The Anticipated Attack Don't blame Iraq for the bombings.

Slate ^ | July 7, 2005 | Christopher Hitchens

[WmShirerAdmirer]

The remains of a London bus destroyed by a bomb near Tavistock Square

"My son flew in from London at the weekend, and we were discussing, as we have several times before, why it hadn't happened yet. "It" was the jihadist attack on the city, for which the British security forces have been braced ever since the bombings in Madrid. When the telephone rang in the small hours of this morning, I was pretty sure it was the call I had been waiting for. And as I snapped on the TV I could see, from the drawn expression and halting speech of Tony Blair, that he was reacting not so much with shock as from a sense of inevitability."

..."Looking for possible timings or pretexts, one of course comes up against the meeting of the G8 powers in Edinburgh and perhaps the imminent British spot in the rotating chair of the European Union. (It can't have been the Olympic announcement on such short notice, but the contrast with the happy, multiethnic crowds in Trafalgar Square yesterday could hardly be starker, and it certainly wasn't enough to get the murderers to call it off.) Another possibility is the impending trial of Abu Hamza al Mazri, a one-eyed and hook-handed mullah who isn't as nice as he looks and who preaches Bin-Ladinism from a shabby mosque in North London. He is currently awaiting extradition to the United States, and his supporters might have wanted to make a loving gesture in his favor."

"This would mean that the cell or gang was homegrown, rather than smuggled in from North Africa or elsewhere..."

[RichInOC]

Bomb the usual suspects.

[Peach]

Ping for Hitchens.

[theFIRMbss]

>Bomb the usual suspects

Maybe we should bomb
half of nearly every one,
and tell the others:

"Hey, you guys prevent
more bombings, because next time
we will take out you!"

[dighton]

Another possibility is the impending trial of Abu Hamza al Mazri, a one-eyed and hook-handed mullah who isn't as nice as he looks …

[eureka!]

marking

[OESY]

Warning: Animated map of casualties in Iraq from March 20, 2003

[WmShirerAdmirer]

This article link at the bottom of Hitchens came as a real surprise to me.

If They're Brits, They Must Acquit

Guess who's giving their terrorist suspects speedy trials?

By Dahlia Lithwick (Slate)
Posted Thursday, Aug. 22, 2002, at 3:11 PM PT


We have one pervasive problem with our terror trials: crap evidence. Al-Qaida is comprised of fragmented cells with diffuse authority and limited knowledge about specific plots. Much like the mob, the organization is all about fostering plausible deniability. Someone like Zacarias Moussaoui, who admits to being al-Qaida and exults in the destruction of Americans, has still seen no evidence linking himself to the crime with which he's charged—involvement in the Sept. 11 plot. And Yaser Esam Hamdi—an American citizen captured in Afghanistan—is currently being tried based on a government affidavit that was practically scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin. Jose Padilla, the alleged "dirty bomber," was apprehended at such an early stage of his dirty plot that there is evidently almost no conclusive evidence with which to try him. So, what's a constitutional democracy to do?

There are two ways out of this problem: either get better evidence, or rig the trials. Right now the Bush administration seems inclined toward the latter. We've solved the Hamdi problem, for instance, by denying him access to counsel, claiming this is somehow justified by his status as "enemy combatant." We've solved the Padilla problem and the problem of the various other detainees about whom we lack sufficient evidence by simply refusing to try them at all. It's a crude system, but effective.

The British have gone a different route: They have proceeded to test the evidence against their alleged terrorists, and, finding it lacking, they have simply freed them. After Sept.11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair fell all over himself to prove that he's as tough on terrorism as his cowboy buddy in Texas. Pushing his new Anti-Terrorism, Crime, and Security Act 2001 through Parliament, Blair was as trigger-happy as Bush when it came to suspending civil liberties and apprehending suspected terrorists without evidence or due process. But the British, suffering for a lack of a John Ashcroft, stupidly allowed for fair trials and a right to counsel. They made the mistake of permitting judges to scrutinize both the act itself and the defendants being held pursuant to the act. So it should come as no surprise that the first English terror trial following Sept. 11 ended two weeks ago in an acquittal.



Sulayman Balal Zainulabidin, a 44-year-old chef and convert to Islam, was charged with operating a Web site that incited followers to jihad—offering to send would-be terrorists to the United States for arms training courses. Zainulabidin's "Ultimate Jihad Challenge" Web site offered lessons in the "Islamic art of war" and a two-week firearms course in the United States for $4,700. Arrested three weeks after Sept. 11 and held for 10 months in a maximum security prison, the defendant claimed he was merely helping people find work in the security field.

