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anonymous

Keeping Terrorism in Perspective - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...keeping-terrorism-perspective

shared by anonymous on 22 Mar 12 - Cached
  • By design, terrorist attacks are intended to have a psychological impact far outweighing the physical damage the attack causes. As their name suggests, they are meant to cause terror that amplifies the actual attack. A target population responding to a terrorist attack with panic and hysteria allows the perpetrators to obtain a maximum return on their physical effort.
  • One way to mitigate the psychological impact of terrorism is to remove the mystique and hype associated with it. The first step in this demystification is recognizing that terrorism is a tactic used by a variety of actors and that it will not go away, something we discussed at length in our first analysis in this series.
  • Another way to mitigate the impact of terrorism is recognizing that those who conduct terrorist attacks are not some kind of Hollywood superninja commandos who can conjure attacks out of thin air. Terrorist attacks follow a discernable, predictable planning process that can be detected if it is looked for.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • A third important component in the demystification process is recognizing and resisting the terror magnifiers terrorist planners use in their efforts to maximize the impact of their attacks.
  • let's first examine the objective of terrorist planners.
  • In the late 1960s and early 1970s, modern terrorist organizations began to conduct operations designed to serve as terrorist theater, an undertaking greatly aided by the advent and spread of broadcast media.
  • Today, the proliferation of 24-hour television news networks and Internet news sites magnifies such media exposure.
  • Such theatrical attacks exert a strange hold over the human imagination. The sense of terror they create can dwarf the reaction to natural disasters many times greater in magnitude. For example, more than 227,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami compared to fewer than 3,000 people on 9/11. Yet the 9/11 attacks spawned a global sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that had a profound and unparalleled impact upon world events over the past decade.
  • As noted, the media magnifies this anxiety and terror. Television news, whether broadcast on the airwaves or over the Internet, allows people to experience a terrorist event remotely and vicariously, and the print media reinforces this. While part of this magnification results merely from the nature of television as a medium and the 24-hour news cycle, bad reporting and misunderstanding can build hype and terror.
  • The traditional news media are not alone in the role of terror magnifier. The Internet has become an increasingly effective conduit for panic and alarm. From hysterical (and false) claims in 2005 that al Qaeda had pre-positioned nuclear weapons in the United States and was preparing to attack nine U.S. cities and kill 4 million Americans in operation "American Hiroshima" to 2010 claims that Mexican drug cartels were smuggling nuclear weapons into the United States for Osama bin Laden, a great deal of fearmongering can spread rapidly over the Internet.
  • Website operators who earn advertising revenue based on the number of unique site visitors have an obvious financial incentive to publish outlandish and startling terrorism stories.
  • Sometimes even governments act as terror magnifiers. Certainly, in the early 2000s the media and the American public became fearful every time the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) raised its color-coded threat level. Politicians' statements also can scare people. Such was the case in 2007 when DHS secretary Michael Chertoff said his gut screamed that a major terrorist attack was imminent and in 2010 when the head of French internal intelligence noted that the threat of terrorism in France was never higher.
  • The world is a dangerous place. Everyone is going to die, and some people are certain to die in a manner that is brutal or painful. Recognizing that terrorist attacks, like car crashes and cancer and natural disasters, are part of the human condition permits people to take prudent, measured actions to prepare for such contingencies and avoid becoming victims (vicarious or otherwise). It is the resilience of the population and their perseverance that determine how much a terrorist attack is allowed to terrorize. By separating terror from terrorism, citizens can deny the practitioners of terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.
  • anonymous on 22 Mar 12
     
    "As we conclude our series on the fundamentals of terrorism, it is only fitting that we do so with a discussion of the importance of keeping terrorism in perspective."
anonymous

Terror Alerts vs Elections - 0 views

www.informationisbeautiful.net/...terror-alerts-vs-elections

visualizations

shared by anonymous on 11 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Oct 10
     
    "Accusations today over the timings of terror alerts and elections. The Bush administration used to raise threat levels around campaign time, apparently. Is Obama doing the same with European terror alerts to create a rally-round-the-president effect? I wondered if there was a correlation between terrorism and elections we could actually see."
anonymous

Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did - 1 views

www.dailykos.com/...artin-Luther-King-actually-did

shared by anonymous on 18 Jan 12 - Cached
  • So yes, Dr. King had many other goals, many other more transcendent, non-racial, policy goals, goals that apply to white people too, like ending poverty, reducing the war like aspects of our foreign policy, promoting the New Deal goal of universal employment, and so on.  But his main accomplishment was ending 200 years of racial terrorism, by getting black people to confront their fears.  So please don't tell me that Martin Luther King's dream has not been achieved, unless you knew what racial terrorism was like back then and can make a convincing case you still feel it today.  If you did not go through that transition, you're not qualified to say that the dream was not accomplished.
  • anonymous on 18 Jan 12
     
    My father told me with a sort of cold fury, "Dr. King ended the terror of living in the south." Please let this sink in and and take my word and the word of my late father on this.  If you are a white person who has always lived in the U.S. and never under a brutal dictatorship, you probably don't know what my father was talking about.   But this is what the great Dr. Martin Luther King accomplished.  Not that he marched, nor that he gave speeches. He ended the terror of living as a black person, especially in the south.
  • Erik Hanson on 19 Jan 12
     
    The trick is that Dr. King accomplished that and kept dreaming bigger, and in a very short timespan. We get into these problems defining "dreams." (Is the "American Dream" merely about financial opportunity, the goal of using that opportunity, about freedom and opportunity more generally?) Dr. King did dream about mobilizing the community to confront the terrorism and oppression of blacks (which, while still extant in mostly systematic respects, saw great progress under the SCLC). But he kept pushing, kept dreaming. He pushed for an end of more indirect repression in law, policy, business and the economy. The reverend doctor's stance on Vietnam wasn't just about pacifism, but also about a draft system that let college-bound kids out the back door while upping conscription of minorities and the economically disenfranchised. Because ultimately Dr. King was dreaming of a perfect world--literally. You don't catch that from some of his more political and public speeches, but it's clear in his sermons that he was dreaming of the return of God's "Promised Land," the New Jerusalem.
anonymous

Separating Terror from Terrorism - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...29-separating-terror-terrorism

shared by anonymous on 30 Dec 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 30 Dec 10
     
    "On Dec. 15, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sent a joint bulletin to state and local law enforcement agencies expressing their concern that terrorists may attack a large public gathering in a major U.S. metropolitan area during the 2010 holiday season. That concern was echoed by contacts at the FBI and elsewhere who told STRATFOR they were almost certain there was going to be a terrorist attack launched against the United States over Christmas."
anonymous

Assessing Inspire Magazine's 10th Edition - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...inspire-magazines-10th-edition

