Boston Marathon: Is terrorism ever justified?

[Bryn]

Hopefully the link will be accessible again soon. All you lot should read it.

And also the comments (and their associated links) which follow it. I tend towards the 'cock-up' rather than 'conspiracy' interpretation of the actions of those 'in authority' responding to the pressure cooker bomb attack. It's instructive that the helicopters fitted with thermal imaging did not find the suspect until an alert resident had followed a blood trail to the boat.

For those whose accommodation was subjected to search, it would have been a very scary encounter with the 'security forces'. I bet it was a pretty scary experience for those carrying out the search, too. Worth remembering that we are treating with fellow human beings, with all their frailties, on both 'sides' of this event.

[Mr Pee]

Maybe if there had been WMD etc etc we might have a little faith in those who tell us that there are really dangerous people who are constantly being stopped by our "heroic" security services and forces ?
Crying "wolf" doesn't work after a few goes , maybe the moral being that you shouldn't tell the same lie more than once ?

Of course they're making the whole thing up aren't they? How silly of me.....

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/the-threats/terrorism/international-terrorism/international-terrorism-and-the-uk/terrorist-plots-in-the-uk.html

BUT when I go some places in the UK I feel very unsafe indeed when I see the UK police with automatic weapons as I am certain that if they use them in error or though negligence then there really is no justice for the victims.

Walking down the street must be nightmare for you. After all, loads more people were killed by vehicles last year than by the police.

[Richard Barrett]

And also the comments (and their associated links) which follow it.

Indeed. There are various agendas at work here, for example the fact that the author is a dyed-in-the-wool supporter of the Democrat party (whose father was state chairman for the party in Alabama) and, having written a book criticising the militarism of the Bush II administration is motivated by a wish to portray everything that happens under Obama as fundamentally different; which it isn't, of course. Mr Pitt was fortunate enough not to be subject to an aggressive search of his house; other people obviously were. As one of the commenters says, "Just as Pitt is getting angry at people taking bits and pieces of the incident out of context, Pitt is taking the entire incident out of context by not considering the whole current state of society within which it is taking place."

Scottycelt makes my point for me by citing a list of the news outlets that he observes: without a framework within which to criticise all of them, all you see is a barrage of mutually contradictory "information" which in a few seconds you can cherrypick to bolster whatever you want to think is going on. All mass news media are in thrall to some vested interests or other: the interests of their shareholders, of their advertisers, of the official news sources like governments which can cut them off if reporting strays too far from the propaganda line, and so on. No need to invoke corruption or conspiracy: the large mass media organisations (and they need to be large in order to afford sufficient journalists, technology, distribution channels etc.) are "effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion." And this applies to the Guardian and al-Jazeera as much as it does to News Corp outlets.

Nobody here is claiming to be an "expert in the matter of combating urban terrorism." :yawn: I was under the impression that we were exchanging opinions on the issue of terrorism in general in the context of the (fairly insignificant in themselves) recent events in Boston.

I don't own an armchair. As I write I'm changing planes in Vienna airport. Like MrGG I have a microphone in my handluggage, which generated a great deal of interest at the security gate. What is it about microphones, does anyone know? I mean you could do someone a nasty injury by clocking them with a KMS104 but I don't think that's the issue, is it...? :erm:

[MrGongGong]

Of course they're making the whole thing up aren't they? How silly of me.....

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/the-threats/terrorism/international-terrorism/international-terrorism-and-the-uk/terrorist-plots-in-the-uk.html

Walking down the street must be nightmare for you. After all, loads more people were killed by vehicles last year than by the police.

You really DO see the world in black and white
goodies vs baddies
Us vs them

extraordinary and more than a little worrying

[Mr Pee]

I was under the impression that we were exchanging opinions on the issue of terrorism in general in the context of the (fairly insignificant in themselves) recent events in Boston.

I'm glad you consider the Boston attack to be fairly insignificant. Perhaps you would like to share that sentiment with the victims and their families.

[MrGongGong]

I'm glad you consider the Boston attack to be fairly insignificant. Perhaps you would like to share that sentiment with the victims and their families.

After all, loads more people were killed by vehicles last year than by

terrorists ?

[Mr Pee]

You really DO see the world in black and white
goodies vs baddies

What is more than a little worrying is people who are unwilling or unable to tell the difference.

Any comment on the MI5 link? Or are you simply dismissing at as a scaremongering work of fiction?

[MrGongGong]

What is more than a little worrying is people who are unwilling or unable to tell the difference.

Any comment on the MI5 link? Or are you simply dismissing at as a scaremongering work of fiction?

Why on earth do you assume that I (or anyone else for that matter) would think that terrorism is all fiction ?
It's scary indeed
as is the way in which one several (but not ALL ) occasions the security services have made fatal errors and got away with it.......

If you adopt a position (which you seem to be doing) that somehow EVERYTHING "we" do is right and "we" never make mistakes or get it wrong then you really are living in a fantasy. One doesn't earn respect by being pig headed.
But I guess some folk feel that it's ok to have innocent people murdered in the name of a "war" on terror ? as long as they aren't "one of us" ........

[ahinton]

I'm glad you consider the Boston attack to be fairly insignificant. Perhaps you would like to share that sentiment with the victims and their families.

