Your Honor, May I Approach?
I just have a couple of stories I’d like to bring to the attention of our readers. This first one comes from the "Insider" section of the Washington Times. There’s a reason I cite this story. No leading, recognized group has come out and condemned any sort of attack perpetrated by Islamo-Fascists. And a Hat-Tip goes to Captain’s Quarters for both pieces.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
Muslim leaders in Britain yesterday were swift to condemn a series of deadly bomb blasts in London and they appealed to Britons not to single out their community for reprisals.
The leaders also made an unprecedented appeal to the estimated 1.7 million Muslims living in Britain to tip off the police about who had carried out the bombings.
"These evil deeds makes victims of us all," the Muslim Council of Britain said.
"The evil people who planned and carried out these series of explosions in London want to demoralize us as a nation and divide us as a people.
"All of us must unite in helping the police to capture these murderers."
That same appeal was made by the leadership of Europe's largest mosque and cultural center.
"We call on the Muslim community to be fully cooperative in this situation, so we may all live in peace and harmony and continue to make London the vibrant, tolerant and peaceful city it is," concluded a statement from the London Central Mosque, whose golden dome rises above one of London's major landmarks, Regent's Park.
Now, we have our first condemnation of the terrorism from a major Muslim organization. Maybe it’s because the community is starting to wake up, or the fact that one of the targets for Thursday’s blasts was a predominantly Muslim area. That’s Aldgate. And I’m sure by now that, as parts of the article point out, the Muslim community in London is afraid of backlash. Backlash much in the form of Germany’s ban on Muslims in their country. These people don’t want to be deported, and if that is something al-Qaeda was counting on—to twist and exploit them and their displeasure into hatred—they’ve got another thing coming.
During the blitz, Churchill didn’t throw out all the Germans. Blair isn’t going to throw out all the Muslims. With 1.7 million Muslims living and working in England, I doubt the prime minister would be foolish enough to make such a move. I’ll grant you that the blasts yesterday would warrant greater scrutiny, but this is anything but 11 September. That’s not to downplay it, but it could have been a lot worse. As Marcie pointed out yesterday, they didn’t use a WMD. There’s a silver lining for you. Which that probably also means they don’t have access to one, or could not smuggle one in. Regardless, the death toll is just now hitting fifty. That’s after 24 hours. After 24 hours of the worst attack in US history, we had close to 3000 dead. Big difference. And this leads me into point number two. This comes from the "Strib."
[T]here are ways to fight it. Some are better than others. Just days ago, Bush said again that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. He asserted that the United States fights terrorists there so it won't have to fight them at home. The London bombings illustrate the fallacy at the heart of that argument: Terrorists aren't a finite army that you can defeat on a battlefield and achieve victory. Ivo Daalder, international security expert at the Brookings Institution, said it well: "Today's terrorists are independent operators, beyond the control of any state. They roam relatively freely around an interconnected world -- striking when they are ready and we least expect it." ...
As Daalder also said, invading countries isn't the answer and often makes matters worse. What's needed is increased cooperation between nations in law enforcement, intelligence, security, financial tracking and other forms of aggressive counter-terrorism. Perhaps it was fortuitous that this attack came as the G-8 leaders are meeting; this could possibly put more urgency into the international counter-terrorism agenda.
Fighting terrorism is going to be a long, hard slog, more like fighting crime than anything else. Sometimes it will indeed involve military action. But more often than not, it will involve quiet, determined law enforcement and intelligence work -- to discover the nooks and crannies where terrorists hide as they plot their next outrage -- and then destroy them before they act.
This is a snippet of an editorial out of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. And this goes onto show why journalists, like politicians, don’t run wars, and why when they speak about the subject, they’re relatively retarded.
Paragraph One: The bombings in London, much like the ones in Bali (targeting Australia, because of those killed) and in Madrid was a clear message from the barbarians we fight that they wanted Britain out of the war. It was a surgical strike, at the height of rush hour, to kill as many as they could. As Tony Blair stated yesterday, they failed. And we have defeated them on the battlefield. They won’t engage our forces on the field of battle any longer because they lose. They prefer to use the only tactics they seem to know how to use. IEDs, terrorizing the populace into not helping us, and car bombs. Israel faces this sort of life everyday. Those in Iraq and Afghanistan likewise live under such conditions right now. But it will change. Idiots like those at the "Strib", and those on the Left, I’m sure, thought this war would be over in a week or two. We heard what the president said about how long it would be. We don’t go to war half-heatedly (unless your a president trying to keep your sordid affair off the front covers of newspapers), and we know what it entails. And as for the "least expect it" part, this was the first time in almost a year that we or our allies weren’t prepared for this, i.e., we didn’t have advance notice through intel. But the fact of the matter is, as the president said just over a year ago. We have to be right 100% of the time. The terrorists only have to be right once.
