terrorism – Page 3

Hamza Guilty

6 charges of soliciting murder – this law is probably OK. It’s an abridgement of free speech, but a long-standing and fairly reasonable one.

Also 4 charges of “stirring up racial hatred”. This is an unacceptable abridgement of free speech. In practice it’s much easier to stir up hatred against yourself than against others, and Hamza is responsible for more hatred of Arabs than of Jews. Of course, since he wants war, that’s all OK from his point of view, but it’s pointless to ban it.

Finally 1 charge of possessing information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing terrorism – you always feel that law has to be a joke, but it isn’t. Terrifying.

The Americans want him on a whole bunch of actual terrorism charges. I’d much rather see him done for that.

Useless Terrorists

It’s really hard to be scared of an enemy that is this stupid.

http://osm.org/site/story/20051201suicidebomber/view

Mireille was a 38-year old woman born into a white, Christian family in the
Southern Belgian town of Charleroi; she married to a Moroccan, converted to a
radical form of Islam, and went to Iraq where she blew herself up in a suicide
attack targeted against a US military convoy; she killed only herself. Her
passport was in her remains, and its finding prompted yesterday the arrest by
Belgium and France security forces of 15 suspected Islamic militants believed to
be linked to her. Mireille has the more than dubious honor of being the first
white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing, according to London’s The
Times

(via instapundit)

A white, female suicide bomber in Western Europe – a uniquely valuable weapon – and she goes to Iraq, where her uniqueness is not merely no longer an advantage, but is now a disadvantage.

This lends considerable strength to the idea, expressed before, that suicide bombing is often more a personal statement than a serious attempt to cause any kind of political change:

http://www.anomalyblog.co.uk/2005/07/12/suicide-bombs/

Why suicide bombing? … Maybe they feel that, other things being equal, it is better to die in the attack than survive it. I don’t 100% believe the “Blood Feud” theory of Islamist terrorism — I do think there is some strategy to it — but it is valid to say that the bombers are very much concerned with themselves and their supporters, not just with their effects on us.

Deborah Davis

Saw this on boingboing:Deborah Davis in Denver, Colorado is being prosecuted for refusing to show ID on a bus.The case is complicated by the status of the bus, which while available to the public is run by a Federal government office complex, and runs through that complex.But leaving that aside, what is interesting is that she was always OK when she said she didn’t have ID, she was arrested (on a later occasion) when she said she had some but wasn’t going to show it.The US, like the UK, doesn’t have a compulsory ID card. That means she was practically OK claiming not to be carrying ID – the problem came when she (bravely, and admirably) made an issue of it by admitting she happened to be carrying ID, but refusing to produce it.This story is the perfect answer to the “we already have so many IDs, what difference does one more make” argument. It is the difference between “I am not carrying ID” and “I won’t show you my ID”, which the police in this case, typically, considered so important.(Of course, technically the government claim that the ID cards they are introducing will not be made compulsory. If you believe that…)
Support No2ID.

Trade and Peace

Various observers have picked up on the new report from The Fraser Institute:

Economic freedom is almost 50 times more effective than democracy in diminishing violent conflict between nations, according to the Economic Freedom of the World: 2005 Annual Report.

Well, if trade is such an effective way of preventing wars, how did we get to be in this one?

Perhaps it’s something to do with the fact we refused to trade with Iraq for 12 years? As I argued previously, deliberately antagonising the government of a foreign country, without taking any effective steps to remove it, is a very bad policy. Is there any example in history of sanctions achieving any political goal, other than the goal of provoking a war? (and other interesting by-products)

I think it should be a rule of thumb: don’t introduce sanctions against a country unless you’re willing to fight it.

Government Criminality

I haven’t commented at all on the de Menezes affair. From the very beginning, I felt it wasn’t worth discussing it, because 50% of what we read about it would turn out not to be true. It now looks as if that was a massive underestimate, but that just makes it all the more sensible to wait until the whole thing hits the courts and we can start to separate the facts from rumour and misinformation.

I am raising it now, because of the philosophical link with my earlier post on the activities of Neil Herron. What is at issue in Sunderland is the attitude of government to the law. When I read on Neil’s blog today:

Sunderland Council had had a meeting with NCP regarding the fact that there were no traffic orders in place for the city’s taxi ranks. This meant that issued tickets were unlawful, but rather than admitting this, they covered it up. They knew in October 2003.

It just sounded so much like the Evening Standard’s account of the cover-up of the CCTV footage from Stockwell station:

The row over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes took a dramatic turn today.

Senior tube sources have challenged police claims that there was no video footage of his final moments on the platform at Stockwell station.

They told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform were in full working order. …

The Tube sources spoke out after it emerged that police had returned tapes taken from the cameras saying: “These are no good to us. They are blank.”

The attitude that tries to cover up illegal issuing of parking tickets is the same attitude that tries to cover up murder. That’s why the parking tickets matter.