As of course you know well but seem for your own reasons less than willing to admit, RB merely wrote of the recent events in Boston as fairly insignificant in themselves, from which it is hardly difficult to understand that a single event that resulted in three deaths and a couple of hundred or so injuries - grave and distressing though of course it is - is neither on the same scale as, say, 9/11 nor on the same level of frequency as the all too regular incidents in Syria, Iraq, &c. I got no sense that RB was seeking in any way to undermine the seriousness or the tragic nature of what happened in Boston last week.

RB is also correct in pointing out that most members here were/are seeking to exchange "opinions on the issue of terrorism in general in the context of the...recent events in Boston" rather than pretending to expertise in all matters of terrorism handling. I imagine that most people here would accept that the police have a difficult job to do in dealing with such things, but then (a) that's the job that taxpayers pay them to do and to be professionally trained to do and (b) they have plenty of other difficult jobs to do besides responding to terrorism incidents.

As yet, there appears in any case to have been no evidence of a generalised majority view of what specifically constitutes "terrorism" as distinct from any other types of crime that involve threatened or actual murder, violence and public mayhem, not least, perhaps, because the terms "terrorism" and "terrorist" have acquired an emotively loaded status as a particular consequence of GWB's notorious promotion of the rather absurd notion of a "war on terror". Is "terrorism" as a crime is dependent upon threats to or the undermining of public security (however one might define that)? Is it necessarily defined by the demonstrable existence of some kind of religious and/or political agenda on the part of the criminals involved?

It seems to me that the potential danger in expecting the police to respond to certain incidents marked out for them as "terrorist" ones differently to others involving threats of or actual mass murder, maiming and mayhem is obvious, not least in (a) elevating the "terrorists'" crimes above those of other mass murderers not officially defined as "terrorists" and (b) potentially offering to the police possible excuses to behave in more risky, invasive and violent ways than they would otherwise be likely to do.

As to Mr Pee's observation that "loads more people were killed by vehicles last year than by the police", such statements of the obvious are hardly helpful to such a debate, especially as, were it the case that more people were killed by the police than by vehicles, the likelihood that we'd still be living under a régime in which it would even be possible to engage in such a debate as this would have become exceedingly remote.

[ahinton]

If you adopt a position (which you seem to be doing) that somehow EVERYTHING "we" do is right and "we" never make mistakes or get it wrong then you really are living in a fantasy. One doesn't earn respect by being pig headed.

But I guess some folk feel that it's ok to have innocent people murdered in the name of a "war" on terror ? as long as they aren't "one of us" ........

Some folk may, though none here, I fondly hope. The position that you describe is one in which the deplorably competitive mix of unbridled arrogance and head-in-sandedness can only be damaging both to those who subscribe to it and to those who are or may become victims of it.

As I have stated previously, in democratic countries, police officers and security services personnel are government employees funded by the taxpayer and, since they are specifically charged with upholding the law, it is especially vital that they never transgress it and that they are and at all times remain as accountable for their actions as any other taxpayer-funded employee; it is dangerous enough when any of them do cross that line, but when they're then allowed to get away with having done so, the rule of law and the public trust in the upholding of law is inevitably undermined, thereby playing into the hands of some of the more hardened of criminals.

[amateur51]

Of course they're making the whole thing up aren't they? How silly of me.....

https://www.mi5.gov.uk/home/the-threats/terrorism/international-terrorism/international-terrorism-and-the-uk/terrorist-plots-in-the-uk.html

Walking down the street must be nightmare for you. After all, loads more people were killed by vehicles last year than by the police.

But what about those killed by police in vehicles?! :yikes::whistle:

[amateur51]

What is more than a little worrying is people who are unwilling or unable to tell the difference.

Any comment on the MI5 link? Or are you simply dismissing at as a scaremongering work of fiction?

Great data set, it'll prove something one day.

Under Arrests and convictions my confidence was rather shaken by "Notable terrorist convictions up to the end of 2010 have included the following cases ...

18 March 2011
Rajib Karim, an IT worker for British Airways, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years' imprisonment for supplying information about airlines to al Qaida terrorists in Yemen.
Metropolitan Police


9 February 2012
Nine men who were members of a terrorist network in England and Wales were sentenced to between five and 17 years' imprisonment for offences including plotting to attack the London Stock Exchange and seeking terrorist training overseas."

:smiley:

[MrGongGong]

But what about those killed by police in vehicles?! :yikes::whistle:

Well maybe they had forgotten to pay their TV licence on time so deserved all they got !
We can't have dodgy criminals wandering the streets now .......... it's Zero tolerance in Peeland
(There do seem to be some who don't realise that "Hot Fuzz" is a work of fiction :whistle: )

[amateur51]

Well maybe they had forgotten to pay their TV licence on time so deserved all they got !
We can't have dodgy criminals wandering the streets now .......... it's Zero tolerance in Peeland
(There do seem to be some who don't realise that "Hot Fuzz" is a work of fiction :whistle: )

Oh I thought Timothy Dalton's gleeful villain was pretty real :laugh:

[Richard Barrett]

I'm glad you consider the Boston attack to be fairly insignificant. Perhaps you would like to share that sentiment with the victims and their families.

It doesn't need to be said that it's always tragic when someone is violently killed, and I don't believe anyone ever deserves to be violently killed. But this must surely also apply to the well over a million people estimated to have perished in Iraq as a direct consequence of the US invasion of 2003 and subsequent occupation, no? And each one of those people was not one bit different in their worth as a human being from those killed by the Boston bombing. So, fairly insignificant in the wider scheme of things, yes.