Attack in London Today

About 20,000 people have been evacuated from Birmingham city centre amid a security alert.
West Midlands Police asked people to leave Broad Street, the main entertainment hub and two other areas. Some city homes were also evacuated.

No vehicles are being allowed past the inner ring road into the city centre, and there have also been reports of controlled explosions by police.

West Midlands Police said it was in response to intelligence it received.

Brandon:

Previous behavior is the best indicator of future behavior....

TTF

Thanks for clarifying. I think we agree on much more of this than we think.

Here is what I mean by 2C above:

In order to get other countries to bend to our will (no terrorists and no bioweapons) we have to break international law (i.e lock up people without charges, ignore habeus corpus, invade countries under questionable intelligence, and so on.

With these laws out of the equation (when it suits us) I cannot, and do not trust an administration to follow rules of 'legality' when it comes to bioterror weapons and WMD's of other sorts for thier own proliferation.

You cannot, as an administration, pursue terrorists by all means necessary (legal and illegal, moral and immoral) and then refer to legality and morality when attempting to argue for why the administration can be trusted.

Now, to be fair, I have put you in the same boat as those who ignore international and national law in the pursuit of safety.

I asked before and I will ask again - what price is security worth to you? The essential liberty we all love and enjoy? This is the real question of 80% these threads on this board lately.

TTF

Brandon,
we've been sticking our stick in the hive long before this war in Iraq. The hive I'm referring to is the Middle East in general. In Iran, we threw out the democratically elected PM and installed a dictatorial monarch, the Shah. Our dictator's rule fomented a revolution there that became explicitly anti-American when we harbored and refused to turn over the exiled Shah. The power vacuum that resulted enabled the religionists there, which were slowly building in power and influence, to assume control of the country.

In Iraq we propped up the dictator there, Saddam Hussein, in his war against Iran. We provided him weapons, which he used against them and later he used against minorities in Iraq itself which were in collusion with Iran.

We continue to back an externally imposed, ethnocetrically motivated country there in the Middle East that was established by the arrogation of land, and the ethnic cleansing of its inhabitants.

The straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, for these fanatical nationalists, which I believe is the impetus of these individuals, nationalism, much more than religion, was the occupation of Middle Eastern nations by our military granted by dictatorial regimes allied with our government. The first terrorist response to this was the 1993 WTC bombing.

Today's terrorism is a result of yesterday's foolhardy and venal actions, Finn.

What should be done in the here and now is to learn from yesterday's foolhardy and venal actions so that we may not continue to commit more foolhardy and venal actions, so that we may not die at the hands of the people our government has wronged, if the cessation of reactionary violence--because that's exactly what the terror being perpetrated against us is-- to our foolhardy and venal actions is really our goal.

Or, we could do like what I previously posted upon which Brandon commented.

The fact that these people intentionally target civilians, including children, rather than combatants, ...

Terrorists born or based in the UK were "almost certainly" behind the London bombs, a former Met police chief says.
Suggesting foreign attackers were to blame was "wishful thinking", ex Police Commissioner Lord Stevens told the News of the World.

Whence does it appear that the fact that these people intentionally target civilians, including children, rather than combatants doesn't impress me much, Brandon?

Re-read my post that you originally commented upon for your answer to your question about whom was wronged and how.

Do I believe that the deliberate killing of non-combatants, including minors is justified? You mean, like the fire bombing of Tokyo, Japan during The Big One, part 2?

InfraBlue wrote:

Do I believe that the deliberate killing of non-combatants, including minors is justified? You mean, like the fire bombing of Tokyo, Japan during The Big One, part 2?

Yes, like that. Now, answer, please.

A worm's eye view

Andrew Brown
Monday July 11, 2005

There's very little the US can do to help Britain counter the terrorist threat to its cities, says Andrew Brown.
The bombs in London mark a curious and unpleasant milestone, reversing a trend that has continued for almost 100 years.

From 1917 onwards, whenever the US and Britain have fought side by side, the US has contributed more and more to the victory and the British armed forces have become less and less important.

In 1917, and again after 1941, US troops could not have crossed the Atlantic without the Royal Navy, but in the second world war the Navy was dependent on old US destroyers, while our army was equipped with US tanks.

At Suez, we learned that we could not fight a war at all without US permission. In the 60s, we gave up the ambition to have our own atom bombs (the "dual key" system means that the US controls whether they can be fired, as well as building them).

Ever since the days of Bletchley Park, our signals intelligence has been more and more dependent on US computers and satellites.

The process has gone so far that it looks completely inevitable and unstoppable. But what help can the US give us in our struggle against al-Qaida, whatever that may now be? Looking around, the answer seems to be something between none and very little.

This is an answer quite distinct from the argument that we have been targeted as the US's allies in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a political sense we - and the world - would certainly have been helped by a less arrogant and more competent US.

But that's beside the point. The deal Tony Blair, and his predecessors, struck was that we would abide by the results of US elections and serve faithfully whoever was in the White House.

In exchange for this political fealty, we would get practical help and material assistance - but the practical help that can be given to us in our attempts to stop the next bombs seems tiny.

After all, we know what defeats terrorist networks. It's a mixture of intelligence, politics, and very carefully targeted violence. None of these are commodities we can now get from the US.

Our own intelligence services may not know a great deal about the threats against us - or they may know a lot and have stopped lots of plots we haven't heard about. What's very hard to believe is that they should have learnt anything of value from the CIA, whose record of incompetence is by now second to none.

It may be that US surveillance of the internet will be of some practical help. I hope so. But essentially what we need to do here is co-operate with other European security services facing the same sort of problems that we are, and that have had similar experiences of terrorism.

Politically, I think there is very little any US president can now do to diminish the supply of potential bombers of London.

There is a huge list of things a president might do that would make Tony Blair's life easier - but they would all involve a public, graceful renunciation of things George Bush, and those who elected him, believe as facts. So they're not going to happen.

I don't mean there is nothing political that can be done to make future bombings less likely. The essential objective of any British policy in dealing with Islamist terrorism is to keep it foreign.

Democracy, to use the thriller writer Gavin Lyall's phrase, isn't about elections. It's about the sound of millions of people saying "You can't do that!" when some outrage is proposed or perpetrated. This is now the simple, spontaneous reaction of British Muslims when bombs are put on tube trains.

So all the government - and the rest of us - have to do is to nourish this sense of common humanity. That is a highly political task, but it's also purely domestic and, by definition, something the US government couldn't help with.

When it comes to violence, the last, essential component of policy - well, the US army can't hold down Iraq, and really isn't needed to keep order in Britain. None of its magnificent weaponry is much help against a carrier bag full of explosives on a commuter train.

So in this domestic struggle with terrorism, we're on our own - and, to the extent that we're not, we are equal partners with the US for the first time since 1918.

This may have profound political consequences if the worst comes and low-level urban guerrilla warfare continues for another 30 or 40 years.

At the end of that time, we will have been fighting a war in which our chief allies were European, and the Americas were irrelevant. Could anything be more likely to foster a sense of European solidarity and integration?

* Andrew Brown, whose column now appears on Mondays, is the author of The Darwin Wars: The Scientific War for the Soul of Man and In the Beginning Was the Worm: Finding the Secrets of Life in a Tiny Hermaphrodite. He also maintains a weblog, the Helmintholog.