Comment Towards World Liberty Day? (Score 4, Insightful) 1632
Hello from the UK.
It may help, with regard to what I'm about to say, that you know "where I'm coming from"
I'm a computer consultant involved in a project with major security angles (so I've made myself aware of the issues) I'm nowhere near as skilled as many of the slashdot contributors but it pays the bills.
I'm also a political philosopher, atheist, transhumanist and libertarian anarchist.
Generally, as you might expect, therefore, I oppose a great deal of what both the US government and my own stand for.
However, I also try to be both pragmatic and objective.
OK, so much for the bio.
You may be aware that we've had a little local difficulty with our own home grown terrorists for the past 30 years. A number of points ought to be sticking out like sore thumbs as a result of our experience.
First off, as I've said, I'm no supporter of the British establishment. But one thing is crystal clear. No one knows more about combating terrorism than the Brits. No one even gets close. They were the first victims of modern terrorism (Palestine, late 40s) and have since fought it actively in every corner of the world. British anti terrorist special forces have been trained in real terrorist situations ever since the second world war. The Israelis come a not very close second (their experience is too parochial).
What lessons have arisen from that expertise?
Well, for a start, we've learned that the only terrorism which can be defeated is that which - unlike the current threat - has a very narrow base of support. (Oman is the classic example) Other forms can be suppressed and, to some extent, controlled, but not defeated. Why not? For the simple reason that Terrorism is a response to historical and political conditions. If those remain as they were when the terrorism began, then, even if you manage by extraordinary good fortune to wipe out every member of the current generation of terrorists, more will emerge, like mushrooms, from the background environment. If you don't tackle the conditions which produced the problem, you will reap a regular harvest.
Alarmingly, I do not hear, in the current debate, any mention of what needs to be done in order to reduce the political pressures which produced this attack. Unless AT LEAST as much effort goes into that political effort then the result of even a successful military campaign will be worse than you can probably imagine. Not immediately, not perhaps for 10 or 20 years. But unlike American politicians, the enemy here is patient and has time on its side. Don't lose sight of the fact that Tuesday 11 September 2001 has been in the planning stage for at least 8 and probably 10 years.
If we do nothing to tackle the background causes of this cancer, then even if we succeed in excising the current tumour, it has already metastasised and will inevitably flare up again in the future. And given the developments in delivery systems for biological agents (eg anthrax) and the progress being made in genetic engineering, the attack in 2011 or 2021 can be expected to kill not a few thousand, but millions or even hundreds of millions.
Having said that, terrorists, even when they carry out devastating attacks with the high degree of professionalism we saw on our TV screens, aren't very clever politically. The key breakthroughs in our Irish problem have generally come about as a result of the IRA committing atrocities which even their own supporters couldn't stomach. This has, at times, not only choked off their major source of funding (from the terrorists main supporting country, the USA) but also made it very difficult for them to justify their actions to their own grass roots.
It is very clear, from the speed with which even terrorist sponsor countries like Libya and Syria have jumped on the condemnation bandwagon, that this is precisely what has happened among the vast Islamic community who, though generally hostile to the USA, have recognised the World Trade Centre as an attack too far. The Pentagon, on its own or even the White House might have been regarded as legitimate military targets and you'd have seen a lot more than a few angry Palestinian teenagers dancing in the streets. But most Moslems, even the ones who hate the US, are not so unreasonable that they would seek to justify massive civilian casualties.
It is that reaction which should form the core of the political analysis and response.
The world is now divided into two hostile camps. The vast majority of us are hostile to what the Hussein/Laden axis carried out last week.
I'm not claiming that the figures I'm about to give are accurate, but they are in the right ballpark..
In excess of 99.9% of the human population would probably like to see bin Laden and/or Hussein quickly executed, together with all those for whom we can prove a valid connection to the attack, or preparation for the attack. There are, nevertheless possibly a million or so, who fully support the terrorists aims and methods, even including what they did in New York.
Of that million, probably no more than 5000 are combatants. We need not worry about killing any of those. Their deaths will be widely seen - even amongst the usually anti American community - as completely fair game. Their deaths will, of course, rouse fierce resentment from the million, but they were already in the enemy camp in any case, so the situation will not have been made any more dangerous than it already is.
However, each death outside that circle of combatants will probably:
a) "promote" ten of the million non combatant supporters to full combatant status in their own right and
b) recruit 10 new terrorist supporters - including possible future combatants - from the currently outraged wider Islamic community who otherwise would, regretfully, have "tolerated" (they wont stretch as far as "support") the shooting of their wild dogs.
