he’s freakin’ me out.
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46127
He’s not just on conservative sites either…
Terrorism isn’t an end in itself, it’s a strategy determined by the relative balance in military power between warring factions.
Terrorist campaigns can often be successful, but generally take decades to achieve that success, and come at a huge price in lives, etc.
It’s very inefficient, in other words, so no cause chooses terrorism when they have sufficient power to fight at a higher level*
Terrorism is the weapon of the nearly-powerless.
With an inability to do real, militarily-significant damage to the enemy, terrorism must instead attempt symbollic damage with the judo-like aim of inciting their opponant (the superior power) to overreact, using its own power against itself.
However, the posession of a nuclear weapon immediately catapaults an arganization from the bottom to near the top of the ladder of military capacity. With a bomb, whole new vistas of viable new strategies open up, making the low-viability and expensive strategy of terrorism much less attractive.
When you’ve got the bomb, you can immediately hole up in some forgotten corner of the world–Sudan, Afghanistan or Aceh, for instance–and announce that the world should buzz off and leave you alone, because you are now the government.
And if the world believes you, they will do just that. No one wants to start a nuclear war.**
~~
So my point is that this fellow’s theory–that al Qaeda plans a first strike on the US–fails the sniff-test. It’s a compelling paranoid fantasy, but it’s lousy strategy. Al Qaeda’s leadership has a better grasp of strategy than that.
However, it’s interesting that, in the week after New Orleans has been destroyed in an event which is already being called “america’s Hiroshima” by commentators, and while the administration is desperate to re-focus attention on their ‘war on terror’, where the politics of fear keep americans compliant, suddenly this fellow pops up with a terrorism fantasy which, yes, appropriate the “american Hiroshima” phrase and turns it to the war on terror.
- except for sporadic, strategic reasons–all powers occasionally use terrorism when it suits them.
**yes, I know the US has a much publicized ‘first-strike’ policy to use against WMD-armed foes, but this is (largely) a bluff.
I’m not sure why you should get upset with this stuff. If he’s wrong you have no worries. If he’s right there’s nothing you can do about it. Better to worry about the things you can do something about IMHO.
djm
Really, I think its just that he’s out there flogging his book more than anybody’s agenda, though the lack or preparedness after NO is certainly on everyone’s tongues. Well, I should say, it serves his agenda to sell books. But coupled with Osama’s latest Ramadan threat, I have been getting that same feeling I got right after 9/11, that the marginal are no longer marginal.
PS. DJM, it’s been bothering me a long time that the govt. seems lackadaisacal about the southern border. There have been some successes, such as the fact that supposedly, EVERY single container that comes into the Port of Oakland is being x-rayed. To me, oil refineries, water reservoirs and container ports have been terrorist no-brainers…
I think s1m0n makes good points.
This idea, although I guess the extremeness varies, seems to be more common than I had realized. I happened to watch Nightline on Aug. 30 to see if I could get some information about Hurricane Katrina. Ted Koppel chose to end the program, which was solely about the hurricane, with what I thought was a very bizarre statement:
Aug. 30, 2005: Being Prepared Nightline Closing Thoughts
By TED KOPPEL
We don’t like anticipating disasters. It suggests pessimism and America is largely a nation of optimists.
But when you look at the damage inflicted by an accidental storm, you have to think about the sheer havoc that an intentional terrorist attack may produce one of these days.
We want to believe that no one will ever use a weapon of mass destruction against one of our cities. But it’s almost inevitable that someone will. We don’t like to hear that; we certainly don’t want to contemplate the consequences. But we need to talk about it and we need to plan for it.
The very worst thing you can do when confronting a potential disaster is to take the position that it’ll never happen to us.
http://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/ClosingThoughts/story?id=1082224
In addition to its just seeming plain tasteless to not have a closing thought about the victims of the hurricane, it seemed very strange to me to start talking about terrorists and “weapons of mass destruction” and attack being “almost inevitable”. I have not studied that issue, although I do understand the basic concern, but I think that there is some question about a nuclear attack being “almost inevitable”. Again, the same link was made. I can see what the fellow writing the book has to gain, and what some of the people quoted in the article would have to gain by keeping the public in constant fear, but why would Ted Koppel be talking like that?
