Still Missing the Point
Discussions about Guantanamo still seem to focus on moving the prisoners to another facility. This is exactly the danger I warned about several years ago -- that focusing too much on Gitmo itself as a facility was missing the whole point. The problem was indefinite detentions without due process, not the facility per se. But since so much of the press latched onto Gitmo itself as the problem, it as allowed the administration to say that it is solving the problem by eliminating Gitmo and moving the prisoners (either to Illinois or Afghanistan, the plan keeps changing) while still clinging to the position that it should still have the power to detain people at the President's pleasure.
Dhalia Lithwick has a good article on just what a mess we have created at Gitmo. Are there potential, even past, terrorists there? Probably. But I could probably say that there are current or past criminals in any random 1000 people I might sweep off the street. That doesn't justify locking them up -- as a country, we have always said that it is better to free the innocent at the cost of potentially missing some of the guilty.
And please don't hammer me again in the comments with "there is a war on and these are just POW's." Sorry, they are nothing like traditional POW's. They were not caught on the battlefield, were not in uniform, in many cases were just turned in by other people for a bounty. I think I would accept that maybe slightly different rules apply to these folks than to a person arrested on 5th Avenue in New York, but on the other hand supporters of their detention need to admit that some extra scrutiny needs to exist vs. traditional POW rules, as in this case their very combatant status is unclear, something that was not the case in, say, with most POW's in WWII.
"You are an ABSOLUTE idiot if you believe this. The 9/11 attacks were a sophisticated assault on the United States. The utilization of force may have been crude and unsophisticated in some ways, but that is only a minor part.
For example, prior to 9/11 the reinsurance companies that insured the commercial properties that were attacked were shorted in the stock market."
I'm literally not sure what you're implying here but that seems like a fairly obvious financial move for somebody with insider information and $8 for brokerage fees. We're not talking George Clooney Ocean's 11 sophistication here.
Life would definitely be more exciting if it was more like TV and we needed Jack Bauer-types to fight the evil genius terrorist masterminds, but at some point you need to accept mundane reality.
The mundane reality is that there are many thousands of Jihadists who wish to do us great harm. They are led, not by idiots, but by well educated, fanatical people (Obama is an Engineer, Zawahiri is an MD, their biowar person had a PhD in Biology from a US University, many of the terrorists, including the underwear bomber, have technical degrees). The mundane reality is that these people killed 3000 people in a well planned assault. The lack of sophistication of their weapons only shows how effective they are - three of the four assaults worked as planned, even with these primitive weapons.
The mundane reality is that most of the evil in the world is not done be evil genius', but by evil people banding together and attacking us.
Wake up and smell the blood.
"Wake up and smell the blood."
If all you're saying is true, there's an odd lack of blood to smell. Recently there's been another rash of reports that high explosives can be smuggled onto planes without detection. Not hard to believe for anybody who has accidentally taken a pocket knife or too much liquid through airport security. For all their funding, technology and bluster, the TSA is pretty ineffective.
This being the case, how can you explain that terrorists are not blowing up planes on a weekly or even daily basis?
My explanation is that the terrorist threat is actually much smaller than you claim and that the media and government lead us to believe. As mentioned by another poster above, your chances of dying in a terrorist attack to date are less than dying from almost ANY other cause. You are attempting to propagate an irrational fear.
True.
This is where your logic and that of other terrorism deniers goes off the rails. Yes, in a numerical sense, the fear is rational (although each person killed is tied closely to a number of others, expanding the real effect). But guess what... fear is very often irrational. It's one reason terrorism is a popular tactic.
It simply doesn't matter if personal fear is irrational in this regard. What is not irrational is to recognize that the effects on the society of such an attack will be significant and very expensive.
Furthermore, there are certain attacks for which the effects can be huge. The use of a radiological dispersal device (dirty bomb), which is much easier to make than a real nuke, could cause trillions of dollars of real estate to suddenly be unusable (especially because people have, and will continue to have, an irrational fear of low levels of nuclear radiation). A biological agent, which Al Qaeda has worked on, could in fact kill millions.
