Sunday 22nd of December 2024
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Side effects of terrorism

Much has been written and said about the terrorism world wide but my interest lies in Australia and the effects in this country. Obviously the acts elswhere have effects on us and this is my concern.

Yes we need to guard and defend our country against the possibilities but I am very concerned about the general trend of response from what is known as our Government(s).

In the name of fighting terrorism we are losing our freedoms, what is left of it at any rate. Try boarding a plane for example without having to get partially undressed.

There are now provisions for people to be held for extended periods without legal representation, laws to punish people who even discuss such interrogations, the ability to descend upon any individuals home if suspected and more.

The latest suggestions about banning books and combing through book shops and books for "unacceptable" thoughts or words are, to me, more dangerous than the potential terrorist acts themselves. Perhaps we could just burn all books to be safe.

Any government that has all those powers has the ability to destroy anybody for any purpose, regardless of that persons involvement or not in any terrorism. It just takes someone in authority to take a dislike to you and you can be a victim.

It's simply a matter of time before what I am writing here is deemed " unacceptable " and I get the treatment.

Is it worth the loss to all in our society to allow our Government(s) to rush these powers in? My answer is NO and we should be opposing any and all of that oppression before it is too late.

Fear is the weapon used by our " leaders " but it is us they are making afraid, not the potential terrorists.

I see little in the way of actual defence against potential acts and more restriction of the people. The ID card is yet another threat rather than a help as most of us know.

Australia is in deep shit and it is our elected reps that are creating that shit.

Lastly, has anybody noticed the pattern of attacks? Is John Howard the actual target? He was in New York on 9/11 and in London with the current bomb/detonator scare.

scrumdowns .....

In the good old days of policing, those bullnecked old thumpers knew how to get their man. Accused were verballed, evidence planted and fishing expeditions mounted.

Police powers were pretty wide and all those smart, overweight cops who hung around Chinese restaurants into the late afternoon could sidestep the rules and regs without too much strife. Bribery was rife, evidence and witnesses ''disappeared'', and if material facts were not distorted, they were withheld. ''Scrumdowns'', where cops would collude to present a unified story, were the order of the day.

The royal commission into the NSW police was supposed to have changed all that. What happened after Justice Jim Wood reported his findings and recommendations in 1997 was a system of ''policing by law''. Procedures were tightened by which police power was supposed to be exercised.

What's been happening in recent times is the surreptitious unstitching of ''policing by law'' and a return to powers that are ill-defined and lightly supervised. This is a direct consequence of the war on terrorism.

Terrorism laws just the thin end of the wedge as bad old days return

I think that our leaders

I think that our leaders need an addiction treatment because they are getting more and more addicted to the power they have and seem to forget that we the rest of the nation are not that wellat all and we need some good reforms.

Boiling blood


From Is Bin Laden Ordering the Bombings around the World? Many commentators are putting out the straw man argument that the Iraq War cannot be blamed for terrorism because September 11 and Bali, e.g., happened before the Iraq War.
This argument is so dishonest that it should make your blood boil when you hear it. No one is alleging that all the instances of radical Muslim terrorism can be traced to the Iraq War. What is being argued is that the Iraq War provided the already-existing terror networks with an enormous propaganda and recruiting windfall. Would Hasib Hussein, who was 14 in 2001, really have agreed to kill himself and 20 others on a London bus if Bush and Blair had acted responsibly and declined to bog the West down in a guerrilla war in the Muslim country of Iraq? What if instead they had captured Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, put $200 billion into rebuilding Afghanistan, and used their enormous diplomatic and military weight to resolved the Israeli-Palestinian and Kashmir issues?

and


Obviously, then, the issues are bigger than Iraq. But that does not mean Iraq is not an issue. The Iraq War had many costs. It made the blood of Muslims boil all over the world, including in Europe and the US (with the exception of Kurdish and Shiite expatriate Iraqis).


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From 'Bombers, racists, the law: they're all out to get Muslims'
The research also showed that nearly one in three thinks that Western society is decadent and immoral and should be brought to an end.