Paragraph Two: The terrorist may havce struck because of the G-8 conference; possibly some pseudo-reminder that they still exist. Or, maybe al-Qaeda planned this bombing for the day the Olympic venue was supposed to have been announced, or on the day they thought it would be announced. That’s stretching a bit, as they would’ve had to have advance knowledge of who was going to be chosen. There are many possibilities, but the basic assertion that invading countries doesn’t work is preposterous. Look at Afghanistan: Aside from the attack last week that cost us almost twenty Spec-Ops troops, the Taliban had mounted attacks that amounted to minor annoyances. They are broken in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the cowards have been reduced to using car bombs to blow up civilians, or those signing up for Iraqi security details. They’re also still trying to weasel their way into small, out-of-the-way towns in Iraq, and instituting their fascist law there. That doesn’t last long, as many of the Iraqi civilians have firearms to defend themselves, and they have proven that they’re not afraid to use them. I personally believe that the effort is working, and for the last time, you moronic Leftists, Iraq is part of the GWOT. It’s stage two. Quit separating it from the overall war. It’s your worthless pea-brains that keep it separate, and you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Just like your ideas and you ideology, you were wrong then, and you’re still wrong now.
Paragraph Three: Who invited Bill Clinton and Janet Reno to write this piece? Law enforcement? What do you want us to do, write them tickets? Stop! Or I’ll say "stop" more forcefully next time? Please. Get a grip. Law enforcement should have an analysis role only in the capture or thwarting of terrorists. Let the military handle the rest. The intel guys will crack what they need to, and point the good guys in the right direction. Further, their stupidity in this one paragraph alone shows that these editorialists have no clue how intelligence work is done. There is no "X" that marks the spot until the puzzle is finished, and even then, "X" may be off a little. There are times where intel is exact, and others when it’s not. That’s the way it works. Think of intel work like a puzzle. The more pieces we have, the easier the task becomes, and the clearer the picture becomes. But there will be times where we have to move quickly, and we go with the intel we have in hand at the time. Case in point, in 1998, then-Pres. Clinton and over half the world decried Saddam Hussein and his WMD programs, but the worst that happened was yet another worthless UN sanction. Regime change was determined and approved of by Congress then. Pres. Bush gets into office, and uses the WMD programs as just one of the reasons to go into Iraq—the overall point that was made was Saddam’s ties to terrorists. That was a point that the media refused to address, but they hopped all over the WMD programs, which shifted to working WMDs thanks to them.
The president used the intel he had in hand at the time. It’s the same intel Clinton had, the same intel the Brits, the French, the Germans, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Russia had. They all pointed to Saddam’s WMD programs—his chemical and bio weapons programs—and they also pointed to the fact that he was pursuing nuclear weapons. He wanted them, and wanted them very badly, hence his ties to North Korea and Libya. But the most important point that the president made, in his State of the Union speech, was the ties Saddam Hussein had to terrorism. And he even had an "I-told-you-so" moment when our forces kicked over a rock in Iraq and discovered Abu Abbas—the main hijacker of the Achille Lauro. He even cited Abu Nidal in one of his speeches about going into Iraq. Colin Powell used the WMD argument before the UN Security Council, but he also showed satellite footage of some of the terrorist training areas in Iraq, including the fuselage of a 747 or 757 (I forget which one) at an abandoned airfield where terrorists were taught how to take a plane. On 11 Sept., nineteen terrorists did just that, and turned four jetliners into deadly cruise missiles.
And that’s another point I’d like to make. For all the effort the terrorists put into the attack yesterday, the attacks were blunted, for the most part. It wasn’t a WMD, which would have resulted in ten times—at the least—the death toll that is totaled today. They struck public transportation, but couldn’t get an airplane. Despite the apparent ineptitude in many airports, the terrorists can’t get their hands on a plane. (Besides, in this day and age, if a plane deviates from its flight plan, it’s liable to have a couple fighter jets sent up to bring it down—one way or another.) And, they had to use the old standby tactic of striking during rush hour to provide a body count. The terrorists, in short, are operating from a position of weakness. The GWOT is working. Operations have been disrupted, assets have been seized or frozen, and pressure on our enemy is worldwide; they are engaged in nearly every corner of the globe. Just because it isn’t being reported by Wolf Blitzer or Caroline Ivanov of CNN and FOX, respectively, doesn’t mean we’re sitting on our laurels while troops engage them in the field of battle. Much of this war is being fought in the shadows, where our efforts won’t be fully recognized for some time. But the tactics we’re using are working, and they’re working effectively. After all, when was the last time we were attacked?
