Some bombs have exploded at the Brussels international airport. Another bomb detonated in one of the city’s metro stations. There’s been considerable loss of life and many injuries. According to the BBC, “The Islamic State (IS) group said it was behind the attacks in a statement issued on the IS-linked Amaq agency.”
The attacks are not a surprise. This is from a Reuters article published yesterday:
The only suspected participant in Nov. 13 Paris attacks to be captured alive has been cooperating with police investigators and is “worth his weight in gold”, his lawyer said on Monday.
Belgium’s Interior Minister, Jan Jambon, said the country was on high alert for a possible revenge attack following the capture of 26-year-old Salah Abdeslam in a flat in Brussels on Friday.
“We know that stopping one cell can … push others into action. We are aware of it in this case,” he told public radio.
Unfortunately, they were not able to disrupt this plot in time to prevent it despite having a cooperating witness.
You should expect to hear all the common defenses of torture now. If only Salah Abdeslam had been hooked up to electrodes and waterboarded a few dozen times, he would have given the investigators the timely accurate information they needed. Because right-wingers are always living in an episode of 24.
I’m sorry about the senseless loss of life in Brussels, but it doesn’t justify torture. And torture generally doesn’t work in any case. But, mainly, it’s immoral and should be impermissible.
Just as with every mass shooting in the US, everybody will trot out the exact same things they said after the last terrorist attack in Europe and the one before that and before that occurred in a western country. None of it is practical and much of it is stupid if not downright contraindicated.
Billmon’s response:
BBC because gotta hear from one of those war criminals still walking around and lining his pockets == Tony Blair warns of ‘flabby liberalism’
A totally irresponsible dickhead.
Put it on his gravestone.
From the linked reporting:
“”The truth is this extremism is being incubated in school systems, formal and informal, which are teaching children a narrow minded and often hateful view of those who are different,” says Mr Blair.
“What people need to understand is that this culture of hate is taught.
“They are taught a culture of hate and they can be untaught it.”
“This extremist thinking is what you have to attack, if you don’t attack the ideology you’ll never defeat the violence.”
Let’s take the existing counter-argument for a spin, one which is very much being used:
“The truth is this extremism is being incubated in school systems, formal and informal, which are teaching children a narrow minded and often hateful view of those who are different,” says the terrorist recruiter.
“What people need to understand is that this culture of hate is taught.
“They are taught a culture of hate and they can be untaught it.”
“This extremist thinking is what you have to attack, if you don’t attack the ideology you’ll never defeat the violence.”
Orwell sighs and nods his head. We read his writing again:
“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
I don’t get the glib substitution of “terrorist recruiter” for “Mr Blair”. It’s the functional equivalent of an ad hominem attack.
You could be critically assessing the claim about teaching hatred. But you’re not.
Regrets that I didn’t express my view well.
My view is that Mr. Blair’s “analysis” is itself glib, particularly coming from the ass who drove his nation into being the lead international and military supporter for W.’s misbegotten Iraq war. Wrong messenger, big time.
Blair’s statement is also trite, anodyne and not particularly useful in determining what we should be doing next. And I doubt its truth as well. For example, am I to believe that the terrorists in the most deadly European actions were taught hate at the European school systems which I believe were attended by almost all of them?
It is also worthwhile to consider that the terrorist recruiters are capable of making their deadly pitch to recruits on the basis of their need to use violence to defeat a hateful ideology. Why have people from Western nation states murdered so many Middle East civilians over the centuries to this day? It would be pretty simple for recruiters to label hatred of their religion and culture as the West’s motivation, a deadly hatred which requires a deadly response.
Bush’s Poodle is another appropriate epithet.
Poodles are far too kind and smart to deserve that comparison.
I agree, but check out this photo-op.
http://ledaro.blogspot.com/2009/12/tony-blair-loyal-poodle.html
wouldn’t be complete without this nutter weighing in with his old script: Trump Media Ally Alex Jones On Brussels Attacks: “This Is The Ultimate False Flag” . (source: Media Matters)
It’s even worse than that I bet. Are we sure the CIA is not funding this? Or maybe them aliens from Mars we all know about.
Wouldn’t be a complete, standard nutter script is something like that wasn’t included. But it’s been my impression that for several years now, Obama or the “Obama administration” has been exchanged for the CIA. Then again, nutter rap doesn’t interest me enough to read much beyond the headlines for the details of their current delusion. Attributing any negative event to ETs seem to have fallen out of favor except for their more delusional set.
Billmon:
In their interests to keep sporadic terrorist attacks around for a very long time.
The whole concept of a ‘cell’ that relies on ideology rather than a command center to run, is independence. There’s threads here to weave which is why torture is too blunt a tool.
Of course his attorney would say he’s a ‘goldmine’ the guy is bargaining for his client’s life.
Of course his attorney would say he’s a ‘goldmine’ the guy is bargaining for his client’s life.
I don’t think Belgium has the death penalty. Neither does France.
Right. The whole raison d’être of cells is independence and “compartmentalization”. Normally one cell has no idea what another cell is doing, or even that it exists, except if somebody higher up decides there’s a specific “need to know” (another useful phrase) — and even then they will not be told any more than what they need to know.