Zainulabidin's trial defense was that he was a "trophy scapegoat" being persecuted by the state to show that they were going after terrorists. (This is Zacarias Moussaoui's defense as well.) Prosecutors tried to argue that the purpose of jihad Web site was clearly to "assist or prepare for terrorism." But after four days' deliberation, the jury disagreed. This acquittal was only the most recent blow to the British anti-terror efforts. Zainulabidin walked two weeks after another panel of British judges held that the detention of nine foreign terror suspects under the same anti-terror legislation was unlawful, finding the anti-terrorism act—empowering the British home secretary to detain foreign nationals suspected of involvement in international terrorism without trial—to be "discriminatory and unlawful."

Then, there's the inability of British judges to find sufficient evidence to extradite any of the suspects sought by the FBI in connection with Sept. 11. First, there was Lotfi Raissi, the Algerian-born pilot, believed by the FBI to have been the "lead trainer" for some of the Sept. 11 hijackers. An English judge found the evidence against him insufficient for extradition and released him last spring. Next there was Yasser al-Siri, a London-based bookseller accused of operating a fake "charity" that funneled funds to al-Qaida. Al-Siri was also freed recently after a judge ruled there was insufficient prima facie evidence to extradite him. The FBI is now seeking the extradition of Egyptian-born Sheikh Abu Hamza al-Masri, the radical Imam alleged to have recruited Richard Reed, the shoe bomber, among others. They believe they can make a case against him stick this time.

The tremendous irony at the heart of all this is that the reason the British are faring so very badly in their terror trials is that they are granting the accused rights enshrined in our Constitution, specifically—the right to speedy testing of the evidence and the right to a meaningful defense. Not only are we withholding the opportunity for a speedy trial from virtually all the suspects detained in connection to Sept. 11, we are withholding the possibility of any trial at all. Make no mistake about it: The British government doesn't have "worse" evidence than ours. They are just prepared to test it, while we are determined to lock it away in the dark and hope that it'll magically sprout and grow into something bigger.

The decision to respond to the horror of Sept. 11 with a sprawling dragnet that managed to sweep in a whole lot of suspicious, somewhat suspicious, and suspicious-by-association guys was not irrational. Both the U.S. and British governments needed to act quickly at the time, to restore calm, to reassure their citizens, and to attempt to stave off future attacks. But a dragnet isn't an end in itself, and the British seem to have recognized this fact, while the Americans still sit by, paralyzed. The British aren't necessarily losing their war on terror. They're merely taking our Constitution more seriously than we do.


Dahlia Lithwick is a Slate senior editor.

Can be found at:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2069991/

[bubman]

Hitchens ping

[From many - one.]

read later

[OESY]

Trashing Our Soldiers Who Fought In World War 2


It's bad enough when liberals trash our troops who are fighting far from home to protect this country and to help the Iraqi people towards freedom, but now at least one of them is going after the soldiers who fought and died to defeat the Japanese in WW2. From a weepy, whiny column by James Carroll in the Boston Globe:

"The Iwo Jima image is sacred precisely because the men lifting up the fallen flag are all but unable to do so. The extremity of their exhaustion, their nearness to defeat, the horrors of what they have been through and of what awaits them are all implied in the painful stretch of limbs, in the rough gear of armored clothing, in the absolute investment each has made in a symbol of something better than himself. Even as the valor of what they did on one beachhead after another is properly honored, the American fighters of the Pacific War were not heroes. The desperation of island combat included exchanged barbarities of which no one would willingly speak for a generation. On the American side, there were foul racism, vengeful refusals to take prisoners, a generalized brutality that extended to a savage air war. To raise the flag at Iwo Jima was to lift the transcendent symbol out of the total hell that the war had become. Few if any men who survived it came home speaking of virtue."

This may be hard for certain liberals like James Carroll to understand because their views are so twisted by moral equivalence and because their knee jerk reaction is to blame America first, but the Japanese were not just the "other side" in WW2, they were the "bad guys."


If our troops didn't act like boy scouts the entire time, so what? That old saying: "It's not whether you win or lose; it's how you play the game" doesn't apply to war. In the end, what matters is winning, especially when the price of losing could be the enslavement of your nation.

Moreover, if our troops hated the Japanese, were brutal, and sometimes didn't take prisoners, they had good reason to do so. They were fighting imperialistic brutes who launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and were bent on world conquest. The very idea that our soldiers in WW2 shouldn't be given the credit they're due for their heroism because they weren't "nice enough" to the enemy is staggeringly moronic.