geopolitics terrorism

shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 13 - Cached
  • I have been very surprised at how the media and other analysts have received the magazine. Some have overhyped the magazine even as others have downplayed -- even ridiculed -- its content. I have heard others say the magazine revealed nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
  • All these reactions are misguided. So in response, I've endeavored to provide a more balanced assessment that can be placed in a more appropriate perspective.
  • Inspire 10 is not going to launch the grassroots jihadist apocalypse al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula seeks to foment any more successfully than the magazine's previous nine editions. The fact that a photograph of Austin, Texas, appears in the magazine does not mean that the city is somehow being secretly targeted for attack by jihadist sleeper cells.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • But laughing at the magazine or dismissing it as irrelevant would be imprudent. The magazine has in fact inspired several terrorist plots.
  • Other cases have not been as blatant as those involving Abdo and Pimentel. However, they have involved individuals who were radicalized or motivated by Inspire.
  • Some commentators have noted that most of the suspects arrested in connection with these plots were fairly hapless and clueless -- the type of individuals we have long referred to as "Kramer jihadists." Though partly incompetent, these grassroots operatives are exactly the demographic al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is targeting for radicalization and mobilization.
  • Inspire seeks to reach amateur terrorists living in the West; professional terrorists already know how to create pipe bombs. For this reason, the magazine urges amateurs to undertake simple attacks rather than the complex attacks. Too often they find assistance from an FBI informant.
  • It is a grave error to dismiss Kramer jihadists and assume they pose no threat.
  • Kramer jihadists can also be deadly if they actually find a real terrorist, rather than a government informant, to assist or equip them. It is very important to remember that amateur, committed jihadists such as shoe bomber Richard Reid and underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab nearly succeeded in destroying an airliner.
  • Twenty years ago last month, I witnessed firsthand the dangers of discounting Kramer jihadists when I peered into a massive crater in the floor of the World Trade Center parking garage. The FBI had deemed those responsible for the attack too hapless to do much more than assassinate the leader of the Jewish Defense League in a midtown Manhattan hotel. And they were -- until a trained terrorist operative traveled to New York and organized their efforts, enabling them to construct, deliver and detonate a massive 590-kilogram (1,300-pound) truck bomb.
  • I also take umbrage at those who snicker at the thought of grassroots jihadists lighting fires. As noted last month, I believe that fire is an underappreciated threat. Many people simply do not realize how deadly a weapon it can be, even though starting fires does not require sophisticated terrorist tradecraft.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      This is intriguing, and something I hadn't thought about. With the limited response resources, a bunch of nasty terrorists *could* affect an area too large for response capability to control. Ugh.
  • Like all propaganda and political rhetoric, its assertions must not be taken at face value. But to claim that the magazine tells us nothing about al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is simply lazy analysis.
  • Clearly, the concept of reaching out and attempting to radicalize and equip English-speaking jihadists was not something promoted only by Anwar al-Awlaki and Khan. English-speaking outreach has continued after their deaths. The group maintains that traveling to places such as Yemen for training is too dangerous.
  • That al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula continues to publish Inspire, which takes time and resources to produce, is also revelatory.
  • The copyediting in Inspire 10 was also cleaner than the previous edition, which had a major typo on the front cover. The new editor, who uses the nom de guerre Yahya Ibrahim, has worked with Khan since the first edition of the magazine.
  • In Inspire 10, for example, Ibrahim attempts to replicate the insulting one-page "advertisements" that Khan included in earlier editions of the magazine -- one in particular racially derided U.S. President Barack Obama -- but they lack the bite and general snark of Khan.
  • Inspire seems to be more serious and less edgy than when Khan was in charge. This may dull its appeal to its targeted audience.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 21 Mar 13
       
      StratFor: Offering design and outreach advice to the editorial crew. Hah!
  • Another thing we can ascertain from Inspire 10 is that, despite al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's continued commitment to foment grassroots terrorism in the West, the group is clearly disappointed by the response it has gotten.
  • The Open Source Jihad section also continues to show the low view that al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's professional terrorist cadre has for grassroots operatives. They see them as not-so-exceptional individuals
  • Inspire 10 can also tell us some important things about what tactics we can expect the group to use and what locations we can expect it to target.
  • Clearly the magazine continues to focus on targets in the West that have insulted the Prophet Mohammed. It revives the "the dust has not settled" theme from the first edition of the magazine and provides an updated hit list of individuals who have insulted Mohammed, including Terry Jones, the controversial Koran-burning pastor; Morris Sadek, who made a controversial film that disparaged Islam; and Stephane Charbonnier of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 22 Mar 13
       
      Terry Jones?! Okay, now it's ON.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 13
     
    "Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released the 10th edition of its English-language magazine, Inspire, on March 1. After discussing its contents with our analytical team, initially I decided not to write about it. I concluded that Inspire 10 conformed closely to the previous nine editions and that our analysis of the magazine, from its inception to its re-emergence after the death of editor Samir Khan, was more than adequate."
anonymous

Boston Bombing Suspects: Grassroots Militants from Chechnya - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-grassroots-militants-chechnya