Phones

This kind of thing is what really drives me nuts.

“Mobiles are believed to have been used by the 7/7 bombers as timers in their rucksack bombs” – well, if you want to use them as timers you can buy them second hand from a car boot sale, you don’t need a network.

I would like to know what is being done about shoes. All the London terrorists wore shoes, and without shoes they would probably not have been anything like as effective. Yet one can walk into a shop in any town in Britain, and buy a pair of shoes, cash down; no ID, no questions. Don’t these people realise we’re AT WAR???

In the same way that stuff which appears in the newspapers a lot is stuff which is newsworthy, and therefore rare, human rights which get a lot of publicity are those which are argued about, and therefore marginal. The really really basic human rights, like the right to buy a pair of shoes or a telephone without being required by the government to register yourself as the owner, are so obvious that we don’t even think about them as human rights, which is a shame, because we let government get away with taking them away far more readily than we do the marginal cases.

The other element here is a kind of “aquis communitaire” of police powers. As an implementation detail of the telecoms industry, there used to be a practical necessity to provide a name and address to get use of a telephone. With the technological innovation of call rating on the switch, pay as you go became possible and therefore anonymous access to telephones. (I recall with embarrassment that when I went to a meeting with Ericsson sales-people pushing this new technology, I didn’t see what the big deal was). The police, having got used to the convenience of access to telephone records, feel that some obvious, essential police tool (which in fact would never have been given to them in the first place except by accident) has been taken away from them, and that the law must be changed to give it back. Again, because people are used to the idea that police can find out who made a phone call, they are more sympathetic to it than they would be out of the blue.

There is an obvious parallel to the attitude of copyright owners.

War on Squirrels

Two views from my blogroll: Eric Raymond says

The choice between “support the war” and “allow the pressure off of enemies who want to kill us all” is not a difficult one. As a libertarian, I’m deeply sorry we live in a world where governments are doing the fighting for us, and I fear the consequences of the power they will amass while doing so. But I don’t see an alternative.

While Nick Seddon says

… it is wrong to treat this as a war. Or rather, it is possible to prevent this becoming a war. Much as evangelicals (the kind who read the metaphor of the armour of God at the end of Ephesians in literal terms) and neocons (Mark Steyn’s article in The Spectator this week concludes, “If it’s a war, you can win it. Anything less is unlikely to end in victory.”) are keen on their gung-ho adrenaline, it will only make things worse to react as if this is a war of simple opposites, a clash of civilisations …

I set out to agree with Nick Seddon. But whenever I tried to form an argument of the form, “it’s wrong to say this is a war, because if it was a war then ….” I had nothing to complete the sentence with. Not “nothing that supported my argument”, nothing at all. To me, deciding whether the situation is or is not a war leads to no policy conclusions at all. No measure I can think of would automatically be appropriate “because we are in a war”. Wars come in all shapes and sizes, even leaving aside questionable entrants like the “War on Drugs” or the “Cold War”.

It’s like the the old story of the squirrel, the hunter and the tree.

Now here’s an odd thing. Having written the above, I thought I’d show off my erudition, or “ability to use google”, by giving a better reference to the squirrel. In fact it’s from William James. But check out the page that came up when I looked it up. Maybe one day I’ll come up with something original.

Crime and Terrorism

From time to time we hear criticism of the “crime-fighting” approach to counter-terrorism: the line is that the terrorists aren’t restrained by law, and we cannot afford to disadvantage ourselves against them.

As I mentioned previously, the flaw is that I as a civilian am at least as concerned not to be wrongly convicted of terrorism as of crime – removing the protection of the law for any action removes my certainty of not being punished without a chance to defend myself in court.

In any case, criminals aren’t restrained by law either, so what’s the difference?

Well, terrorism is a much bigger problem than crime, isn’t it? Um, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t. Check this out:

Violent death rate in Baghdad, from March 2003 to March 2005, from Iraq Body Count: 20.1 per 10,000 population. That’s 100 per 100,000 per year, and it includes the invasion itself. I can’t get accurate figures for the period after the invasion, but from the feel of the report, I would knock about a third off for “peacetime” Baghdad: say 70 per 100,000 per year

Murder rate in Washington, D.C. 69.3 per 100,000 per year.

That’s it – the capital of Iraq, the epicentre of world terrorist activity, has, as close as I can measure it, the same violent death rate as the capital of the USA with no terrorists.

OK, admittedly, Washington D.C has by far the worst murder rate of any “peaceful” city in the entire world, but compare any other city in the world to Baghdad, and terrorism is negligible.

Maybe, since car drivers kill more people than terrorists, we should suspend basic freedoms for drivers, as well.

Oh yeah, we did that.

