Let me ask you a hypothetical question. Let’s say that we knew 9/11 was going happen beforehand. Sure, maybe we didn’t know the exact day, and we didn’t know the exact method. But we knew there were 19 suicidal terrorists in the country and that they were in the advanced stages of plotting a major terrorist attack that they expected to kill somewhere between 3,000 and 25,000 Americans. Okay. You with me? Because this is very similar to the situation the United Kingdom claims they are in right now.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials have passed on a grim assessment to their U.S. counterparts, “It will be a miracle if there isn’t a terror attack over the holidays in London,” a senior American law enforcement official tells ABCNews.com.
…Officials said they could not cite any specific date or target but said al Qaeda had planned previous operations during the Christmas holidays that had been disrupted.
“It is not a matter of if there will be an attack, but how bad the attack will be,” an intelligence official told ABCNews.com.
Authorities say they are seeking at least 18 suspected suicide bombers.
“They hope they are one step ahead, but they seriously fear they may be one step behind,” the senior American official said.
British law enforcement and intelligence officials say the ongoing plots have been in the planning stages for at least three years. The officials say the plots are all connected and track back to al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan who have been recruiting and training British citizens of Pakistan descent.
So, I am assuming this is true. And I admit it creates a hell of a problem. Yet, as soon as I started to read the comments from that article I was confronted with a proposed solution.
Maybe its time we drop the bomb and show them that we mean business when it comes to terrorism. It ended WW2 and it would either end terrorism or at least make them think of the consequences before they take action. Look at it this way; we should strike first before they use a dirt bomb on us. All the intelligence available will not work and one day we will be hit again. As the 9/11 indicated, it’s inevitable.
Posted by: Joe | Dec 21, 2006 11:46:02 AM
And that seemingly insane reasoning got a lot of support. (For the record, I am not the BooMan that left a comment in that thread).
So, I began asking myself, “would such a plan actually deter terrorists?” If we had nuked Mecca back in August 2001, would that have dissuaded the terrorists from carrying forth their plan?
Shit. You know it just might well have stopped 9/11 from happening. Ya know? I mean, sure, they willing to kill themselves, but were they willing to let millions of Muslims die in the process?
Then I snapped out of it.
There are already some 600,000 dead Muslims that have lost their lives as a direct result of the actions the 19 hijackers carried out. I kind of doubt they thought there would be any less. Clearly they knew of the military might of the United States and clearly they knew we would respond with overwhelming force against someone, somewhere. It didn’t deter them a bit.
Then you have to picture what the world would have looked like if the United States had just pre-emptively nuked Mecca just to focus the minds of some terrorists.
I guess in the UK’s case the plan would be to nuke Islamabad or Karachi.
It’s amazing to me just how scared people are of random acts of violence. Someone is plotting to kill thousands of Britains. I know that is scary. I certainly don’t want their plans to succeed. But, let’s get some courage here people. Don’t go racing off to kill millions as a way to avoid the possible death of few thousand.
This is the kind of thinking that will prematurely end the world if we let it. We can’t have bedwetters in charge of foreign policy. If we can’t prevent massive terror attacks then we will have to do something different in our policies so that people do not want to carry out terror attacks. Why is this so damn hard to understand?
there’s a missing component to your analysis.
In the past five years, every time someone makes a face at a picture of His Nibs a terror alert is declared and we go into a four-stage pattern:
So I’m sorry, and it’s probably overly cynical of me to say so, but until they can either catch real terrorists with real plans rather than manufactured ones who just sit around the coffee shop and do nothing more violent than complain about the government, or (God forbid) something really interesting blows up, I’m extremely disinclined to believe that this terror report has any more truth behind it than any of the others we’ve been subjected to over the past few years.