geopolitics immigration reform

shared by anonymous on 19 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Just after 10 p.m. on April 18, the Tsarnaev brothers were identified after having robbed a convenience store in Cambridge, Mass., just three miles from Boston, hours earlier. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology police officer, who responded to the robbery, was shot and killed and found in his car by fellow responding officers. The two suspects later hijacked an SUV at gunpoint, releasing the driver unharmed. Authorities later caught up to the suspects, and a car chase ensued.
  • Just after midnight, the car chase ended with a gunfight in Watertown, Mass. The suspects reportedly threw explosive devices at police, though it is not yet confirmed what types of explosives allegedly were used. During the firefight, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was wounded, taken into custody and later reported dead. Dzhokar escaped by driving the stolen SUV through the police barricade and remains at large.
  • According to The New York Times, the two men are from Chechnya. Their family also reportedly lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan, before moving to the United States in 2002.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Dzhokhar Tsarnaev's profile on VKontakte, a Russian social media website, said he attended school at the School No. 1 of Makhachkala, spoke English, Russian and Chechen and listed his worldview as Islam. A school administrator from the School No. 1 said the two suspects and their family had previously lived in Kyrgyzstan before moving to Dagestan.
  • Given that they are grassroots actors, there is likely only a small chance that the authorities will discover a formal link between the suspects and a state sponsor or a professional terrorist group, such as al Qaeda or one of its franchise groups.
  • Moreover, given what we have learned about the suspects and the nature of the improvised explosive devices they constructed, it is very likely that the authorities will find that the brothers had read and studied al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire Magazine.
  • This case also highlights our analysis that the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from grassroots operatives who live in the West rrather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks.
  • This demonstrates how the jihadist threat has diminished in recent years -- a trend we expect to continue.
  • There will always be plenty of soft targets in a free society, and it is incredibly easy to kill people, even by untrained operatives. In this case the brothers conducted an attack that was within their capabilities rather than attempting something more grandiose that would require outside assistance - and which could therefore have put them in jeopardy of running into a government informant as they sought help.  It is thus important for citizens to practice good situational awareness and to serve as grassroots defenders against the grassroots threat.
  • anonymous on 19 Apr 13
     
    "The identity of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing -- Chechen brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26 -- confirms several of our suspicions. From this profile, the simple nature of the attack, their efforts to rob a convenience store and their lack of an escape plan, we can conclude that they were what we refer to as grassroots militants. Despite being amateurs, such militants clearly still pose a significant threat."
anonymous

What America Has Lost - 0 views

www.newsweek.com/...overreacted-to-9-11.print.html

news media terrorism

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 10
     
    "Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden's terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda's best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives." By Fareed Zakaria at Newsweek on September 4, 2010.
anonymous

Pakistan and the U.S. Exit From Afghanistan - 1 views

www.stratfor.com/...kistan_and_us_exit_afghanistan

geopolitics gwot

shared by anonymous on 28 Sep 10 - Cached
  • But while the military’s top generals and senior civilian leadership are responsible for providing the president with sound, clearheaded advice on all military matters including the highest levels of grand strategy, they are ultimately responsible for the pursuit of military objectives to which the commander-in-chief directs them.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      Which is why I scratch my head when I read or hear (as I did at a recent family function) "Obama is just leaving because of political reasons." Of course he - I mean *we* are - we got into it for political reasons and we'll leave that way. At its core, war is political. I'm amazed at how ridiculously basic a concept that is, and yet its lacking from many person-to-person narratives.
  • The strategy of the guerrilla is to make the option to withdraw more attractive. In order to do this, his strategic goal is simply to survive and fight on whatever level he can. His patience is built into who he is and what he is fighting for. The occupier’s patience is calculated against the cost of the occupation and its opportunity costs, thus, while troops are committed in this country, what is happening elsewhere?
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      See also: The rise of conventional powers during this decade-long overmagnification on one region.
  • The occupation force will always win engagements, but that is never the measure of victory. If the guerrillas operate by doctrine, defeats in unplanned engagements will not undermine their basic goal of survival.
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • While the occupier is not winning decisively, even while suffering only some casualties, he is losing. While the guerrilla is not losing decisively, even if suffering significant casualties, he is winning.
  • There has long been a myth about the unwillingness of Americans to absorb casualties for very long in guerrilla wars. In reality, the United States fought in Vietnam for at least seven years (depending on when you count the start and stop) and has now fought in Afghanistan for nine years. The idea that Americans can’t endure the long war has no empirical basis.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      This is another one of those fascinating bits of conventional wisdom that's completely wrong. Another is the idea that Afghanistan is the *graveyard of empires*. Both these misconceptions feed our basic need for explanatory stories, but they do so at the expense of realistic observation.
  • Far more relevant than casualties to whether Americans continue a war is the question of the conflict’s strategic importance, for which the president is ultimately responsible.
  • Washington’s primary goal at the initiation of the conflict was to destroy or disrupt al Qaeda in Afghanistan to protect the U.S. homeland from follow-on attacks to 9/11.
  • STRATFOR has long held that Islamist-fueled transnational terrorism does not represent a strategic, existential threat to the United States. While acts of transnational terrorism target civilians, they are not attacks — have not been and are not evolving into attacks — that endanger the territorial integrity of the United States or the way of life of the American people.
  • They are dangerous and must be defended against, but transnational terrorism is and remains a tactical problem that for nearly a decade has been treated as if it were the pre-eminent strategic threat to the United States.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      Initial criticisms of the GWOT is that you can't have a "war" on a method. I believe that criticism still stands. It's certainly an untenable basis for conducing national security.
  • disrupting and degrading it — to say nothing of destroying it — can no longer be achieved by waging a war in Afghanistan.
  • The strategic problem is that simply terminating the war after nine years would destabilize the Islamic world.
  • The political problem is domestic. Obama’s approval rating now stands at 42 percent. This is not unprecedented, but it means he is politically weak. One of the charges against him, fair or not, is that he is inherently anti-war by background and so not fully committed to the war effort.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 28 Sep 10
       
