k-punk on terror

[henrymiller]

me: what i am saying is precisely that you CAN'T generalise these (ascribed) motives or feelings to muslims in the west at large, ie in leeds.

k-punkYou can quite clearly ascribe them to SOME people in Leeds, i.e. Muhammad Sadique Khan, Shezhad Tanweer etc.

yeah -- exactly: you can't generalize *from* the leeds bombers to other muslims in the west (or indeed in the muslim world -- the kurds being my convenient example). i have gone too far in the opposite direction, and indeed i must be doing something wrong, in that i agree with today's polly toynbee article!

OK, so by this logic, surely the USA - which, as you admit backed the Taliban - should also have bombed itself?

yes. the morality of the entire afghanistan episode in the cold war is too depressing to contemplate. basically, a terrible invasion by a terrible dictatorship matched by an nightmarish islamic theocracy backed by christian fundamentalists. there are many wrongs and few rights. but the people who provided a home for AQ were still fair targets after 9/11. this is inconsistent, but i can't see any other answer. the whole history of us foreign policy is having to burn former friends when they go off the reservation.

 

[hint]

Thing is though that exercise did take place.... What does it mean?

How many of these kinds of exercises take place each year?

I'd imagine that the more you look into it, the more it would seem possible that it's a coincidence that a real attack could take place while such an exercise was underway.

Wasn't some of the 9/11 footage shot by a fire crew doing some kind of training exercise nearby?

 

[DigitalDjigit]

How many of these kinds of exercises take place each year?

I'd imagine that the more you look into it, the more it would seem possible that it's a coincidence that a real attack could take place while such an exercise was underway.

Wasn't some of the 9/11 footage shot by a fire crew doing some kind of training exercise nearby?

I did a google search for "homeland security exercise schedule" and you can see that for any given location they happen maybe three times a year at most. Now, this is different because this was a private company. Still, the timing and location being the same is really quite a coincidence.

 

[henrymiller]

i will admit that if true it's extraordinary and obviously brings up big questions. i don't much belive it, i must say. a lot of police would have had to have been in on it, it wasn't clear, while the attacks were happening, that they were at three stations -- during the bombings and well into the afternoon about 8 stations were directly affected, so they guy saying it was eerie because it was happening where they were doesn't quite scan. but there might be something there.
i don't know how the government or the security services benefit. but i am prepared to belive that mi5 is as entangled with their islamist opponents as they were with the ira. all those spy movies about the murkiness of allegiances in espionage aren't plucked out of the ether -- spying is like that.

 

[komaba]

what i am saying is precisely that you CAN'T generalise these (ascribed) motives or feelings to muslims in the west at large, ie in leeds. only among fundamentalists crazies does this (entirely fictional) 'brotherhood' exist. what of the 'brother' kurds? what of the 'brother' londoners killed two weeks ago? IOW i don't buy these ascribed motives; they are at once too rational to be ascribed to suicide bombers, and too irrational to be taken seriously.

I'm not inventing this stuff... if you care to read up on Islam you will find that historically and presently Muslims regard themselves as one community regardless of background or nationality - they refer to all Muslims as forming the Ummah, or community. Sure, this is an idealised view of Islam but one that Muslims, by virtue of being Muslims, ascribe to. The reality, of course, is that Muslims are as split into different groups, as you say, as much as anyone.

Another basic belief of Muslims is in jihad, or struggle, whether inner, or outer as in the promulgation of Islam, but for most Muslims this is tempered by the proscription against violence. The bombers, of course, think violence is fine. Sure, the terrorists are going nowhere fast and their claim to be fighting for Islam is patently false but that doesn't mean they aren't sincere in their beliefs. Part of the problem as I see it is that what these people believe are very extreme versions of what millions of peaceable Muslims believe so it's difficult to deal with them without antagonising borderline Muslims and pushing them over into extremism.

It isn't useful to dismiss the bombers as crazies - taking that view leads absolutely nowhere. Like Blair dismissing them as evil. Dangerous, extremist, misled, fucked up, criminal, warped if you want but from accounts of the people who knew them they were otherwise normal and surprised everyone by what they ended up doing. The problem for the rest of us is to find out how these people get to be how they are and tackle that. Or as Sun Tzu said, 'Know your enemy' - as good advice now as it was 2600 years ago. Part of the problem, IMO, is that too many people in Islam, people running schools and mosques in Pakistan, even in Yorkshire where I've read that immans are often brought in from rural Pakistan, have no idea of the wider world and yet are given responsibility for the religious education of children. An Afghani friend remarked the other day that he thought religious teachers should be schooled in science and world history before being allowed to teach in a madrass. That seems like a good idea to me.