The American soldiers who fought, bled, and in many cases died to break the Japanese were heroes and they deserve to be spoken of as such instead of being dishonored by some soft-headed liberal hack in the Boston Globe who seems to be deficient not just in judgment, but in patriotism as well.

Hat tip to Ace of Spades HQ for the story.

-- John Hawkins, rightwingnews.com/

[Peach]

You STILL Find the BEST articles! I'll read it more carefully when we get home from dinner, but I can see that the problem we had getting mobsters convicted in the 60's and 70's is going to be doubly difficult for the terrorists, at least for the Brits. It's possible today's attack will force them to change strategy.

[OESY]

London and Gitmo


If the people who perpetrated today’s bombings are caught, what would the great defenders of “civil rights,” such Senator Dick Durbin (D-Gitmo), recommend that we do with them? In Durbin’s eyes, detaining them at Guantanamo Bay would clearly be out of the question… -- PoliPundit

[Sabatier]

Hitchens says, "Europe is steadily becoming
a part of the civil war that is roiling the
Islamic world". That's his explanation for
why this happened in Madrid and London.

On the other hand, one of the endless experts
discussing this tragedy said today that he
expects the terrorists are saving up something
much worse for their main enemy, the United States.

So is this an Islamic civil war or a jihad against
Western values? Personally, I think it's the latter.
Muslims may get hurt in the crossfire but that
doesn't make this an Islamic civil war. They will
be forced by their rabid brothers to take sides
with the terrorists or be killed like the infidels.
This is an "all or nothing" faith that motivates
this hatred. We in the West are really going to
have to come to terms with this reality.
That's going to be tough on the "can't we all
just get along" crowd.

[WmShirerAdmirer]

I take back that article written by Dahlia Lithwick, which I posted. I see by my slower second reading, she's using the Brits (who are now suffering consequences of perhaps their speedy terrorist trials and system)to slam President Bush and how our government has handled suspected terrorist in custody awaiting trial.

I disavow her sentiments and am ashamed that I post such crap. I apologize.

I for one feel a lot safer Padilla and Zacarias Moussaoui are where they can't hurt anyone else.

[q_an_a]

Hitch does not have any prepared answers -even if he knew "not if but when." that is saying something about the chattering class. -No Answers.

[OESY]

From the Belly of the Beast


How is the American left responding to today's terrorist attacks in London? The posters at Democratic Underground represent the heart and soul of the left, and, arguably, of the Democratic Party. Check out this message thread for their views on the latest terrorist outrage. Warning, this is only for those with strong stomachs. The debate is basically between those who think President Bush is only indirectly responsible for the terrorist attacks, and those who think the administration actually carried out the bombings. Like this guy:

"I am so cynical... That all I can think is "how convenient" that this happened to take the light off Karl Rove. I don't think anything is on the "up-and-up" anymore, not even terrorist attacks."


Yes, that's it, all right. The Bush administration is now staging terrorist bombings to distract attention from Karl Rove. Fortunately, however, our leftist friends have their attention riveted firmly on Rove, and they won't be distracted by something as insignificant as terrorist attacks.

-- John, powerlineblog.com/

[WmShirerAdmirer]

Thanks for your kind reply. I was very embarrassed and ashamed when I saw how I assumed she was taking a critical direction towards terrorist getting off so easy lately, which they have in Spain, elsewhere in Europe, Jordan, etc., (15 months for getting caught driving a mega ton chemical truck bomb down the streets in Jordan's capital) because of poor criminal investigations or poor judgment on the part of juries and judges.

Had I carefully read slowly instead of glancing through the article I would have never posted it.

[advance_copy]

For decades, even generations, hundreds of millions have been suffering under the worst oppression by dictatorships like the Taliban, Saddam Hussein's regime, the Iranian Mullahs, and Ba'athists in Syria. Combined with the ideology of fanatic Islamism that resembles a radical occult, a murderous movement against "the infidels" has emerged. THAT is the cause of terrorism. Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom are part of the precisely correct strategy to end this terrorist threat.

[Peach]

We're preparing to leave shortly for dinner and I only read the first paragraph or two and decided to reply to you both as a thank you for finding the article and to give myself a reminder when I got home to read it more thoroughly.

But now that you've had a chance to look at it more carefully yourself, and made your comments, I'll give it a pass :-)

Good to see you again, btw.