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From letters to The Age 24/7/05
For your information Terry Lane (17/7), we immigrants are here in your society to enjoy the two, the only two, positive aspects of Western culture — namely the high standard of living and democracy. We are not here to get drunk, take drugs, remove our clothes, sleep with anyone, terminate relationships at whim, idolise people simply because they kick a ball, sing, dance, act or write fantasies, dump our young in day care and our old in homes for the aged and so on. Only a fool would believe that the two positive aspects of the West are a direct result of the numerous negative aspects.


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From Sharm el-Sheikh Deaths (Informed Comment)
Our world is turning into a horror film. I never particularly cared for horror movies, especially after I had lived in Beirut off and on during the opening years of the Civil War. Once you've seen real blood, the Hollywood ketchup just isn't that much of a hoot.


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More than enough fuel for Trusty John to add to the bonfire of racial hatred.

Motivation of suicide bombings

Obviously I cannot state what the motives of the current bombings in London are, however there was an interview on the 7:30 report a few nights back where a man named Robert Pape discussed his own research over 25 years of sucide bombing. He states:

"ROBERT PAPE: There's a faulty premise in the current strategy on the war on terrorism. That faulty premise is that suicide terrorism and Al Qaeda suicide terrorism in particular is mainly driven by an evil ideology Islamic fundamentalism independent of other circumstances. However, the facts are that since 1980, suicide terrorist attacks from around the world over half have been secular. What over 95 per cent of suicide attacks around the world [are about] is not religion, but a specific strategic purpose - to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from the territory that the terrorists view as their homeland or prize greatly and this is in fact a centrepiece of Al Qaeda's strategic logic, which is to compel the United States and Western countries to abandon military commitments on the Arabian Peninsula."

The item is at this link : http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1418817.htm .

Not that his research is proof positive of anything but it is a study of facts rather than a media driven frenzy. And his findings are basically that the bombings are saying "Get out" to whichever forces they aim at.

On the topic of the "mistake" in London where an innocent man was shot dead, there is no good news on that issue. The only thing I will say is that at least the Brits came clean immediately and didn't run the usual line of bullshit. Not that honest murder makes it any more acceptable. We just didn't have to wade through months of denial etc before the truth came out. A small plus but a good sign at least and acceptance of their own failure.

a little 'collateral damage' .....

A little 'collateral damage' to protect our 'core values'?

 

Or simply another cold-blooded murder in our name – no ID card required?

 

Police Gunned Down Innocent Man

Cold-blooded murder

Yes it's murder, pure and simple. On the face of it there can be no other term to describe this brutal act.

The police officers responsible for this crime should be sent to a certain Cuban facility to serve their time.  At least we would then know for sure that some of the inmates there were guilty of horrific and murderous acts of violence.

Re: Cold-blooded ...

The inquest will call for details of the shooter's training. It isn't everyone who can hold a pistol at the head of a subdued and unarmed person, and pull the trigger several times. But this action is almost certainly the result of intense training, rather than psychopathy.

The training undergone by the specialist squads is intended to over-ride the natural aversion to murder. I guess they had been, more or less, programmed by participation in realistic scenarios, and maybe in the equivalent of a shoot-em-up video arcade.

Dave Grossman warned of the consequences of this kind of desensitisation training, in his book On Killing. The training may have focussed on the need to identify suspects and kill them quickly. The identifying features may have presented as dark hair and bulky clothing, in contrast to the make-up of the other actors in the training tableau. If a shooter has been trained properly, then once the switch is flicked, anyone he identifies as a target is likely to finish up dead.

It's bloody awful but that's what our taxes pay for. And a certain section of the police will be pleased to know the training works. Don't be surprised to learn that Ruddock will send some of the AFP for some of the same. I hope our State police managers will reflect on the impact of a homicide like that one, on the member and his/her family, before they sign up with the Israeli school for termination.

Cult members are programmed to go on murderous suicide missions, and we program cops to hunt them down. Does that sound like Blade Runner?

