You can't fight violence with violence

Halting mass violence, including terrorism, requires a political will to address the problem at its roots. That requires western nations to revise their foreign policies in ways that do not generate and sustain cycles of violence. Unfortunately, such political will appears unlikely at this stage of human history.

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U.S. Cites Big Gains Against Al-Qaeda

Less than a year after his agency warned of new threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden now portrays the terrorist movement as essentially defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and on the defensive throughout much of the rest of the world, including in its presumed haven along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

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CIA Boss Says New Al-Qaeda Are White Westerners

Citing absolutely no evidence whatsoever, CIA boss Michael Hayden told NBC's Meet The Press yesterday that Al-Qaeda is training new fighters that "look western" and could easily cross U.S. borders, in the latest attempt to re-focus the mammoth apparatus of anti-terror against the American people.

Read more, but stay scared.

Terror scholar: 'WoW' could let government sniff out plots

Every few months, we hear about some theorist or academic who has determined that al-Qaida is using virtual worlds like WoW to plot disaster. And every time that happens, a bunch of government officials probably get very freaked out and think that maybe it's time to start running data mining projects in those environments, just like the Office of the DNI did.

But as I wrote last month and I will continue to write, just because someone theorizes it doesn't mean it's true.

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World of Warcraft Shines Light on Terror Tactics

Virtual terrorists blowing themselves up and spreading disease inside World of Warcraft could provide counterterrorists with a window into real-world plots.

Such activities in the massively multiplayer online game bear an eerie resemblance to actual terrorism, and analyzing terror tactics in Warcraft could prove more enlightening than current computer simulations used by counterterrorists.

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Bin Laden Slams EU Over Prophet Cartoons

Osama bin Laden, in a new audio message
posted Wednesday, condemned the publication of drawings that he said
insulted the Prophet Muhammad and warned Europeans of a "severe"
reaction to come.

You know, I can't help but think of Orwell's 1984.

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McCain says al Qaeda might try to tip U.S. election

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday he fears that al Qaeda or another extremist group might attempt spectacular attacks in Iraq to try to tilt the U.S. election against him.

Working that fear factor.

Shut up, John.

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Why are there so many names on the U.S. government's terrorist list?

In September 2007, the Inspector General of the Justice Department reported that the Terrorist Screening Center (the FBI-administered organization that consolidates terrorist watch list information in the United States) had over 700,000 names in its database as of April 2007 - and that the list was growing by an average of over 20,000 records per month.

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Tortured logic of terror trials will not be going away

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has just
been given a cudgel, gift-wrapped by the Bush administration, to thump
his Democratic rival.

For years the six suspected 9/11
conspirators have been in the custody of the CIA and military, held
without charge. Yet now, just as the 2008 presidential race heats up,
capital charges have been filed against the men, with a military trial
to follow.

How convenient that public attention will be
redirected to the actions of these alleged mass murderers over the
coming months, giving fear-mongering - one of the Republican winning
strategies - a boost at just the right moment.

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Banazir Bhutto -- Take 2

I'm posting this again because of what she says at 6 minutes and 12 seconds into this November 2007 interview. Yes, she states that Osama bin Laden was assassinated by Omar Sheik. Am I the only one that finds that rather interesting?

FBI Prepares Vast Database Of Biometrics

The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion effort to build the world's largest computer database of peoples' physical characteristics, a project that would give the government unprecedented abilities to identify individuals in the United States and abroad.

Digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns are already flowing into FBI systems in a climate-controlled, secure basement here. Next month, the FBI intends to award a 10-year contract that would significantly expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives. And in the coming years, law enforcement authorities around the world will be able to rely on iris patterns, face-shape data, scars and perhaps even the unique ways people walk and talk, to solve crimes and identify criminals and terrorists. The FBI will also retain, upon request by employers, the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks so the employers can be notified if employees have brushes with the law.

...

