Sick of counter-terrorism experts?
Sunday, November 13, 2005 - 09:28 PM
That terribly well-educated alleged terrorism and security dude Aldo Borgu from Canberra was on TV the other night waffling on about Australia's alleged terrorism suspects. He was blathering about the lack of employment opportunities for such people.
A bit of a problem for his argument that almost all of them were gainfully employed.
We really are at the buttock end of intelligent debate in Australia.
Everyone's talking loud, but saying nothing.
We're stuck in clowntown.
I think it's partly the price of travel. But hell, there are clowns the world over.
Nevertheless, the babies we have thumping their chests to be seen as national security journalists or experts really ought to get out more.
If they don't get beheaded by unemployed people, they might learn something.
Take this recent hullabaloooooo about "CIA black sites" - quiet little detention centres around the world where bad counter-terrorism goons abuse Muslims.
Old news.
Here's a bit about the capture of alleged Sep 11 organiser and former Manila resident, Khalid Sheik Moohamed, from Mark Bowden's The Dark Art of Interrogation in The Atlantic Monthly of October 2003:
Once more hooded, Sheikh Mohammed was driven to Chaklala Air Force base, in Rawalpindi, and turned over to U.S. forces. From there he was flown to the CIA interrogation center in Bagram, Afghanistan, and from there, some days later, to an "undisclosed location" (a place the CIA calls "Hotel California")—presumably a facility in another cooperative nation, or perhaps a specially designed prison aboard an aircraft carrier. It doesn't much matter where, because the place would not have been familiar or identifiable to him. Place and time, the anchors of sanity, were about to come unmoored. He might as well have been entering a new dimension, a strange new world where his every word, move, and sensation would be monitored and measured; where things might be as they seemed but might not; where there would be no such thing as day or night, or normal patterns of eating and drinking, wakefulness and sleep; where hot and cold, wet and dry, clean and dirty, truth and lies, would all be tangled and distorted.
And dig this:
There is no clear count of suspected terrorists now in U.S. custody. About 680 were detained at Camp X-Ray, the specially constructed prison at Guantánamo, on the southeastern tip of Cuba. Most of these are now considered mere foot soldiers in the Islamist movement, swept up in Afghanistan during the swift rout of the Taliban. They come from forty-two different nations. Scores of other detainees, considered leaders, have been or are being held at various locations around the world: in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Jordan, Morocco, Yemen, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Iraq, where U.S. forces now hold the top echelon of Saddam Hussein's dismembered regime. Some detainees are in disclosed prisons, such as the facility at Bagram and a camp on the island of Diego Garcia. Others—upper-tier figures such as Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Rashim al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Tawfiq bin Attash—are being held at undisclosed locations.
And quite frankly, good.
Shame there's not more of it.
I've long been in favour of the war against jihadist swine being conducted largely in quiet mode. Abductions, killings, abuse.
Sure, you can jump up and down about police states, etc, and that's entertaining, but who does it help?
General Patton slapped shell-shocked men across the head, called them cowards in public. Yes he was a bastard, but he was still one of the few enemies the Nazi military personally feared.
Thank the stars it was Patton who was unleashed on the Nazi hordes instead of the waffle brigade who might have argued the Nazis were driven to anti-social behaviour by unemployment and cultural marginalisation.
The jihadist swine need a good smack.
The ease with whichy one can make bombs from household products means we can expect troubles for some time, and some casualties, but let's not lose our nerve.
The World Trade Center was first attacked in 1993, by jihadist swine based in Manila with help from more swine out of a Brooklyn mosque.
Not too long after the unholy Soviets had been driven out of holy Afghanistan with the help of the evil US.
So let's drop the fixation on the current war to democratise Iraq. After all, when anyone defends the "insurgency", they're defending stinking little losers who love nothing better than to chuck a nasty surprise and blow up in public with the express aim of killing civilians.
Wow. Well done. Moral legitmacy. Muslims are against killing.
So this jihad caper might be a problem we have for a while.
And the goofs raving on about Iraq might like to answer bin Loser's remarks about Australia and East Timor.
I'm glad the goofs do little but sit on the sidelines and whine.
Thank goodness there are a few Pattons out throwing some punches few people even know about.
Two years later it might make the news here.
By which time a lot of people will still be living who might otherwise be dead.
Clowntown.
Mind you there are exceptions like Kit Collier of Canberra and the International Crisis Group. He puts his arse in the grass, so to speak.
But as for most others - like I said, clowntown. |