It will be interesting to read the commentaries in the dailies, about this sudden turn in affairs. But, cricket scores, or a cycling accident, will help to distract away from unpleasant necessities and 'unfortunate incidents'. He was an alien, after all.  And John Howard is hand-in-glove with the Manager of the National Agenda.

Knee-jerk pollies

Bloody sacrifice, blood-for-blood retribution and blood-atonement for historical humiliation, appear to be deeply embedded in the Shi'ite culture. Martyrdom as a vehicle for accumulation of readiness for victory in battle, also feature prominently in expectations.

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Michael Ignatieff: Iranian Lessons
Hence the paradox: the Middle Eastern Muslim society with the most pro-American democrats will strenuously resist any American attempt to promote democracy inside it. It is easy to understand why. ''We fought for our independence,'' Semnanian told me. ''You think when our people fought to drive out the invaders from Iraq for seven years, we were fighting only Saddam? We were fighting the U.S.A. , Britain, the whole world. We saved our country. And now we are free.''

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The ideology of terror
The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global Ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

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Why the bombers are so angry at us
Since the London bombings, many are asking how local, middle-class, educated British Muslims could kill themselves to kill others. Alas, the answer is both simple and disturbing: deep anger at Western combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula. As long as the war on terrorism ignores the actual strategic logic of suicide terrorism, it will be impossible to win and our actions may well end up helping terrorist leaders recruit many more suicide terrorists to kill us.

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The objective: to inflict Mass panic with people running and screaming and let the mass media capture the scenes to broadcast round the globe.

Not the shielding of casualties with portable plastic screening, the calm purpose and the quiet resumption of normal business. The more vision of blood-streaked victims, rushing about aimlessly, the better for the potential jihadis to see. Over and over.


In Nervous pollies bare their teeth Michelle Grattan writes -

Britain wants to crack down on the glorification of terrorist acts.


That should be a dominant theme in plans to harden communities against the effects of terrorism.

Iraq on bypass

A bricklayer, dropping off a posy at the site of Steve's last joke, was asked by a reporter how he was feeling at the moment. "Gutted, mate. Absolutely devastated. One moment he's king of moomba, then a self-aggrandising pollie comes over the hill on a suicide mission, and knocks him off his bike."

Next in line for in-depth investigative journalism - Steve's brother on how their mum is feeling, at the moment.

"Good heaven's - is that the score? Hyuh-huh-hyuh-huh-huh-huh-huh.  Your shoelace is undone, Tony. Gotcha!"

I think I know what's got Our Leader on the campaign trail. Take a look at the banner for the Cato Institute's foreign policy website.  (The Cato is to US Republicans as the IPA is to our home-grown Tories.)

Lots of flags in that banner, but where is the man of steel?

The Cato wrote about another outpost of American fundamentalism.

Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy,

The National Endowment for Democracy is a foreign policy loose cannon. Promoting democracy is a nebulous objective that can be manipulated to justify any whim of the special-interest groups--the Republican and Democratic parties, organized labor, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--that control most of NED's funds. As those groups execute their own foreign policies, they often work against American interests and meddle needlessly in the affairs of other countries, undermining the democratic movements NED was designed to assist. Moreover, the end of the Cold War has nullified any usefulness that such an organization might ever have had. There is no longer a rival superpower mounting an effective ideological challenge, and democracy is progressing remarkably well on its own.

NED, which also has a history of corruption and financial mismanagement, is superfluous at best and often destructive. Through the endowment, the American taxpayer has paid for special-interest groups to harass the duly elected governments of friendly countries, interfere in foreign elections, and foster the corruption of democratic movements.

Sounds familiar.

Howard Cameos At Disaster...Again.

It seems that more than a few are noting John Howard's presence at attack scene, a ravem eyewitnessing  carnage on behalf of the western world.  The Bulletin's Tony Wright was noting the coincidence on air this morning.

Lucky Australia isn't part of the G-8, or hat tricks in London wouldn't be confined to Lords.

It's not suprising that nothing untoward happenned at the cricket.  That would have made Howard really, really mad.