You can see this attitude most clearly in Pakistan. The military leadership will keep the lid on their generally Laden supporting population in order to ensure that they themselves do not wake up in the firing line. They are currently host to 2.5 million Afghan refugees - who are no friends of either the Taliban or Bin Laden. But if ONE of their number back home is killed by a coalition attack - you can expect a hundred recruits to the anti American cause. And the rest of the Pakistan population would go apeshit. Not that they would necessarily seek to become terrorists themselves, but they would certainly make it easier for terrorists to conduct their business.
It is crucial, therefore, to have very precise targets and stick rigidly to those.
The problem of precision, of course, lies in locating the 5000 combatants. As we've already learned, 12 of the 19 identified had been living in the USA on and off for most of the past few years. How many more are already there? Where are the rest? Its extremely unlikely that they are still hanging around the known training camps in Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan etc. They will have dispersed back to their home villages, or to entirely different countries around the world. What are we going to aim at then?
If the coalition sticks to the Runsfeld line, the answer to that is going to be "whatever we can find - even if there isn't a terrorist within a hundred miles - providing it hurts the host country and makes them think twice about allowing terrorists to operate freely within their borders ever again" That way lie many thousand newly motivated terrorists.
There must be No blanket bombing. No non-combatant casualties - even at the cost of greater casualties for our side.
In this war, we need brains and bullets not blather and bombs. Precision targeting, should mean the sniper's bullet not the laser guided smart bomb. I'm more than happy to see the talk of lifting the ban on CIA assassinations. This is indeed a dirty war and, paradoxically, if fought dirty, will actually be a lot safer for the rest of us.
The Brits have had no compunction in that direction. Its been a major factor in their relative success. Check out, for example, http://www.flamemag.dircon.co.uk/dirty_war_in_irel and.htm for a brief intro to some of the things we got up to in Ireland and elsewhere. It was the IRA's reluctant realisation that they were up against military tactics at least as effective as their own, but with much better funding, that eventually forced them to consider the peace process.
And that, above all, or at least alongside the military manoeuvres, is the light that must be placed at the end of the tunnel. If there is no prospect of political reform, there is no prospect of an end to the War on Terrorism. After all, if they're already prepared to sacrifice their lives, what else have they got to lose?
Primarily this means, somehow, forcing Israel and the Palestinians to share, peacefully, a territory over which both claim sovereignty.
The administration has already spoken of flushing out the roots of terrorism. In fact, it has no current strategy for dealing with that ambitious project at all. There are mixed signals coming from Runsfeld. On the one hand he talks about using small units of special forces - which is encouragingly realistic. Assassination is the appropriate tool here. On the other, he talks about the terrorists not having capital targets to go after, but their harboring countries do; so we might go after those instead. Teach them not to support the terrorists in future. This is alarming nonsense. And precisely the kind of behaviour which will increase the problem by recruiting more terrorists to the cause.
Indeed, most depressingly, such talk indicates that they haven't even understood what the "roots of terrorism" are. They are not spoilt arab ex-playboys with too much money (bin Laden) or egomaniacal despots who used to be on our side (Hussein) or training camps in the desert. The roots of terrorism are the political conditions which have provoked widespread anger amongst about 25% of the human population. Are we going to kill them all? Thats what you'll have to do if you wish to flush out the roots of terrorism without confronting the political issues.
There are many such issues, but, without doubt, the strongest, most important root of all, is the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians. Find the magic formula for that one, and most of the rest will wither on the vine. Even Iraq would cease to be a problem if it was no longer able to nurture support through its unconditional succour to the Palestinians. This is the area we should be most focussed upon.
One final point on the emerging shape of the Coalition policy. As touched on above, we are apparently supposed, from now on, to be going after not just the combatants themselves, but after the countries which provide support, or merely harbour them. I wonder if the author of that policy is aware that, had the UK adopted such a policy say 15 years ago, it would have necessarily needed to attack Eire for harbouring and the USA for allowing its Irish contingent to provide most of the logistical and financial support which kept the IRA going. Somehow, I can't see the USA having been so keen to support such a policy at that time. Now, of course, that they have become the target, however, we seem to get a faint whiff of double standards...
Moving on...
...to the threat to our civil liberties,
The naivete of some of the responses I've read here is absolutely frightening. It seems that some of you seriously believe that this war is going to be "over by Christmas". Let me make it plain. I'm a fanatical privacy advocate. Indeed I hope in the near future to be able to promote the concept of near absolute safety achieved through and dependant upon the guarantee of near absolute privacy.