At the West Virginia University Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR), 45 minutes north of the FBI's biometric facility in Clarksburg, researchers are working on capturing images of people's irises at distances of up to 15 feet, and of faces from as far away as 200 yards. Soon, those researchers will do biometric research for the FBI.

Covert iris- and face-image capture is several years away, but it is of great interest to government agencies.

All in the name of "fighting terrorism" of course.

"Terrorism": the death nail of free societies everywhere.

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No proof airport security makes flying safer-study

Airport security lines can annoy passengers, but there is no evidence that they make flying any safer, U.S. researchers reported on Thursday.

A team at the Harvard School of Public Health could not find any studies showing whether the time-consuming process of X-raying carry-on luggage prevents hijackings or attacks.

They also found no evidence to suggest that making passengers take off their shoes and confiscating small items prevented any incidents.

It's all about "conditioning".

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White House to Cut Anti-Terror Funds

The Bush administration intends to slash counterterrorism funding for police, firefighters and rescue departments across the country by more than half next year, according to budget documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The Homeland Security Department has given $23 billion to states and local communities to fight terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks, but the administration is not convinced that the money has been well spent and thinks the nation's highest-risk cities have largely satisfied their security needs.

Interesting.

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Hundreds of thousands of women raped for being on the wrong side

Rape has been used to terrorise and punish civilians in Congo who support the "wrong side", and it is perhaps no coincidence that it was also a tool of genocide in the mass murder of the Tutsis. Sexual violence is now so widespread that the medical aid charity, Médecins sans Frontières, says that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in eastern Congo. Darfur is a distant second.

...

Human rights groups described gang rapes as commonplace and often accompanied by "barbaric" acts of torture with victims beaten with clubs, cut with knives or sexually assaulted with guns. Many young women have been abducted into sexual slavery.

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Suitcase Nuclear Bomb Unlikely to Exist

But government experts and intelligence officials say such a threat gets vastly more attention than it deserves. These officials said a true suitcase nuke would be highly complex to produce, require significant upkeep and cost a small fortune.

Counterproliferation authorities do not completely rule out the possibility that these portable devices once existed. But they do not think the threat remains.

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Snowflakes and scare-mongering

Fear-mongering, arrogance and bureaucratic bullying. By such tools, Donald Rumsfeld became one of the most powerful, most unpopular and ultimately most unsuccessful Pentagon chiefs in history. Any doubts about that judgement have been removed by the publication this week in The Washington Post of a selection of his "snow-flakes" – the short memos the former defence secretary was wont to fire off daily in scores to his staff. They pestered, they irritated, and on occasion they terrorised their recipients. Together, they give a depressing snapshot of the modus operandi of their boss, as he presided over the debacle in Iraq.

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America's war without end

These days, terrorism seems to be whatever the Bush administration says it is.

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Justifying these whopping increases, Mr Bush repeats a favourite mantra, that "America is safer but not yet safe", implying that absolute safety is attainable at some point in the future. In a speech this week, his vice-president, Dick Cheney, was franker: he said the US was engaged in an ideological struggle amounting to war without end.

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Blogs target jihadis online

Ordinary Americans are tracking down U.S. Web sites used by al Qaeda and jihadi sympathizers and then using the Internet to persuade the service providers to snuff out the sites.

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Teenager facing terror charges for possession of "Anarchists' Cookbook"

It is alleged he had a copy of the "Anarchists' Cookbook", containing instructions on how to make home-made explosives.

...

The teenager faces two charges under the Terrorism Act 2000.

The first charge relates to the possession of material for terrorist purposes in October last year.

The second relates to the collection or possession of information useful in the preparation of an act of terrorism.

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CIA Director Hayden Warns of New al-Qaida Attacks

"Our analysts assess with high confidence that al-Qaida's central leadership is planning high-impact plots against the U.S. homeland."

Stay scared people!

Interesting this rhetoric always seems to increase around September 11th of every year.

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