I think we all have to believe that it`s going to happen here also. My reasoning behind this is, that if everybody stayed home for fear of being blown to bits then they wouldn`t be shopping, contradicting the wishes of the Magi Decider. The decider who tries to get people to believe the economy is doing great, would then be seen as a failure. So the talking point by the “terra-wrists is; “If you don`t shop, we won`t drop”. You see, these izmamofacelifts are always making us look bad. I`m just going to wear one of my “NO FEAR” T-shirts. One other thing; since we can assume that there will be a bear attack at a campgroung somewhere, lets nuke all bears.
I constantly read a dichotomy of views on this–either some terrible people knew of the entire plot, or we were totally surprised. The middle ground is much more likely.
Suppose that the Bush Administration came into power with the intention of finding a way to attack Iraq. Suppose that there were hints within the various intelligence communities that an attack was possible. The last attack on the World Trade Center was relatively small. The people involved don’t have a lot of imagination or a lot of respect for Islamic terrorists. They all conspire toward “benevolent neglect” of the intelligence. A small incident would be convenient and provide them with the rage that they require to move forward on Iraq.
(This isn’t tinfoil hat stuff. History can document that the same mindset guided the public relations after the destruction of “the Maine,” probably guided the benevolent neglect of intelligence regarding a potential Japanese attack in 1942, and is endemic in our intelligence community.)
So it’s likely that some people knew something about the potential for attacks, and ignored it for their own purposes.
Because in any large population, there are a relatively small number of people who can think independently and will take the time to analyze and sift through data and facts.
Couple that with the power that fear has to motivate and control, sprinkle in a dash of mainstream media megaphone, and there you have it. One giant batch of bedwetters.
The most troubling thing is that this paragraph simultaneously implies too much and too little knowledge. Three years? That is an interesting thing to know. I suppose when the plotters get on their cell phones, what they talk about is how bloody long the operation has been dragging on with no action?
And yet, all that can be said of the plotters is that they are Pakistani Brits? Yeah, that narrows it down a LOT–we can almost go ahead and make the arrests!
I can’t help but think that this simply originated out of Tony Blair’s press office.
Now let me accept your hypothetical. You tip your hand, publicly, when 1) you don’t know enough to make an arrest, but 2) you can rattle the plotters with the idea that you are closing in, and 3) you will accept their scuttling the plot (and disposing of evidence and probably getting away) as preferable to risking their success, since you really aren’t close enough to catching them with the goods.
Is this even possible? Yes, but if this announcement is followed by yet another false arrest, you will know it was bogus from the outset.
i can’t believe people are treating this as if it were a legitimate line of inquiry. it’s unfathomably stupid.
nuking mecca to prevent or punish 9-11 would be like nuking new york to prevent or punish the oaklahoma bombing. (mcveigh was from new york.)
i didn’t think it would actually be necessary to point this out.
It sure is a pity they blew the cover of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan
Ummmm…. terrorists attacked the US on 9/11 because they felt that we had been attacking them (i.e. Muslims) already for years. Imagine if that perception was not limited to a small bunch of nutcases, but was shared passionately by millions of Muslims? That’d be what would happen if Tom Tancredo and others who say “turn Mecca into glass” got their way. Bin Ladin would have WANTED us to do something drastic (probably not nuke Mecca bc of its earthly symbolism, but that would have accomplished the job) because his goal was to radicalize the Muslim world.
Maybe take a refresher on Doug Muder’s “Terrorism 101.”
http://www.gurus.com/dougdeb/politics/TS101.html
people are planning to kill thousands of Brits and whoever else. That does not mean it is going to happen. That does not even mean it is true. However, it is a good way to insure people panic, people accept loss of liberty, people accept murderous preemptive strikes on anyone of the same religion as the so called plotters, people accept higher funding that is not really needed for military and so called intelligence organizations. Oh yes it is a win all round for the glorious leaders and their military apparatus and useless intelligence organizations if they overplay every threat and terrorize us.
I didn’t have time to comment on this last night… But I nearly busted a gut laughing when I read that title of this diary! lol