Publius II
I just have a couple of stories I’d like to bring to the attention of our readers. This first one comes from the "Insider" section of the Washington Times. There’s a reason I cite this story. No leading, recognized group has come out and condemned any sort of attack perpetrated by Islamo-Fascists. And a Hat-Tip goes to Captain’s Quarters for both pieces.
http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/
Muslim leaders in Britain yesterday were swift to condemn a series of deadly bomb blasts in London and they appealed to Britons not to single out their community for reprisals.
The leaders also made an unprecedented appeal to the estimated 1.7 million Muslims living in Britain to tip off the police about who had carried out the bombings.
"These evil deeds makes victims of us all," the Muslim Council of Britain said.
"The evil people who planned and carried out these series of explosions in London want to demoralize us as a nation and divide us as a people.
"All of us must unite in helping the police to capture these murderers."
That same appeal was made by the leadership of Europe's largest mosque and cultural center.
"We call on the Muslim community to be fully cooperative in this situation, so we may all live in peace and harmony and continue to make London the vibrant, tolerant and peaceful city it is," concluded a statement from the London Central Mosque, whose golden dome rises above one of London's major landmarks, Regent's Park.
Now, we have our first condemnation of the terrorism from a major Muslim organization. Maybe it’s because the community is starting to wake up, or the fact that one of the targets for Thursday’s blasts was a predominantly Muslim area. That’s Aldgate. And I’m sure by now that, as parts of the article point out, the Muslim community in London is afraid of backlash. Backlash much in the form of Germany’s ban on Muslims in their country. These people don’t want to be deported, and if that is something al-Qaeda was counting on—to twist and exploit them and their displeasure into hatred—they’ve got another thing coming.
During the blitz, Churchill didn’t throw out all the Germans. Blair isn’t going to throw out all the Muslims. With 1.7 million Muslims living and working in England, I doubt the prime minister would be foolish enough to make such a move. I’ll grant you that the blasts yesterday would warrant greater scrutiny, but this is anything but 11 September. That’s not to downplay it, but it could have been a lot worse. As Marcie pointed out yesterday, they didn’t use a WMD. There’s a silver lining for you. Which that probably also means they don’t have access to one, or could not smuggle one in. Regardless, the death toll is just now hitting fifty. That’s after 24 hours. After 24 hours of the worst attack in US history, we had close to 3000 dead. Big difference. And this leads me into point number two. This comes from the "Strib."
[T]here are ways to fight it. Some are better than others. Just days ago, Bush said again that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. He asserted that the United States fights terrorists there so it won't have to fight them at home. The London bombings illustrate the fallacy at the heart of that argument: Terrorists aren't a finite army that you can defeat on a battlefield and achieve victory. Ivo Daalder, international security expert at the Brookings Institution, said it well: "Today's terrorists are independent operators, beyond the control of any state. They roam relatively freely around an interconnected world -- striking when they are ready and we least expect it." ...
As Daalder also said, invading countries isn't the answer and often makes matters worse. What's needed is increased cooperation between nations in law enforcement, intelligence, security, financial tracking and other forms of aggressive counter-terrorism. Perhaps it was fortuitous that this attack came as the G-8 leaders are meeting; this could possibly put more urgency into the international counter-terrorism agenda.
Fighting terrorism is going to be a long, hard slog, more like fighting crime than anything else. Sometimes it will indeed involve military action. But more often than not, it will involve quiet, determined law enforcement and intelligence work -- to discover the nooks and crannies where terrorists hide as they plot their next outrage -- and then destroy them before they act.
This is a snippet of an editorial out of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. And this goes onto show why journalists, like politicians, don’t run wars, and why when they speak about the subject, they’re relatively retarded.
Paragraph One: The bombings in London, much like the ones in Bali (targeting Australia, because of those killed) and in Madrid was a clear message from the barbarians we fight that they wanted Britain out of the war. It was a surgical strike, at the height of rush hour, to kill as many as they could. As Tony Blair stated yesterday, they failed. And we have defeated them on the battlefield. They won’t engage our forces on the field of battle any longer because they lose. They prefer to use the only tactics they seem to know how to use. IEDs, terrorizing the populace into not helping us, and car bombs. Israel faces this sort of life everyday. Those in Iraq and Afghanistan likewise live under such conditions right now. But it will change. Idiots like those at the "Strib", and those on the Left, I’m sure, thought this war would be over in a week or two. We heard what the president said about how long it would be. We don’t go to war half-heatedly (unless your a president trying to keep your sordid affair off the front covers of newspapers), and we know what it entails. And as for the "least expect it" part, this was the first time in almost a year that we or our allies weren’t prepared for this, i.e., we didn’t have advance notice through intel. But the fact of the matter is, as the president said just over a year ago. We have to be right 100% of the time. The terrorists only have to be right once.
