new ways to defend ourselves. All those warships and tanks are not going to help us to fight terrorism. In my opinion, we should reduce our budget in the conventional millitary and increase it in intelligence. We are over protected from conventional millitary attacks, and what we need is having people inside the terrorist organizations to prevent their attacks.

 

[Rambuchan]

When I was in grade school, my teachers were saying exactly the same thing: don't retaliate against the campus bully. Don't fight back. That's what the bully wants you to do.

Every one of my teachers was wrong. NOT fighting is what made things worse. The only thing that caused the school bully to back off was to beat the crap out of him.

The real world is, unfortunately, just like the school grounds.

Clearly it isn't like the real world and these analogies lead us grossly astray. Was the bully experiencing what he perceived to be the prevention of his brothers living in their homeland (palestine), were you invading his brother's country on false pretexts and taking that country towards civil war (Iraq), had you left his other brother's country in a decrepid state after pulling strings in the Cold War and then gone in and smashed it up AGAIN (Afghanistan)? No. None of this applies so quit it with the poor analogies.

Also - I wanted to add here what many security experts have been saying during their interviews about the events now. ALL of them have said that ID cards would NOT have prevented this happening. The people who perpetrated this atrocity were driven, clever, accepted in British society and seemingly 'not out of the ordinary'. This event has made me accept ID cards even less than I did before.

 

[Drakan]

Yeop, we need more intelligence infiltrated this is no conventional warfare we're waging.

We need insider info. Echealon ?

 

[BasketCase]

You can not fight back invisible enemies.

Sure you can. Nobody can be truly invisible in this world. Terrorists try, and a lot of them get found anyway.

Counterintelligence is one method.

A second method is to look all your suspected enemies in the eye and threaten to take something they value away from them if they screw with you. A person who values only his religion, can be threatened with the loss of that.

 

[Rambuchan]

A second method is to look all your suspected enemies in the eye and threaten to take something they value away from them if they screw with you. A person who values only his religion, can be threatened with the loss of that.

Oh you mean fight fire with fire? (Isn't this what the terrorists are doing?)

 

[Jorge]

A second method is to look all your suspected enemies in the eye and threaten to take something they value away from them if they screw with you. A person who values only his religion, can be threatened with the loss of that.

Oh yes, very clever. Most of what you call suspected enemies will be just innocent people. You want to menace and terrify them Isn´t that a way of terrorism?

 

[Jorge]

Yeop, we need more intelligence infiltrated this is no conventional warfare we're waging.

We need insider info. Echealon ?

No, not Echelon. We need muslims to work and cooperate with us. We need some of them in our side, to act as spies. They can move among them, infiltrate among the radical and religious groups and provide us with information.

 

[Lambert Simnel]

The people who perpetrated this atrocity were driven, clever, accepted in British society and seemingly 'not out of the ordinary'.

This is just speculation at the moment. Possibly well-informed and well considered, but speculation nonetheless.

The case for ID cards doesn't stand or fall or its ability to prevent one particular atrocity, but rather as to whether it will make some possible routes for attack less likely. For many people the issue as regards yesterday's attacks will not be "can you guarantee ID cards would have stopped this ?" but rather "can you guarantee they wouldn't have ?".

 

[CurtSibling]

To our brothers and sisters in Britain, the hearts and minds of Canada are with you. The sun will shine on Britannia again.

Today, this is how I feel. (ugh, I can never seem to get the images in correctly!)

From this Brit to a Canadan bro - Cheers!

 

[Rambuchan]

This is just speculation at the moment. Possibly well-informed and well considered, but speculation nonetheless.

The case for ID cards doesn't stand or fall or its ability to prevent one particular atrocity, but rather as to whether it will make some possible routes for attack less likely. For many people the issue as regards yesterday's attacks will not be "can you guarantee ID cards would have stopped this ?" but rather "can you guarantee they wouldn't have ?".

Fair point and I fully accept that there have been a number of large plots foiled by (existing, I might add) intelligence measures. I was simply throwing that into the mix as it's pretty much relevant. Of course it is hard to "guarantee that they wouldn't have stopped the attack", you know that's hard to prove. But do we want to spend large amounts of money on a system that is being sold to us because it supposedly "guarantees that attacks will not happen in the future"? I just don't want them to get all Bush about it and cite this attack as the reason for lots of initiatives that were already planning, especially if many experts are informing us otherwise.

 

[Rik Meleet]

The events in London made me draw 2 conclusions:

1 - The British are the very best in terror-prevention and terror-smothering.
2 - If even London can be hit, any place can be hit.

That said, it seems to me (or rather: reconfirmed my opinion) that terrorism needs to be addressed not by fighting it, but by removing the reasons why people want to commit terrorism. As some terrorism-experts have explained on TV yesterday, there is not 1 single reason a person joins a terror-group, but still there is a common aspect. The person joining a terror-group sees no future in his/her life. This can be for economic or personal reasons. Only the terrorism-leaders are driven by ideology; the executers are usually driven by personal reasons. That knowledge points to the way to solve (or limit) the terrorism-problem: address the economic problems of the "Al-Qaida fishing pond" and terrorism will fall (but never disappear).

 

[BasketCase]

A lot of those people are located inside dictatorships--there's no way to get at their economic problems in order to fix them.

Oh you mean fight fire with fire? (Isn't this what the terrorists are doing?)

Nope. Terrorists point guns at innocent noncombatants and pull the trigger intentionally.