      To which I respond: Presidents are not the same as partisan constituents. They may enter office with one perspective, but the reality of the damnedable profession changes you. Being "anti-war" is a sort of childlike triviality once you've had to manage the unweildy apparatus of the state.
  • The American solution, one that we suspect is already under way, is the Pakistanization of the war. By this, we do not mean extending the war into Pakistan but rather extending Pakistan into Afghanistan.
  • In the past, the United States has endeavored to keep the Taliban in Afghanistan and the regime in Pakistan separate.
  • The Pakistani relationship to the Taliban, which was a liability for the United States in the past, now becomes an advantage for Washington because it creates a trusted channel for meaningful communication with the Taliban.
  • The United States isn’t going to defeat the Taliban. The original goal of the war is irrelevant, and the current goal is rather difficult to take seriously. Even a victory, whatever that would look like, would make little difference in the fight against transnational jihad, but a defeat could harm U.S. interests.
  • Therefore, the United States needs a withdrawal that is not a defeat.
  • Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration.
  • anonymous on 28 Sep 10
     
    "Bob Woodward has released another book, this one on the debate over Afghanistan strategy in the Obama administration. As all his books do, the book has riveted Washington. It reveals that intense debate occurred over what course to take, that the president sought alternative strategies and that compromises were reached. But while knowing the details of these things is interesting, what would have been shocking is if they hadn't taken place." By George Friedman at StratFor on September 28, 2010.
anonymous

9/11 and the 9-Year War - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20100907_911_and_9_year_war

geopolitics stratfor 9_11

shared by anonymous on 08 Sep 10 - Cached
  • It has now been nine years since al Qaeda attacked the United States. It has been nine years in which the primary focus of the United States has been on the Islamic world.
  • Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after.
  • At the root of all of this was a profound lack of understanding of al Qaeda, particularly its capabilities and intentions. Since we did not know what was possible, our only prudent course was to prepare for the worst. That is what the Bush administration did.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Sep 10
       
      This is another example of the American tradition of underestimating your opponents and then suddenly overestimating them once caught off guard.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Al Qaeda learned from Soviet, Saudi, Pakistani and American intelligence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and knew how to launch attacks without tipping off the target. The greatest failure of American intelligence was not the lack of a clear warning about 9/11 but the lack, on Sept. 12, of a clear picture of al Qaeda’s global structure, capabilities, weaknesses and intentions.
  • American policy became ready, fire, aim.
  • In looking back at the past nine years, two conclusions can be drawn: There were no more large-scale attacks on the United States by militant Islamists, and the United States was left with the legacy of responses that took place in the first two years after 9/11.
  • Even in hindsight, aligning U.S. actions with the apparent outcome is difficult and controversial. But still we know two things: It has been nine years since Sept. 11, 2001, and the war goes on.
  • an act of terrorism was allowed to redefine U.S. grand strategy.
  • the United States proceeded with a strategy whose goal, like that of the United Kingdom, was to nip potential regional hegemons in the bud. The U.S. war with Iraq in 1990-91 and the war with Serbia/Yugoslavia in 1999 were examples of this strategy.
  • The most significant effect of 9/11 was that it knocked the United States off its strategy. Rather than adapting its standing global strategy to better address the counterterrorism issue, the United States became obsessed with a single region, the area between the Mediterranean and the Hindu Kush.
  • as a long-term U.S. strategy — the long war that the U.S. Department of Defense is preparing for — it leaves the rest of the world uncovered.
  • The single most important result of 9/11 was that it shifted the United States from a global stance to a regional one, allowing other powers to take advantage of this focus to create significant potential challenges to the United States.
  • The fact that Afghanistan was the base from which the attacks were launched does not mean that al Qaeda depends on Afghanistan to launch attacks.
  • But let me state a more radical thesis: The threat of terrorism cannot become the singular focus of the United States. Let me push it further: The United States cannot subordinate its grand strategy to simply fighting terrorism even if there will be occasional terrorist attacks on the United States. Three thousand people died in the 9/11 attack. That is a tragedy, but in a nation of over 300 million, 3,000 deaths cannot be permitted to define the totality of national strategy.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 08 Sep 10
       