FWIW, my personal view is that anyone who believes in God either knows something I don't (which I think very unlikely) or is wilfully suspending disbelief. But then I regard anyone who thinks they've 'found the answer' with great suspicion, whether politically, philisophically, musically or anythingically.

 

[ambrose]

off topic, sorry, just to point out that this assertion is patently untenable:

"The Russian government was caught red-handed planting explosives in Moscow apartment buildings to blame it on the Chechens."

this has been alleged but of all places russia is the least likely for hard "facts" of this nature to be verified. what is yr source, how were they "red handed".
not saying it isnt possible, but to make such a strident assertion is idiotic.

i know im a bit slow of the mark, but it seems as though henry miller is having problems with the idea of a group of people self identifying beyond the national boundary - britain comes first, then other defining elements. to point out that people might identify on a different axis, yes even to bomb fellow brits, is not to argue that all members of that group feel that way.

to hold religion as a greater bond between groups of people than their nationality is not the mark of "fundamentalist crazies". neither is this an irrational response. to ascribe such a feeling to a group of people is not necessarily insulting.

 

[DigitalDjigit]

off topic, sorry, just to point out that this assertion is patently untenable:

"The Russian government was caught red-handed planting explosives in Moscow apartment buildings to blame it on the Chechens."

this has been alleged but of all places russia is the least likely for hard "facts" of this nature to be verified. what is yr source, how were they "red handed".
not saying it isnt possible, but to make such a strident assertion is idiotic.

It's been a while since I read about it but this: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/mar2000/chec-m15.shtml
gives a brief overview. If I recall correctly there was also intimidation and silencing of Russian journalists attempting to investigate.

If you are willing to believe a shady group (Al Qaeda) can plot to blow up stuff in your country for their own purposes why is it such a stretch to believe than an equally shady organization (your intelligence agency of choice)with a bigger budget and a history of blowing up stuff all over the world won't do it in your country for their purposes.

 

[k-punk]

How many of these kinds of exercises take place each year?

I'd imagine that the more you look into it, the more it would seem possible that it's a coincidence that a real attack could take place while such an exercise was underway.

What THOSE three stations on THAT very day? How low are the odds on that?

 

[k-punk]

Meanwhile: the voice of reason speaks...

 

[ambrose]

im not saying i dont believe it could happen, im saying that believing anything that local police officers, kagarlitsky, or the FSB, and producing such a bald claim is rash in the extreme. Observer "exclusive" or no. Russia is only realsitically spoken about in "maybe"s and "possibly"s, and once you start beliveing the hype of one side or the other, whether it be putin or berezovsky, you wander further and further away from anything resembling the truth. our obsession with "fact" and "evidence" obscures the vagaries inherent in such a situation.

 

[Pearsall]

sorry, wandering back to a point made on the previous page, but where does this idea that the CIA created the Taliban come from?

the Taliban were a creation of Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency. after the Soviets were driven out the US mostly withdrew from Afghanistan as the country fell into civil war (and one of the misconceptions of the jihad against the Soviets was that it was directed by the CIA; in actual fact the CIA provided weapons, money, and logistics info, but the bulk of the task of distributing weapons and organizing and training the various mujahedin militias was subcontracted to the ISI, Robert D. Kaplan's Soldiers of God is a good book on the Afghan War in the 1980's). The Pakistanis wanted to calm shit down in Afghanistan so that in case of any serious confrontation with India they could use Afghanistan for strategic depth. So, under the ISI director-general Hamid Gul (google him) they trained and armed the Taliban and sent them off to kick some ass. the CIA and the US stayed pretty hands off for a long time (although by the late 90's they were starting to put out feelers to see if the Taliban would agree to the building of a pipeline from Turkmenistan to Karachi).

sorry, it had to be said.

 

[johneffay]

Thing is though that exercise did take place.... What does it mean?

Synchronicity obviously

Have you looked at Visor's website. They're a company specialising in crisis management. If they're a successful one, they're probably running these exercises every day of the week.

 

[johneffay]

What THOSE three stations on THAT very day? How low are the odds on that?

If you listen to it carefully, you'll see that isn't what he says. He says he was running an exercise involving those stations. He might well have been considering every staion in central London.