Update: Apparently Scrivener discovered this back in January

Policing Terrorism

The normally reliable Bruce Schneier weighed in on security camers on 12 July

Surveillance cameras didn’t deter the terrorist attacks in London. They didn’t stop the courthouse killing spree in Atlanta. But they’re prone to abuse. And at the end of they day they don’t reduce crime.

In New York, the authorities are doing random searches to look for explosives.

Yesterday, the London transport system was flooded with police, many of them armed.

All these policing measures are controversial – how to evaluate them?

The exceptional density of CCTV in Britain, and especially London, is a legacy of previous terrorist campaigns. I am surprised to see Schneier dismiss them so totally, as they are a cheap way of getting substantial benefit. Cheap both in money and in “social cost” – when you are out in public you can be seen, but with cameras you can be seen by people who weren’t actually there at the time. You can disguise or hide yourself, at the price of looking a bit suspicious. The images (unlike, say, number plate recognition cameras on motorways) can’t be used for broad sweeps to track people over months or check everyone for a particular behaviour. (note also many of them are in private hands – the police have to ask for them, and they need support from the public to get them). I’m absolutely opposed to compulsory ID, large-scale telecoms interception, etc., but not CCTV.

From where I sit, it looks like CCTV has been the key tool in breaking up the terrorist organisation behind the London bombings; tracing the 7th July team back to Luton and Leeds, identifying the 21st July team, and following both leads back to contacts and resources.

To be fair to Schneier, all these developments happened after he made the quotes above, but they are consistent with previous terrorist campaigns. Possibly we in Britain see counter-terrorism differently — Schneier, like Arnold Kling, is thinking in terms of preventing a one-off attack like 9/11 (which is almost impossible), while we naturally think in terms of winning an extended campaign, in which we take hits but use intelligence gathered to disrupt the enemy organisation. Even a suicide bomber, who is very hard to deter and who can’t be captured afterwards, is part of an organisation – large or small – which is more vulnerable if he is identified and traced.

Random bag-searches, on the other hand, score very badly on price-performance. The expense and social cost of searching commuters’ bags are very high, and the likelihood of them having any effect at all is quite low.

The large police presence yesterday was expensive (I would guess it cost on the order of a million pounds), and slightly unnerving.

Both of the last two are not cost-effective over a longer period, but each might make sense as a one-off or very occasional measure when the threat is judged to be high. I don’t know whether that is the plan in NY, but it probably was the plan yesterday; if two of the 21st July bombers were arrested today, then yesterday was the day they were most dangerous. It’s easy to imagine a suicide bomber succeeding in a mission under the noses of all those police, but there’s a distinct chance that they would have been able to interfere with the mission. Estimate say 2% chance of an attack on that day, 20% chance of foiling it, a million pounds is fairly reasonable.

Ian Blair – disagreeing with me among others – says the 21st July team were not the B-team or amateurs. This is a relative question, and I would not expect or wish those with the job of catching them to be as blase about them as I am, but I stick to my guns:

Any fool can kill people; the chief attribute of these guys is not skill but bloodthirstiness – but even killing a few hundred people a year would only really affect our way of life if we let it.

This lot are much less sophisticated and professional than the IRA, and most importantly, don’t have the community support the IRA had (how may IRA bombers were ever grassed up by their mothers?)

Sir Ian needs to take this as seriously as a football manager facing a lower-league team in a cup game, but for the rest of us we ought to be confident that we can beat these scum, without losing our sense of perspective.

Related entries:

Really Suicide

The Mirror and others are questioning whether the “mobile self-demolition specialists” who visited London a couple of weeks back were really planning to die.

I’m still quite willing to believe they were, though there is room for doubt.

Classifying the evidence:

Left no notes, wills, video messages or whatever
Bought return train tickets, and possibly car park pay & display tickets.
Detonations were nearly simultaneous (apart from the one that wasn’t)
Didn’t make any announcements at the moment of detonation
One or two of them had pregnant wives
They were British, dammit! One of them played cricket!
Obviously the Mossad was really behind it all.

6 and 7 I disregard.

5 – well, the September 2001 hijackers had full and apparently enjoyable lives. Of course, not all of them necessarily knew exactly what they were getting into. These four might have declared themselves willing to die, and volunteered for a mission without knowing until a late stage that it was a one-way trip. Security, you know.

2 3 and possibly 4 could be explained by my earlier theory, that they were acting on the cautious assumption that the security forces were close on their tails. They had had (very indirect) contact with previous blown operations, nothing in Britain had yet come off succesfully, the #1 priority was to get the job done before anyone could grab them.

The lack of any message is the strongest point, but even that I think might be because of the risk of exposure. Unlike the Palestinians, these people were really operating entirely in enemy territory: the fact of going out and buying a video camera might have triggered some investigating authority to ask for a search warrant.

I’m probably not going to blog about this much more. 50 murders is a significant news story, but a sense of proportion is still important, and we don’t want to go overboard.

Here’s my decision: once the Piccadilly line is open, I will consider the story over.