why even bother with training them to be snipers and giving them vehicles
give a few of them automatic weapons, put them on a few municipal busses, and have them spray bullets haphazardly.
Exactly. Yet how many times has this happened? Terrorism is supposed to be this huge threat, yet they have not managed to figure out how to get an armed individual into a crowd of people in the US?
Living in a society involves risk. Even factoring in the folks who died in the towers and Pentagon, air travel is a hell of a lot safer than getting into your car and driving anyplace.
Yes, thank you for those wonderful pieces of information which no one knew about until now. I didn’t know that there was inherent risk involved with being alive.
No, it is not made out to be this “huge threat” except by people with agendas, but dismissing the potential for harm that it can cause is inappropriate.
I think mswas is saying the exact opposite; that Al Qaeda is largely a rallying cry; a terrorist brand name. And that it therefore doesn’t mean much if someone claims to be Al Qaeda, or is claimed to be by others.
IMO, a lot of sensible thought here.
I have not parsed the article and do not accept every word of it as consistent with my views, but I thought it a refreshing point of view which is seldom heard.
Was this guy a lone looney or part of a plot? Well, if we just go by his words there are more on the way.
Maybe he’s just bragging to make himself look good and there is no connection to AQ. But then again, Al Queda in Yemen is claiming responsibility and they were pretty effective against the USS Cole.
OK, how about the statement from the Foreign Minister of Yemen that there could be hundreds of AQ terrorists in his country. Should that concern us? You bet your bippy it should. He is asking for assistance:
This is not a call to invade, merely to help the Yemeni government to clean up the problem.
Actually, I’m more concerned that we were holding the guys who thought up this plan but we let them go, sending them to Saudi Arabia for “art therapy rehabilitation program”.
We dodged a bullet here. Bad luck on the terrorists side combined with the quick actions of the passengers averted a tragedy. Incompetence, complacency and laziness allowed him to get as far as he did.
We need to rethink the PC fear of profiling. If 9/11 had been perpretated by the IRA then everyone with a last name of O’Malley and O’Reilly would be on a watch list and people with red hair and freckles would be getting body cavity searches at the airport. Since the perpetrators of these acts are predominently Muslim and come from specific countries then we should feel no hesitation in focusing our attention on them.
If nothing else, I think our airlines should consider following the security measures of El Al.
Investigation is needed here. Almost everyone agrees Khalid Sheikh Muhammad was a major Al Qaeda figure, and even he overstated some of his activities. At this doesn’t take much to claim affiliation with a terrorist group or for a group to take responsibility. That’s not to ignore your concerns about Yemen, but we’ve heard this song before.
Even as an imaginary hypothetical, this is ludicrous. Think about how many Americans have Irish ancestry and how many have Arab ancestry and you’ll figure out the reason.
The idea is to have separate snipers all over the country shooting at people for a limited period each day, then moving on to another location and doing it again two days later. If it were to begin on Black Friday and continuing for a couple of weeks, the US economy would collapse in short order.
Some dudes tried this a few years ago and other than having to listen to an inarticulate sheriff every freaking day, nothing much happened. One of them’s dead now.
I honestly don’t understand why this and dozens of other similarly simple tactics haven’t been used. Fortunately, it seems, the terrorists aren’t very clever. BTW, I’m not sure educating them on a public message board is a particularly good idea.
I doubt they need the help; if they haven’t done that, it’s because they don’t want to for whatever reason. Not spectacular enough perhaps.
More on the investigation shows that he had been in contact with AQ and the intelligence wasn’t passed along the chain properly. Sound familiar?
OK, let’s stay closer to home. A series of break-ins occur in a neighborhood and witnesses report it was a bunch black kids. Some are caught breaking into a house and it turns out that they are gang members. Even after their arrest the break-ins continue. Now, would the police be out of line to focus their investigation on black people? Or should they be PC and question everyone about their involvement in the gang? Ask any cop (at least ones who are willing to open up and be honest with you) and they will admit to profiling in their investigations. Why? Because, when it comes down to it, they know that they acheive better results from following known patterns.
Back to the OP.
In 1993 a well orchestrated terrorist attack was made on the World Trade Center in NYC. While the attack didn’t achieve it’s intended purpose (of bringing down the towers) it was quite effective. Most of us didn’t understand the implications of the attack. Eight years later the towers were brought down by an even bolder and more elaborate plan.
So again, back to the OP, is this recent event an signal of what might come? Is this the work of a competent terrorist organization of the act of a single zealot?
It is important to remember that extremest religious organizations don’t think in terms of 1 or 2 or 5 years. They are very patient. They want to win a 1,000 year war.
Ironically, it’s been 8 years since 9/11. Are we looking at something that has much more significance than what we might think or is it just a blip on the “fight against terrorists” screen?
Or, as a wise man once said, “There ain’t no truth in the news, and no news in truth.”
I’m morally certain that the Boy Scouts could be a more effective terrorist organization than Al-Qaeda if just given proper direction. But then, I’m pretty sure the Three Stooges could be a more effective terrorist organization. In the last ten years, these guys have pulled off one act that is less impressive for the training and coordination required than the large gaping hole in airline security which permitted it (i.e. not securing the flight deck from intrusion), and a handful of very modest street bombing campaigns. A really professional terrorist organization like the PIRA could hand Al-Qaeda their socks while they were still wearing their boots.
Lame poser who didn’t have the first clue as to what he was doing, although that may well describe the rest of Al-Qaeda-supported groups as well.
Stranger
Curiously enough, the British have had to put up with this kind of harassment for years; never mind the ongoing campaigns of violence in Greece and Italy by both left- and right-wing organizations, or the murder campaign of the Grey Wolves of Turkey, none of which caused their economies to collapse. It is true that as residents of the United States we’re generally used to being isolated from external invasion and terrorist campaigns, but people adjust. And untrained snipers (there is far more to effective sniping than knowing how to pull the trigger) who are unaccustomed to Western culture are going to find it hard to blend in and hide from authorities. I would give this campaign three weeks, tops.
Stranger
If he was a test of the system then imagine a group of people boarding a multi-stop flight with the same material pooled together. I see no reason to post what could have been done.
9/11 was poorly planned but demonstrates what asymmetric warfare looks like.
And who is to say some/many/all of these “failed” attempts were merely testing the waters? Americans are so easily lulled into complacency. Hey, if one of these worked, great. If it didn’t work, so what? What was important was the reaction of America. How do they respond? Watch and adjust. Try this one, and then that one. Watch and adjust. Rinse, lather, repeat.
At one level, it’s like a never ending succession of yap yap dogs, always biting at the heels and never doing any real damage, except for a few drops of blood here and there. More an annoyance, really. An annoyance carefully studied. Then bam.
It’s been eight years from 9/11. We’ve yet to fully “recover.” In fact, we can’t. Money that could have gone to infrastructure, education, energy conservation and alternatives, hey even health care, still goes to war, security and hype. Isn’t there some medical name where it’s not the actual disease that kills the organism but the added stress of anxiety and fear about the disease that finally kills its host?
Actually, it was “v Pravde net izvestiy, v Izvestiyakh net pravdy” (In the Truth there is no news, and in the News there is no truth).
Pravda and Izvestia being the name of two communist papers. You’ve managed to give a down-home twang to a communist proverb, and in the process, removed the entire relevance of the matter.
Remember, context is everything. Remove it, and you’re just flapping your gums.
Yup. HIV.
Which is oddly fitting, since the US has been fucking the world raw for the last 50 years 
(OK, I only half meant that one. Bad comedy trumps everything.)
I love this board.