So you can minimize Jihadism all you want, if it makes you personally less fearful. But you are not being nearly as rational as you imagine about the real threat it poses to the country.
Forgot to answer this one. One of the main explanations is that airport security, flawed as it is, makes such attacks much more difficult than they were pre-911.
"So you can minimize Jihadism all you want, if it makes you personally less fearful. But you are not being nearly as rational as you imagine about the real threat it poses to the country."
Ironic that your "real" threat is actually a collection of imaginary threats--dirty bombs and large-scale biological agents. For all our vaunted "intelligence" work in the last 9 years, I have yet to see any actual evidence that the terrorists have made any actual progress on such weapons.
"each person killed is tied closely to a number of others, expanding the real effect"
This is something we can definitely agree on. For example, when Israel bombed Lebanon, it caused Mohammed Atta to start planning 9/11. Think of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians we have killed in our five-front war on terror. Each one of those civilians has family and friends who will want revenge. The threat of terrorism has been increasing exponentially if for only this reason, to the point where a "terrorism denier" such as myself is getting to be a little concerned. The recent Fort Hood shootings and CIA bombing were done by PEOPLE RECENTLY ON OUR SIDE because they were upset about civilian casualties. All the millimeter wave airport scanners in the world will not protect us from the blowback we are provoking--the only way to fight it is to stop thinking we're at "war" and that civilian casualties are necessary and acceptable and to start thinking of terrorists as criminals that we must bring to justice.
So you conclude that these are not threats? That's a good head-in-the-sand approach.
Bin Laden experimented with chemical weapons himself. As I mentioned before, he had a highly qualified biologist working on bio-weapons, until we caught her.
For people like you, no threat is real until it is too late.
That's exactly what we were doing pre-9-11. It didn't work. And, regardless of you inability to conceive of a threat until it happens, the terrorists have plans, and are working on more devastating attacks.
As for "blow-back" and creating terrorists - if you study the terrorists, you will realize that it is NOT our actions which create them - including Fort Hood. The current Sunni terrorist movement against the west was mostly started by Sayyid Qutb, who merged the expansionist goals and terrorist means of the communists with the universal goal of Islam for world dominance. Al Qaeda is a result of a merger of Wahhabi jihadists with Qutb's disciples from the Egyptian Islajmic Brotherhood. The result is a movement that requires only our existence to motivate it.
The Shia terrorist movement was created by Ayatollah Khomeini. It has both Persian nationalist and Shia apocalyptic elements, along with the usual Jihadist desire for Islamic conquest. It is not currently operating against the US within our borders, but also represents a substantial threat. If Iran decides to turn Hezbollah against us, there will be lots of terror and lots of blood right here in the US. They are already here, waiting.
Educating yourself on modern Jihadism would be a good idea. Being open to the idea that a threat doesn't have to be carried out before one takes precautions against it would help too.
"That’s exactly what we were doing pre-9-11. It didn’t work. And, regardless of you inability to conceive of a threat until it happens, the terrorists have plans, and are working on more devastating attacks."
In fact, it did work, and it continues to work quite well. We've caught all sorts of terrorists. I'm looking at the Wikipedia page for Islamic terrorism and it seems like people are caught and punished via many countries' regular justice systems for almost every attack on the list.
Your approach to anti-terrorism, i.e., declare war on terrorists and try to drop bombs on suspected terrorists is the approach that has no proven success. In fact, since we started doing that, there's been a huge uptick in frequency of terrorist attacks.
I wonder... let's say your family is at the local shopping mall and the government gets intelligence that the mall also contains a suspected terrorist. They bomb the s*** out of the mall and kill your family. I would really like to see your reaction to that situation. I want to see you shrug off your family's death as necessary collateral damage, just the price we have to pay to make the world a safer place.
What a joke!
A large number of the terrorists we caught were because of interrogations of detainees who were not afforded the rights of criminal defendants.
What you can't show, with your head in the sand approach, is the impact on organized attacks resulting from our non-judicial approaches, such as invading Afghanistan.