Paragraph Two: The terrorist may havce struck because of the G-8 conference; possibly some pseudo-reminder that they still exist. Or, maybe al-Qaeda planned this bombing for the day the Olympic venue was supposed to have been announced, or on the day they thought it would be announced. That’s stretching a bit, as they would’ve had to have advance knowledge of who was going to be chosen. There are many possibilities, but the basic assertion that invading countries doesn’t work is preposterous. Look at Afghanistan: Aside from the attack last week that cost us almost twenty Spec-Ops troops, the Taliban had mounted attacks that amounted to minor annoyances. They are broken in Afghanistan. In Iraq, the cowards have been reduced to using car bombs to blow up civilians, or those signing up for Iraqi security details. They’re also still trying to weasel their way into small, out-of-the-way towns in Iraq, and instituting their fascist law there. That doesn’t last long, as many of the Iraqi civilians have firearms to defend themselves, and they have proven that they’re not afraid to use them. I personally believe that the effort is working, and for the last time, you moronic Leftists, Iraq is part of the GWOT. It’s stage two. Quit separating it from the overall war. It’s your worthless pea-brains that keep it separate, and you’re wrong. Dead wrong. Just like your ideas and you ideology, you were wrong then, and you’re still wrong now.
Paragraph Three: Who invited Bill Clinton and Janet Reno to write this piece? Law enforcement? What do you want us to do, write them tickets? Stop! Or I’ll say "stop" more forcefully next time? Please. Get a grip. Law enforcement should have an analysis role only in the capture or thwarting of terrorists. Let the military handle the rest. The intel guys will crack what they need to, and point the good guys in the right direction. Further, their stupidity in this one paragraph alone shows that these editorialists have no clue how intelligence work is done. There is no "X" that marks the spot until the puzzle is finished, and even then, "X" may be off a little. There are times where intel is exact, and others when it’s not. That’s the way it works. Think of intel work like a puzzle. The more pieces we have, the easier the task becomes, and the clearer the picture becomes. But there will be times where we have to move quickly, and we go with the intel we have in hand at the time. Case in point, in 1998, then-Pres. Clinton and over half the world decried Saddam Hussein and his WMD programs, but the worst that happened was yet another worthless UN sanction. Regime change was determined and approved of by Congress then. Pres. Bush gets into office, and uses the WMD programs as just one of the reasons to go into Iraq—the overall point that was made was Saddam’s ties to terrorists. That was a point that the media refused to address, but they hopped all over the WMD programs, which shifted to working WMDs thanks to them.
The president used the intel he had in hand at the time. It’s the same intel Clinton had, the same intel the Brits, the French, the Germans, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, and Russia had. They all pointed to Saddam’s WMD programs—his chemical and bio weapons programs—and they also pointed to the fact that he was pursuing nuclear weapons. He wanted them, and wanted them very badly, hence his ties to North Korea and Libya. But the most important point that the president made, in his State of the Union speech, was the ties Saddam Hussein had to terrorism. And he even had an "I-told-you-so" moment when our forces kicked over a rock in Iraq and discovered Abu Abbas—the main hijacker of the Achille Lauro. He even cited Abu Nidal in one of his speeches about going into Iraq. Colin Powell used the WMD argument before the UN Security Council, but he also showed satellite footage of some of the terrorist training areas in Iraq, including the fuselage of a 747 or 757 (I forget which one) at an abandoned airfield where terrorists were taught how to take a plane. On 11 Sept., nineteen terrorists did just that, and turned four jetliners into deadly cruise missiles.
And that’s another point I’d like to make. For all the effort the terrorists put into the attack yesterday, the attacks were blunted, for the most part. It wasn’t a WMD, which would have resulted in ten times—at the least—the death toll that is totaled today. They struck public transportation, but couldn’t get an airplane. Despite the apparent ineptitude in many airports, the terrorists can’t get their hands on a plane. (Besides, in this day and age, if a plane deviates from its flight plan, it’s liable to have a couple fighter jets sent up to bring it down—one way or another.) And, they had to use the old standby tactic of striking during rush hour to provide a body count. The terrorists, in short, are operating from a position of weakness. The GWOT is working. Operations have been disrupted, assets have been seized or frozen, and pressure on our enemy is worldwide; they are engaged in nearly every corner of the globe. Just because it isn’t being reported by Wolf Blitzer or Caroline Ivanov of CNN and FOX, respectively, doesn’t mean we’re sitting on our laurels while troops engage them in the field of battle. Much of this war is being fought in the shadows, where our efforts won’t be fully recognized for some time. But the tactics we’re using are working, and they’re working effectively. After all, when was the last time we were attacked?
Publius II
posted by Syd And Vaughn | 8:40 AM
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