Despite that, if I genuinely believed that giving up my rights to privacy for, say, a couple of weeks, or even months, would guarantee success in this war, I would probably concede that it was a price worth paying.
However, first, I would want the control of that situation in my own hands. In other words, at the point I decide that either my sacrifice of privacy is no longer effectively contributing to the war effort, or that the authorities are abusing my surrendered privacy, I would want to be able to switch my privacy back on - regardless of whether they approved or not.
Failing that degree of personal autonomy (which is difficult, though not impossible, in today's world) I would accept no less than a democratically controlled policy where the decision was made not by elected representives but, using a national referendum, by the people themselves in a single issue vote. With a guarantee - enshrined in the wording of the referendum - that the powers being ceded would be time limited to, say, 12 months, after which the powers would lapse unless renewed by another referendum.
Secondly, we are not talking about a short term policy here. I've already made it clear that until and unless you can cure the Arab-Israeli problem (at least), the roots of terrorism will continue to thrive. Those who favour anti-privacy measures will clearly expect them to be in place for as long as the terrorist problem remains. Until, in fact, the roots of terror have been eliminated. So ask yourself the question. How long is it going to take to sort out the Middle East?
Its already taken more than 50 years. I see no immediate reason to believe we could achieve significant progress in less than another 10 or 15 years. Are you really prepared to lose your privacy rights for that long? And do you really believe, that if you gave them away so easily (i.e. without the annual referendum above) that you could ever easily win them back?
And with the so called War on Drugs as a precedent, do you (anti-privacy lobbyists) really understand what you're suggesting. You're already widely regarded as a near police-state with the highest prison population in the western world and have already suffered massive unchallenged breaches to your sacred constitution - the authors of which must be spinning in their graves.
Please, for your own sakes, and for the sake of those who died on September 11, don't sacrifice even more of your freedoms in the mistaken belief that it will protect them. What you'll end up with is a country which is no longer worth protecting.
On September 11 2002 we will commemorate the first anniversary of this horrific attack on civilisation. I hope that the most appropriate name for this day in the future will reflect the fact that it will be recognised as the day the world began to turn away from intolerance, and began instead to pay more than lip service to the very freedoms which are supposed to be enshrined in and protected by - first and foremost - your very own American constitution.
I hope it will be called World Liberty Day.
I know the dead deserve nothing less.
I would like to think that our own actions,
between now and that first sad anniversary,
and all those anniversaries to come,
will make us all feel that we deserve it too.
Harry Stottle
It may help, with regard to what I'm about to say, that you know "where I'm coming from"
I'm a computer consultant involved in a project with major security angles (so I've made myself aware of the issues) I'm nowhere near as skilled as many of the slashdot contributors but it pays the bills.
I'm also a political philosopher, atheist, transhumanist and libertarian anarchist.
Generally, as you might expect, therefore, I oppose a great deal of what both the US government and my own stand for.
However, I also try to be both pragmatic and objective.
OK, so much for the bio.
You may be aware that we've had a little local difficulty with our own home grown terrorists for the past 30 years. A number of points ought to be sticking out like sore thumbs as a result of our experience.
First off, as I've said, I'm no supporter of the British establishment. But one thing is crystal clear. No one knows more about combating terrorism than the Brits. No one even gets close. They were the first victims of modern terrorism (Palestine, late 40s) and have since fought it actively in every corner of the world. British anti terrorist special forces have been trained in real terrorist situations ever since the second world war. The Israelis come a not very close second (their experience is too parochial).
What lessons have arisen from that expertise?
Well, for a start, we've learned that the only terrorism which can be defeated is that which - unlike the current threat - has a very narrow base of support. (Oman is the classic example) Other forms can be suppressed and, to some extent, controlled, but not defeated. Why not? For the simple reason that Terrorism is a response to historical and political conditions. If those remain as they were when the terrorism began, then, even if you manage by extraordinary good fortune to wipe out every member of the current generation of terrorists, more will emerge, like mushrooms, from the background environment. If you don't tackle the conditions which produced the problem, you will reap a regular harvest.
Alarmingly, I do not hear, in the current debate, any mention of what needs to be done in order to reduce the political pressures which produced this attack. Unless AT LEAST as much effort goes into that political effort then the result of even a successful military campaign will be worse than you can probably imagine. Not immediately, not perhaps for 10 or 20 years. But unlike American politicians, the enemy here is patient and has time on its side. Don't lose sight of the fact that Tuesday 11 September 2001 has been in the planning stage for at least 8 and probably 10 years.