Remember, this thread can’t get political. At least that’s what I thought. I haven’t seen new rules though.
Cynth, I think the spirit in which its brought up is what counts. I heard this guy on the radio last week and the countless references he cited sent chills up my spine. So many in power seem to see this as an inevitability, that’s all. My bringing it up is not a talking point for any political party.
I started to read the story, but I got side-tracked by another story which was linked to it:
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=46265
When I was searching for debunkers of this guy, I came across this related article, which, down a bit, mentions buried nukes found in Belgium. This preceded Katrina but is about the same author’s book.
Was Tim McVeigh a terrorist or a hero, with his judo-like aim at the US gov’t building?
Here’s the flaw in the reasoning. Who would ever have imagined that a cowardly thug would someday be able to obtain sweapons that could destroy all other gov’ts? Who would have thought that a “government” is one who would kill your children simply because he hates you, or didn’t like a more powerful agency condemning his property? We live in strange times, but I think we can sometimes be too kind or broad with our definitions.
Guys like Tim McVeigh aren’t terrorists, per se–he’s a mass murderer who used a bomb. McVeigh didn’t have much of a cause, a strategy, or popular political support.
My post in this thread condenses a lot of ideas, and so skiped this distinction. However, I’ve posted a much longer essay here before, in this: http://chiffboard.mati.ca/viewtopic.php?t=29186&start=30 thread.
Whether McVeigh was a terrorist or a mass murderer depends on who you talk to. Above and beyond defining a cowardly thug as a terrorist or a mass murderer, based on the extent of the cause or popular political support, the term “terrorist” can rightly be attached to anyone who violates laws while intimidating or coercing societies or governments for ideological or political reasons.
I really hate all these political threads – I can’t find the threads I enjoy. Can’t you guys talk about something nice?
Aren’t you a terrorist, Jack? Some news I heard over the Grapevine has it that you caused the power outage in LA today. And that’s where C&F is powered I believe.
I really don’t know how we go about debunking a piece like this. It certainly looks like opportunistic pseudo-journalism to me. (He starts by telling us he has a PhD in philosophy; so do I but it doesn’t make me an expert on the stuff he’s talking about.)
But how many readers have contacts in the Albanain mafia or with the Chechan rebels. How long would you last hanging around those groups with a view to checking out his facts? This whole piece has a ‘file with cold fusion and Loch Ness monster sightings’ feel about it. Yet imagine trying to convince Americans, before the event, that sombody would hijack aeroplanes and near simultaneuously take out the twin towers. Who would just dismiss stuff because it sounds implausible?
The piece read to me as though the guy speaks quickly and without pauses. I imagined a look of smug satisfaction come over his face each time he mentioned yet another link you couldn’t possibly check out. But we know we are vulnerable to the kind of thing he is talking about. We know that there is an alarming gap between what our governments want us to believe the main dangers are and what they really are. To illustrate, the Australian Government was furious with anybody who said that the London bombings increased the probablility of something similar happening in Australia, even though that would be obvious to anyone with a couple of lessons in elementary probability theory and even though all the security experts said as much. (You suspect it’s spin but I can’t help worry that they have lost contact with the difference between spin and wishful thinking since the chance of getting away with that lie was zero.)
What it would require to mount a nuclear attack that is controlled to the point of their being able to mount it at a time of their choosing is a stockpile and constant maintenance. I think we can be nearly certain that Islamists would have nuclear expertise; all it takes is a few clever people with the right degrees and a little hands on experience. But stockpiling in target countries doesn’t seem to be a big part of the Al Queda group’s MO, as you would expect since you lose the stockpile as soon as the first attack is launched.