Also. the conspiracy theorists are going on about him having a thousand people in the stations and that was how the bandages arrived so fast. Once gain, all he actually says is that he was having a meeting in an office with the crisis managers of a company with a staff of over a thousand.

What are the odds on a man whose job is advising on crisis management having a chat with some people about terrorist attacks in London on a Friday morning? Probably about the same as you discussing the Ontological argument with a bunch of teenagers

 

[DigitalDjigit]

and this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1533917,00.html

 

[mms]

and this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1533917,00.html

yeah police enforce the law not make it ,so that's that i hope.
that bloke from yesterday that got shot had nothing to do with the incidents .
oops.

 

[owen]

it's remarkable how little information the police have given out over the last couple of days- so many odd inconsistencies, like whether these phantom bombs a couple of days ago were supposed to go off, whether or not there was smoke coming out of a train at stockwell yesterday, and not to mention why they shot this poor fucker (and why they apparently had him under surveillance?)--it's all incredibly sinister

 

[MBM]

Muslims in the UK

Economist article on links between different Muslim groups in the UK.

 

[Omaar]

Met chief warns more could be shot

"Openly discussing the shift in police tactics for the first time, Sir Ian defended the policy of "shoot to kill in order to protect", saying it was necessary to shoot suspects in the head if it was feared they might trigger devices on their body.

..... What we have got to recognise is that people are taking incredibly fast-moving decisions in life threatening situations. There is no point in shooting in someone's chest because that is where the bomb is likely to be. There is no point in shooting anywhere else if they fall down and detonate it. The only way to deal with this is to shoot to the head."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/attackonlondon/story/0,16132,1535605,00.html

Is this not a slightly disturbing development? Surely not justified ....

 

[henrymiller]

i know im a bit slow of the mark, but it seems as though henry miller is having problems with the idea of a group of people self identifying beyond the national boundary - britain comes first, then other defining elements. to point out that people might identify on a different axis, yes even to bomb fellow brits, is not to argue that all members of that group feel that way.

1) no, i don't have a problem with that; my argument was just that this state only obtained among the devout, and that only a real fundamentalist would take it this far.

2) it clearly *is* irrational insofar as religious belief is irrational, and because the idea of a muslim brotherhood is objectively a lie. perhaps it might be brought about; perhaps it exists in theory or in kernel, but all muslims are not at peace. identifying with the iraqi 'resistance' means not identifying with their muslim victims or the kurds, ie the notion of brotherhood is ideological in the extreme.

 

[DJL]

Regarding the claims on prisonplanet.com and www.infowars.com - both are long running sites helmed by Alex Jones who seems to have a nasty habit of getting things right unfortunately. Admittedly he and his crew can be a bit over the top sometimes but he has some important things to say. Interestingly Alex Jones is also part of Sacred Cow Productions which is run by Bill Hick's lifelong friend Kevin Booth.

Until recently I have been working as a driver for a hire car company and as a result got to listen to lots of radio. I had the fortune of actually hearing the interview on Radio 2 on the 7/7 with the guy who was running the exercises involving all three targetted underground stations. He seemed as equally flabbergasted as the presenter over this uncanny coincidence. Since then he has also remained strangely quiet over the whole issue. The four asian lads who's backgrounds do not fit the profile of suicidal mass murderers could quite conceivably of been involved in this training exercise. The fact they all had ID on them begins to make sense under this assertion. The military grade explosive used (apparently no longer the case due to complete u-turn by the media) also fits with this possible line of thought. All it would take is someone with a remote detonator to explode the rucksacks carried unwittingly by these volunteers for the result on 7/7 to occur. If anything had gone wrong it could be explained away by the training exercise going on that morning.

The government with the support of the Murdoch media empire now have carte blanche to impose the biometric identity card scheme and further fascist legislation concerning freedom of movement and thought which is essential to them controlling the population and thus maintaining their own positions and those of people above them.

Before the history books get changed remember the Reichstag fire perpetrated by its occupants and blamed on a false threat in order to further the fear, motive and enthusiasm of the German population to engage in a World War!

These times are fucked. George Orwell was spot on. I find those unwilling to even acknowledge the above theories as a possibility are generally scared by what it would mean if they happen to be true. It means that a lot of what you believe in is in fact a lie which is something not easily accepted from my own experience... Nobody likes to feel they are not in control and if the above has any strand of truth in it then we are a mile away from our believed ideals of democracy.