If we do nothing to tackle the background causes of this cancer, then even if we succeed in excising the current tumour, it has already metastasised and will inevitably flare up again in the future. And given the developments in delivery systems for biological agents (eg anthrax) and the progress being made in genetic engineering, the attack in 2011 or 2021 can be expected to kill not a few thousand, but millions or even hundreds of millions.
Having said that, terrorists, even when they carry out devastating attacks with the high degree of professionalism we saw on our TV screens, aren't very clever politically. The key breakthroughs in our Irish problem have generally come about as a result of the IRA committing atrocities which even their own supporters couldn't stomach. This has, at times, not only choked off their major source of funding (from the terrorists main supporting country, the USA) but also made it very difficult for them to justify their actions to their own grass roots.
It is very clear, from the speed with which even terrorist sponsor countries like Libya and Syria have jumped on the condemnation bandwagon, that this is precisely what has happened among the vast Islamic community who, though generally hostile to the USA, have recognised the World Trade Centre as an attack too far. The Pentagon, on its own or even the White House might have been regarded as legitimate military targets and you'd have seen a lot more than a few angry Palestinian teenagers dancing in the streets. But most Moslems, even the ones who hate the US, are not so unreasonable that they would seek to justify massive civilian casualties.
It is that reaction which should form the core of the political analysis and response.
The world is now divided into two hostile camps. The vast majority of us are hostile to what the Hussein/Laden axis carried out last week.
I'm not claiming that the figures I'm about to give are accurate, but they are in the right ballpark..
In excess of 99.9% of the human population would probably like to see bin Laden and/or Hussein quickly executed, together with all those for whom we can prove a valid connection to the attack, or preparation for the attack. There are, nevertheless possibly a million or so, who fully support the terrorists aims and methods, even including what they did in New York.
Of that million, probably no more than 5000 are combatants. We need not worry about killing any of those. Their deaths will be widely seen - even amongst the usually anti American community - as completely fair game. Their deaths will, of course, rouse fierce resentment from the million, but they were already in the enemy camp in any case, so the situation will not have been made any more dangerous than it already is.
However, each death outside that circle of combatants will probably:
a) "promote" ten of the million non combatant supporters to full combatant status in their own right and
b) recruit 10 new terrorist supporters - including possible future combatants - from the currently outraged wider Islamic community who otherwise would, regretfully, have "tolerated" (they wont stretch as far as "support") the shooting of their wild dogs.
You can see this attitude most clearly in Pakistan. The military leadership will keep the lid on their generally Laden supporting population in order to ensure that they themselves do not wake up in the firing line. They are currently host to 2.5 million Afghan refugees - who are no friends of either the Taliban or Bin Laden. But if ONE of their number back home is killed by a coalition attack - you can expect a hundred recruits to the anti American cause. And the rest of the Pakistan population would go apeshit. Not that they would necessarily seek to become terrorists themselves, but they would certainly make it easier for terrorists to conduct their business.
It is crucial, therefore, to have very precise targets and stick rigidly to those.
The problem of precision, of course, lies in locating the 5000 combatants. As we've already learned, 12 of the 19 identified had been living in the USA on and off for most of the past few years. How many more are already there? Where are the rest? Its extremely unlikely that they are still hanging around the known training camps in Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan etc. They will have dispersed back to their home villages, or to entirely different countries around the world. What are we going to aim at then?
If the coalition sticks to the Runsfeld line, the answer to that is going to be "whatever we can find - even if there isn't a terrorist within a hundred miles - providing it hurts the host country and makes them think twice about allowing terrorists to operate freely within their borders ever again" That way lie many thousand newly motivated terrorists.
There must be No blanket bombing. No non-combatant casualties - even at the cost of greater casualties for our side.
In this war, we need brains and bullets not blather and bombs. Precision targeting, should mean the sniper's bullet not the laser guided smart bomb. I'm more than happy to see the talk of lifting the ban on CIA assassinations. This is indeed a dirty war and, paradoxically, if fought dirty, will actually be a lot safer for the rest of us.
The Brits have had no compunction in that direction. Its been a major factor in their relative success. Check out, for example, http://www.flamemag.dircon.co.uk/dirty_war_in_ire
And that, above all, or at least alongside the military manoeuvres, is the light that must be placed at the end of the tunnel. If there is no prospect of political reform, there is no prospect of an end to the War on Terrorism. After all, if they're already prepared to sacrifice their lives, what else have they got to lose?
Primarily this means, somehow, forcing Israel and the Palestinians to share, peacefully, a territory over which both claim sovereignty.