We point guns at terrorists and pull the trigger intentionally. Almost all innocent people killed by us are killed accidentally.

 

[Drakan]

No, not Echelon. We need muslims to work and cooperate with us. We need some of them in our side, to act as spies. They can move among them, infiltrate among the radical and religious groups and provide us with information.

That is extremely difficult. You have to overcome the ethnic, language, religious, cultural backgrounds for a scant pay (no more than 3.000 euros), no recognition, no social life whatsoever, risk your integrity etc.. all for patriotism.

The Spanish CIA (CNI) put ads looking for people with this profile. You have to hunt them in Ceuta and Melilla. Hardly any university student who studies arab will fit the role. They have to be street wise people with murky backgrounds who are able to infiltrate successfully, no mainstream people and no military are suitable.

Nigh impossible.

 

[bigfatron]

A lot of those people are located inside dictatorships--there's no way to get at their economic problems in order to fix them.

Nope. Terrorists point guns at innocent noncombatants and pull the trigger intentionally.

We point guns at terrorists and pull the trigger intentionally. Almost all innocent people killed by us are killed accidentally.

Philosophically this is back to the argument about whether intention means everything or whether outcomes are also important. Even if you subscribe to the view that intention is paramount, can you accept that others may not take that view, particularly those harmed by good intentions?

Second point is this, even with good intentions, one also has to apply those intentions in practice - sure we only intend to hurt the bad guys, but how sure are we who the bad guys are? And how much risk are we prepared to take in our lives in order to be more sure that it is the bad guys in our rifle sights and not innocents?

Finally, how consistent are we prepared to be? We, rightly, condemn this behaviour but cheerfully carry on supporting regimes that murder political opponents in most appalling ways (e.g. Uzbhekistan) or subsidising our food exports leading pretty directly to thousands of deaths a day. If we cannot be as outraged about these wrongs simply because they kill people in other countries rather than our own, how can we expect to be respected and supported in our reaction to yesterday's atrocities?

We have to grow up as a world and stop being so parochial - IMHO of course.

 

[bigfatron]

When I was in grade school, my teachers were saying exactly the same thing: don't retaliate against the campus bully. Don't fight back. That's what the bully wants you to do.

Every one of my teachers was wrong. NOT fighting is what made things worse. The only thing that caused the school bully to back off was to beat the crap out of him.

The real world is, unfortunately, just like the school grounds.

Unfortunately quite a lot of people around the world (a large minority if not a majority) believe the USA is the schoolground bully (and the UK part of its gang, to continue the analogy), and a small sick part of those believe this is the most effective way to fight that bully and that gang.

That opinion may be misguided, but it is very widely held in the real world and we have to address it - more violence won't exactly change it for the better.

 

[chancellor_dan]

Apples and oranges really. Al-Qaeda is inspired by their Muslim religion. The IRA is inspired not so much by their Catholic religion but a territorial and oppression factor that has more to do with Ireland and the Irish people and Irish land and Irish rights than it has to do with Catholicism. If you took out the Catholic versus Protestant religion factor and replaced it with something else (like Quaker versus Methodist or whatever), the nature of the conflict in northern Ireland would remain pretty much the same. Not so with Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda are fighting a fundamentally RELIGIOUS war based on their RELIGION which is Islam (they want to establish Islamic theocracies all around the world as much as possible) Also, there are distinct BRANCHES OF ISLAM which support terrorism. There's no branch of Catholicism that supports terrorism (IRA is not a branch of Catholicism anymore than the Italian Mafia is a branch of Catholicisim -- but with Islam there are branches like the WAHABI (sp?) branch which supports terrorism).

In addition to all that, there are Islamic terrorist groups OTHER THAN Al-Qaeda. So Al-Qaeda is a subset of Islamic terrorists groups. The IRA is not (it's not really a Catholic-oriented group in the first place ... some of its members are probably not even Catholic ... and there are no other terrorist groups that are Catholic anyway).

Not sure what you're getting at. I said those Catholics who rejoiced whenever a British civilian or soldier was killed were specifically consigned to Northern Ireland. I appreciate that struggle was to do with land and territory, but the religion went hand in hand with that. It was hardly, say, an American Civil War, where two brothers would be opposite sides because they had different ideologies. In Northern Ireland that sides were very clear. Of course theres always individual exceptions, but for the most part it's a Catholic community that favours breaking away from the United Kingdom, to Protestants who are staunch loyalists - certainly more so than any other of the British people.

 

[Brewster]

My condolences go out to all of those affected by this heinous crime on humanity. I will tip back a few pints for the UK tonight. Canada stands with you in your hour of need.

 

[BasketCase]

Philosophically this is back to the argument about whether intention means everything or whether outcomes are also important. Even if you subscribe to the view that intention is paramount, can you accept that others may not take that view, particularly those harmed by good intentions?

That's the problem. People all over the world have completely different views on it. And it's impossible to make them all happy. The ones who are not happy become your candidates for suicide bombings.

World history is chock full of violence. It's also full of incidents of peaceful peoples, who never attacked anybody in their entire history, getting stomped on by belligerent neighbors.

For my part, I used to be one of those "peaceful" people. I finally got sick and tired of being stepped on. Having a clean slate as a peaceful non-violent person wasn't worth the humiliation. It also had really bad dating prospects. Since I became willing to beat the crap out of somebody who wrongs me, my life all around improved greatly.