What we have here are a lot of uncheckable links together with quite a few improbable links. When it comes to complicated plans, the conjuction of a whole lot of very probable links is a large event much less probable than the links it is composed of. As soon as you start adding improbable links, the probability of the whole chain sinks even lower. I would hope that experts are not just discounting this stuff without doing some checking. But we would have to expect a lot of alarmist fantasy at the moment and security experts can’t check everything out. If pseudo-journalists are profiting from this stuff knowing it to be fantasy then I think it is really alarming. Cold fusion and the general free energy business costs the US government millions (perhaps billions) of dollars and gullible cizens (who invest in the companies marketing this garbage) lose millions. I was staggered to discover this stuff recently. Perhaps this is the price we pay for having such a big split between power, money and expertise. But when it comes to national and international security, I’m not so prepared to shrug off the size of the split.
That’s a definition so broad as to encompass pretty much everything from George Bush to the steelworkers Union.
Now you guys are getting into my particular field of experience and education. There is a very specific profile that Mr. McVeigh fits into…its the same one that Ted Kaczynski, The Erie Collar Bomber, George Metesky (NYC’s own Mad Bomber, if you aren’t familiar), Eric Rudolph, and Utah’s own Mark Hoffman of the Mormon Murders…the list goes on and on…
These guys all fit a very specific criminal and behavioral profile, and that’s how a good deal of them were caught! A “terrorist” is something totally off the scale of what you’re talking about here, and since “terrorist” is such a broad word, it would be wise to refrain from calling serial killers, spree killers, and mass murderers anything but what they can be scientifically and categorically classified as. Psychological profiling and classification may not be an exact science, but compared to the obscurity of defining terrorism, it has adamantium claws.
Without getting into a disertation, there are some links you can follow to read up on this topic…
These are for the basic learner; if you really want to know more, go back to school and take advanced degrees in investigation from your local satallite police academy…
http://www.johndouglasmindhunter.com
http://www.crimelibrary.com-not the most reliable source of topical information (it’s one of Court TV’s sites) but it’ll give you a basic idea of what you might want to study…
Also, John Douglas, the man responsible for bringing profiling to the forefront of major investigations (I actually had the oportunity to learn from this guy in a classroom situation; he’s absolutely brilliant!), has an entire series of books that are most informative.
I read one of his books and I was distracted by the breadth and depth of John Douglas’s ego. Oh, well.
The terms “intimidating or coercing,” in any common international sense, would include, but is not limited to, such destructive activities as assassinations, random bombings, random killings (such as a sniper), or hijackings – not a reaction to these violations of law.
A while back I read an article discussing Sadam, Iraq, bin Ladan and all. The writer’s premise was that the people creating these threats fell into two catagories 1) people who had a desire to live past the bad act they want to create and 2) people for who their own continued existance is less important than the act they want to carry out.
He went on to say that US foreign policy response should be different for each group. You can negotiate with group 1 (Sadam) You can’t negotiate with group 2 (bin Ladan) .
So my question is - will the mad bomber type negotiate?
I think it’s more useful to distinguish “terrorist” causes by the degree of support they have in an ordinary population. If a substantial proportion of ‘the people’ are behind a cause, then no amount of force will suffice to stamp it out–Stalin (among others) proved this over and over, and the Isrealis have spent 40 years proving it. The only way to succeed is to divert that popular will away from the terrorists by giving the population’s grievance an alternate means of address. Once divided from their support base, you then stamp out the terrorist die-hards using police action.
This, however, isn’t exactly ‘negotiating with terror’–it’s starving terror of it’s support by resolving the grievance which feeds it. If a large number of a civilian population shares the grievance, it has to be a real one, genuinely in need of being addressed.
Conversely, terrorists of the mad bomber or thrill-seeking gang types (ie, Tim McVeigh or Baader-Meinhoff) have no substantial support in a population, and hence have no real cause that can be addressed. They’re in it for the attention and excitement. Negotiating with this type is counter-productive, because the implied importance just feeds their grandiose fantasies. Besides, they don’t want anything you can offer, apart from attention–there’s nothing they want to negotiate for.