The administration has already spoken of flushing out the roots of terrorism. In fact, it has no current strategy for dealing with that ambitious project at all. There are mixed signals coming from Runsfeld. On the one hand he talks about using small units of special forces - which is encouragingly realistic. Assassination is the appropriate tool here. On the other, he talks about the terrorists not having capital targets to go after, but their harboring countries do; so we might go after those instead. Teach them not to support the terrorists in future. This is alarming nonsense. And precisely the kind of behaviour which will increase the problem by recruiting more terrorists to the cause.
Indeed, most depressingly, such talk indicates that they haven't even understood what the "roots of terrorism" are. They are not spoilt arab ex-playboys with too much money (bin Laden) or egomaniacal despots who used to be on our side (Hussein) or training camps in the desert. The roots of terrorism are the political conditions which have provoked widespread anger amongst about 25% of the human population. Are we going to kill them all? Thats what you'll have to do if you wish to flush out the roots of terrorism without confronting the political issues.
There are many such issues, but, without doubt, the strongest, most important root of all, is the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinians. Find the magic formula for that one, and most of the rest will wither on the vine. Even Iraq would cease to be a problem if it was no longer able to nurture support through its unconditional succour to the Palestinians. This is the area we should be most focussed upon.
One final point on the emerging shape of the Coalition policy. As touched on above, we are apparently supposed, from now on, to be going after not just the combatants themselves, but after the countries which provide support, or merely harbour them. I wonder if the author of that policy is aware that, had the UK adopted such a policy say 15 years ago, it would have necessarily needed to attack Eire for harbouring and the USA for allowing its Irish contingent to provide most of the logistical and financial support which kept the IRA going. Somehow, I can't see the USA having been so keen to support such a policy at that time. Now, of course, that they have become the target, however, we seem to get a faint whiff of double standards...
Moving on...
...to the threat to our civil liberties,
The naivete of some of the responses I've read here is absolutely frightening. It seems that some of you seriously believe that this war is going to be "over by Christmas". Let me make it plain. I'm a fanatical privacy advocate. Indeed I hope in the near future to be able to promote the concept of near absolute safety achieved through and dependant upon the guarantee of near absolute privacy.
Despite that, if I genuinely believed that giving up my rights to privacy for, say, a couple of weeks, or even months, would guarantee success in this war, I would probably concede that it was a price worth paying.
However, first, I would want the control of that situation in my own hands. In other words, at the point I decide that either my sacrifice of privacy is no longer effectively contributing to the war effort, or that the authorities are abusing my surrendered privacy, I would want to be able to switch my privacy back on - regardless of whether they approved or not.
Failing that degree of personal autonomy (which is difficult, though not impossible, in today's world) I would accept no less than a democratically controlled policy where the decision was made not by elected representives but, using a national referendum, by the people themselves in a single issue vote. With a guarantee - enshrined in the wording of the referendum - that the powers being ceded would be time limited to, say, 12 months, after which the powers would lapse unless renewed by another referendum.
Secondly, we are not talking about a short term policy here. I've already made it clear that until and unless you can cure the Arab-Israeli problem (at least), the roots of terrorism will continue to thrive. Those who favour anti-privacy measures will clearly expect them to be in place for as long as the terrorist problem remains. Until, in fact, the roots of terror have been eliminated. So ask yourself the question. How long is it going to take to sort out the Middle East?
Its already taken more than 50 years. I see no immediate reason to believe we could achieve significant progress in less than another 10 or 15 years. Are you really prepared to lose your privacy rights for that long? And do you really believe, that if you gave them away so easily (i.e. without the annual referendum above) that you could ever easily win them back?
And with the so called War on Drugs as a precedent, do you (anti-privacy lobbyists) really understand what you're suggesting. You're already widely regarded as a near police-state with the highest prison population in the western world and have already suffered massive unchallenged breaches to your sacred constitution - the authors of which must be spinning in their graves.
Please, for your own sakes, and for the sake of those who died on September 11, don't sacrifice even more of your freedoms in the mistaken belief that it will protect them. What you'll end up with is a country which is no longer worth protecting.
On September 11 2002 we will commemorate the first anniversary of this horrific attack on civilisation. I hope that the most appropriate name for this day in the future will reflect the fact that it will be recognised as the day the world began to turn away from intolerance, and began instead to pay more than lip service to the very freedoms which are supposed to be enshrined in and protected by - first and foremost - your very own American constitution.
I hope it will be called World Liberty Day.
I know the dead deserve nothing less.
I would like to think that our own actions,
between now and that first sad anniversary,
and all those anniversaries to come,
will make us all feel that we deserve it too.
Harry Stottle