Since you can't show it, it must not exist.
Tripe.
"A large number of the terrorists we caught were because of interrogations of detainees who were not afforded the rights of criminal defendants."
You are parroting a claim made by Dick Cheney last year. He said he would be happy to release memos to prove the point but when pressed, he only released a memo or two and they were so heavily redacted that they proved nothing. IIRC, even with the most generous interpretation of the memos possible, only a few possible terrorists were discovered and it's unclear whether or not they got this information before or after using "enhanced" interrogation. So I challenge you to support your claim. Well, that's a bit of a rhetorical challenge, since Dick Cheney himself can't support the claim.
"What you can’t show, with your head in the sand approach, is the impact on organized attacks resulting from our non-judicial approaches, such as invading Afghanistan."
You're absolutely right and I will freely admit that. I admit the possibility that our "war on terror" has had a beneficial effect, since, again, you're right, it's impossible to PROVE otherwise.
But, conversely, you can not prove that it hasn't had a harmful effect. And unlike me, you seem unwilling to admit this possibility, and attack anybody who proposes it with petty verbal barbs. Not very scientific or open minded of you.
"I have yet to see any actual evidence that the terrorists have made any actual progress on such weapons"
I see. I guess you are actually privvy to such intelligence report. Did you see actual evidence that any of the jihadist attacks would come? Not the CIA, but you????
ANd with respect to "irrational" fears, based on your claims the entire airport security system is irrational. Why go through so much trouble, even before 9/11. The threat of a airline hijacking was extremely low versus the sheer number of air flights. Probably way less than a terrorist strike. The cost of such an approach was probably hundreds of thousands of dollars per seized plane.
But then, people like you cannot understand that there are dependent and independent variables. You change a choice and that creates differing outcomes.
Lastly, any nation that would not respond EXACTLY as we did post 9/11 would be thought a fool and would only invite more attacks. Simple international logic.
We acted well within international and United States norms. The only problem is that there are fools in the world like "mot" who cannot understand the reality.
Ouch. Mark: the entire security theater at airports is pointless today, just as it was before 9/11. I've accidentally brought a knife and gasoline-filled camping lighter on a plane, I've seen someone board a plane through the passenger exit without any security whatsoever interfering, and the underwear bomber as well as the shoe bomber got through despite security. German hackers proved recently that you can enter the secured areas of airports by just getting close (<4m) to someone bearing a cardkey with an rfid reader. Airport security is an employment program and boondoggle, but it does nothing at all for safety. All that money *would* prevent more deaths if spent on traffic safety.
Also, there are no nations who reacted in a comparable manner to attacks like 9/11, the frequency of terrorist attacks on the US since is up instead of down (so that strategy shows signs of not working). In addition, there *are* other, proven successful methods (see for instance the Israelis about how to escalate and handle security really hardcore).
"I see. I guess you are actually privvy to such intelligence report. Did you see actual evidence that any of the jihadist attacks would come? Not the CIA, but you????"
Are you kidding me? Every time the government finds any actual REAL information about a terrorist plot, that's the only thing that's on the news for days. They are more proud of themselves than a two year old whose finger painting you put on the refrigerator. Remember the Fort Dix plot? Multiply that by 1000 if they find anything about a dirty bomb. The fact that we haven't heard about a dirty bomb plot might as well be ironclad evidence that we haven't discovered any, ever, anywhere.
"Lastly, any nation that would not respond EXACTLY as we did post 9/11 would be thought a fool and would only invite more attacks. Simple international logic."
Nonsense. There were occasional terrorist attacks around the world long before 9/11... India, Argentina, Egypt, Russia, etc. Some of these attacks killed hundreds of people. But none of these countries responded by declaring "war" on terrorism, invading and occupying a middle eastern country, and staging bombing campaigns in 4 other middle eastern countries. Remember the s***storm that happened when Russia occupied Georgia for a week in 2008? Now imagine Russia decided to occupy a country like Iraq and was killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. Your "simple international logic," when used by another country, would have likely started World War 3.