In all likelihood this guy would not have known about today’s attack. But the independence of cells is more horizontal than vertical. The value of such a witness is that he can explain how his own cell worked, and in doing so, give them a general idea of how they all work, at least in the form of valuable clues. Chain of command, supply line, funding, ideology, objectives, and so on.
I wish the argument that torture is immoral and should be impermissible would prevail. I am willing to make it; I feel it powerfully. We can see that 9/11 and the response by our government and our media has created a mass mental illness in the United States, making it less likely that the moral argument will prevail.
I think we need to be much better in elevating the arguments that torture and oppression not only are counterproductive, they are ineffective. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on the torture actions need to be brought up over and over again:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_report_on_CIA_torture
The 6,000-page report produced 20 key findings. They are, verbatim from the unclassified summary report:[1]
The CIA’s use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.
The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice (DOJ), impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other Executive Branch agencies.
The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA Headquarters.
The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious or significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systematic and individual management failures.
The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.
In addition, the automatic assumption is made that Salah Abdeslam knew about the planning for today’s attack, and probably knew when and where the bombings would take place. Based on much of the good intelligence we have been able to gain in the wake of recent incidents, it actually is very unlikely that Abdeslam knew anything about this. A terrorist cel, by design, does not communicate with other cels.
Predictably, the Today Show went out and found Trump and the hosts stuck their fingers down Trump’s throat repeatedly until they got him to vomit out the pro-torture statements they wanted. One of the anti-terrorist policy experts on MSNBC was openly agitated about that this morning, explaining that these sorts of responses from Presidential candidates have the effect of confirming the Islam-hating caricatures that the terrorist recruiters paint.
The media is a big fucking problem in this area. Trump and other candidates should be made to respond on air to anti-terrorism experts who are as unified in their views in this area as climatologists are in response to global warming. The public is being actively misled and miseducated by having this discussion happen primarily through the misinformed statements of elected leaders and candidates.
Trump says we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do to stop the terrorism. Hillary says waterboarding, torture and closing all our borders is not the answer. Just look at those initial positions. If the public is not helped in its understanding of the multi-systemic problems we are encountering here, I have no doubt that the preponderance of public opinion will side with Trump, as disgusting and enraging as that is.
You should expect to hear all the common defenses of torture now. If only Salah Abdeslam had been hooked up to electrodes and waterboarded a few dozen times, he would have given the investigators the timely accurate information they needed.
And what is to stop someone from giving bad information if they are tortured?
Nothing. It happens constantlty to stop the torture.
Yeah. Torture doesn’t work, and from what was said previously, Salah Abdeslam was providing information without torture. It has been proven endlessly that typical police interrogation – but not torture – works better at obtaining good info.
But the rightwing hate/noise machine has turned a sizeable portion of the US populace into pants-sh*tting sadistic freaks.
“pants-sh*tting sadistic freaks. “
No.
It’s turned them into cowards.
sadistic cowards. they want “the other” to be tortured and feel a whole lot of pain and agony with no real payoff for anyone.
Yet, how many toddlers have killed themselves or a family member in the past 3 months, inside the US?
Ask the media:
Crickets
You are so right, toddlers are killing adults at an alarming rate. Here is my solution:
-Invade countries which harbor infants
-Put neighborhoods where babies congregate on Ted Cruz style lockdown
-Temporary ban on all babies entering the country, “until we can figure out what the hell is going on”
-And finally, enhanced interrogation for babies who won’t talk. Eventually, they will tell us what we want to know. I am sure of it.
The attacks were not a surprise. What does that even mean anyway? We shall all henceforth expect that somewhere in the world crazy people will kill others some given day / week / month etc.
Got it. I will not be surprised when this happens again.
Good grief.
Crazy people do kill other people somewhere in the world all the time. I’m not convinced that terrorism is as big a problem as our hypersensitive cultural ‘nervous system’, driven by the media I guess, that tells us that every injury is life-threatening.
I include stuff like block quotes so you can understand what stuff means.
Jim Wright nails what I’ve been thinking today:
https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle/posts/981649911870412
Wordier than my comment, but perhaps people need to be reminded of what we ignore/deny in favor of freaking out over the latest Muslim related terrorist attack. Collective attention is also drawn to large passenger airplane crashes regardless of the cause because major stuff makes the news.
Airplane crashes, unless caused by sabotage, are accidents.
Terrorist attacks are not accidents.
You missed my point. Airplane crashes command a lot of media and public attention, particularly if they are US or UK planes. For the simple reason that a high number of people are killed in a single incident, most of which are classified as an accident of some sort, generally pilot error or mechanical failure. But that gets determined later and therefore, doesn’t lessen the collective attention in the hours and days following the crash.
I just heard the expert, John McCain, say what we need is a force of maybe 100,000 troops composed of Sunni and around 10,000 of our guys to take out IS in Raqqa (sp). Then just after him along came the somewhat sane Richard Engle to say we need to figure out what to do in Syria and Iraq and how will the people there feel about a Sunni force or for that matter, Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Russia. Seems Richard is not certain President McCain got it right. But let us not forget Cruz who wants to make the dessert glow with bombs and Trump who just figures he will handle it with torture and such and it will be just amazing, you know.
Not to be outdone, Donald just imparted his wisdom to Wolf who, took it all in. He agrees with Cruz we should search out all the Muslim neighborhoods. And torture you know. It’s about immigration too.
It must be time for the Two Minutes’ Hate.