Monthly Archives: August 2006

counterterrorism 101

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from the Guardian today. This is one of those articles with which my thoughts don’t quite align (like the anti-UN initiative from earlier), but it’s extremely interesting nonetheless. I shall have to mull this over for awhile.

You are not alone...so deal with it.

Popular trust in government is a necessary foundation of a society’s defences against terrorism. We need to believe we are being told the truth and that our government is acting in good faith. Unfortunately there is now sufficient reason to be sceptical about who we should entrust our security to. 

…the problem is not that his critics “don’t get” the terrorist threat, as the home secretary has put it, but that the government has, with the US, abandoned all the principles of effective counterterrorism. These were practised by the British against countless insurgencies. Whether or not you agree with Niall Ferguson and Gordon Brown about empire, it is instructive to review the five key principles that – usually – allowed imperial rule with minimum force.

First, ensure good coordination between security services and police. Karen DeYoung‘s indictment of the failure of the US security services to talk to each other in this week’s Washington Post is truly damning. By refusing to communicate, the US services render their, and by extension our, services less effective. We now know that US officials have a routine seat at Britain’s joint intelligence committee, a fact that one of its former chairmen told me makes it hard for the British state to think independently. Do US officials also sit in on the UK’s counterterror organisations, and if so how do they relate to the myriad, non-communicating services detailed by the Washington Post?

The other four principles are to deny the enemy a base, secure your own base, keep the political and moral high ground and address your opponents’ grievances.

Our leaders say there are no grievances to be addressed, despite the fact that the London bombers said they were motivated by the Iraq war and our security services warned that the occupation of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat.

Our moral high ground is preserved by a US attorney general who was promoted to this office after sanctioning the Guantánamo detention camp and the practices used at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The Islamist terrorists still have a base in Pakistan and Afghanistan. By shifting attention to Iraq after 9/11, we gave al-Qaida and the Taliban a respite for which British troops are now paying the price. And more people are prepared to provide tacit support to those fighting the US.

Our own base is now less secure than before 9/11, based on the number of actual and alleged threats, while our continued unnecessary dependence on oil makes our home base hostage to adverse regime change abroad. There are indeed those who do not get the terrorist threat.

Principal among them are the prime minister and his supporters.

bride of Barbaro!

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Y’all remember Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, right? The sesamoid snapper whose recovery outlook is reported by the media entirely in terms of degree of “eye twinkle” he gets when the mares are around. I tell ya, it’s worse than being Brad Pitt.

Or Tom Cruise.

In any case, at the risk of diverting myself from a lucrative career as a blogger to an unproductive one of hypothetical horse matchmaking, I suggest that we introduce the poor gimp to this mare:

Sweet Nothing

Equine amputee puts her best foot forward
Plucky horse thrives after customized artificial limb replaces hind leg

If cats do indeed have nine lives, Sweet Nothing is living proof that horses have at least three.

Saved first from the slaughterhouse, then from a devastating leg injury that veterinarians said called for euthanasia, the small bay mare is now one of a handful of horses in the world to sport a customized prosthetic limb after her bad hind leg was amputated below the hock.

The best part? In true Canadian fashion, her new artificial hoof is made from a hockey puck. Who knew Red Green was such a talented vet?

how are we fighting the war on terror?

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From the Onion. Keep on fightin’ that TWAT!

FIGHT THAT TWAT!!!

the practical uses of terror

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I worked with TWAT. TWAT was a friend of mine. And you, sir, are a twat. 

I know Aldous Huxley and George Orwell wrote the originals, but this, from the Cato Institute via BoingBoing, is a very practical explanation of just how useful a state of terror can be to a government who wants to hang onto power when the people want to freshen up the litter box.

Only traitors try to make us afraid of terrorists

In this mind-blowing, exhaustively researched Cato institute paper by Ohio State University’s John Mueller, the case against being afraid of terrorism is laid out in irrefutable logic, backed with credible, documented statistics about terrorism’s risks. From the number of fatalities produced by terrorism to the trends in terrorism death to the fact that almost no one has ever died from a military biological agent to the fact that poison gas and dirty bombs in the field do only minor damage — this paper is the most reassuring and infuriating piece of analysis I’ve read since September 11th, 2001. The bottom line is, terrorism doesn’t kill many people. Even in Israel, you’re four times more likely to die in a car wreck than as a result of a terrorist attack. In the USA, you need to be more worried about lightning strikes than terrorism. The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified. Mushroom clouds for everyone!

Much of the current alarm is generated from the knowledge that many of today’s terrorists simply want to kill, and kill more or less randomly, for revenge or as an act of what they take to be The shock and tragedy of September 11 does demand a focused and dedicated program to confront international terrorism and to attempt to prevent a repeat. But it seems sensible to suggest that part of this reaction should include an effort by politicians, officials, and the media to inform the public reasonably and realistically about the terrorist context instead of playing into the hands of terrorists by frightening the public. What is needed, as one statistician suggests, is some sort of convincing, coherent, informed, and nuanced answer to a central question: “How worried should I be?” Instead, the message the nation has received so far is, as a Homeland Security official put (or caricatured) it, “Be scared; be very, very scared — but go on with your lives.” Such messages have led many people to develop what Leif Wenar of the University of Sheffield has aptly labeled “a false sense of insecurity.”

what not to wear…on a date with Darren Sherman

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Everybody remember the hapless Darren Sherman of How Not to JDate? And, of course, who could forget the moving soundtrack to the undoubtably already-in-pre-production musical?Remember when Nirvana said that the Weird Al parody meant that they’d really made it? Well, in the wardrobe equivalent of Weird Al immortalization, you can now wear the unofficial Darren and Joanne Date From Hell t-shirt.

Getcha Darren and Joanne t-shirts heyah!

Thanks to Arnell Boone in the comments section, and of course to PR Differently for breaking the story in the first place.