      Play the numbers again and you find that far more Americans died that year of far more mundane reasons. But this is never considered as one factor among many when tempers are flaring.
  • The issue there is not whether the United States can or can’t win, however that is defined. The issue is whether it is worth the effort considering what is going on in the rest of the world.
  • anonymous on 08 Sep 10
     
    "In order to understand the last nine years you must understand the first 24 hours of the war - and recall your own feelings in those 24 hours. First, the attack was a shock, its audaciousness frightening. Second, we did not know what was coming next. The attack had destroyed the right to complacent assumptions. Were there other cells standing by in the United States? Did they have capabilities even more substantial than what they showed on Sept. 11? Could they be detected and stopped? Any American not frightened on Sept. 12 was not in touch with reality. Many who are now claiming that the United States overreacted are forgetting their own sense of panic. We are all calm and collected nine years after." By George Friedman at StratFor on September 8, 2010.
anonymous

France in Turmoil | STRATFOR - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...20101021_france_turmoil

geopolitics france europe

shared by anonymous on 22 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • The two groups have different economic and social interests, but they are coming together in their angst toward the government and in their anger toward President Nicolas Sarkozy. This presents a dangerous situation for Paris, as it has the potential to spark wider societal unrest unless the government moves to satisfy one of the groups.
  • The origins of the French welfare state go back to the 60-year period of nearly constant turmoil following the 1789 French Revolution. The revolution was followed by the 1793-94 Reign of Terror; the White Terror of 1794; Napoleon Bonaparte’s rule from 1804 to 1814, which included an almost uninterrupted period of pan-European warfare; another White Terror in 1815; and two more revolutions, in 1830 and 1848. The 1848 Revolution took on a particularly socialist tinge, as a nascent working class that was growing amid the country’s industrialization united with the peasantry in protest of their conditions.
  • Under Napoleon III, social order was largely restored for the next 20 years — to be disrupted by the war against Prussia in 1870 — but more importantly, the French social welfare state became a crucial part of the government’s social contract with its citizens. In order to pacify and unite its restive population, the state vowed that it would take care of its citizens from cradle to grave.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The French, in other words, are neither lazy nor illogical. The protesters see the reforms as a threshold that, if crossed by the government, could undermine the foundation of the last 150 years of French society. Thus, while only 7-8 percent of the working population belongs to a labor union — the lowest percentage in the EU and even lower than that in the United States — nearly 70 percent of the population supports the ongoing strikes and believes they should continue if the proposed reforms pass, which they likely will by Oct. 23.
  • The context of the 2010 unrest is therefore not very different from 1995. The French budget deficit is forecast to hit 8.2 percent of GDP, and Paris is being forced by Germany to rein in spending to conform to the EU’s fiscal rules. Germany is making EU-wide fiscal discipline an essential condition of its continued support for EU institutions, a message that was elucidated during the Greek sovereign debt crisis but understood to apply to everyone.
  • In addition to protests from the French middle classes and workers demanding a continuation of the established social contract, there are protests from French citizens who feel they were never offered that social contract in the first place.
  • The protests of the last couple of days in France have seen both groups pour out onto the streets. The rioting and violence are still not in any way at a level that could be construed as threatening to the government; both the 2005 and 2007 riots were more intense. However, the protesters are using more strategic tactics, targeting the country’s energy infrastructure, and hence are less reliant on drawing out the masses to the streets.
  • The youth need a flexible labor market and thus would need substantial portions of the French welfare state to be eroded if their employment situation were to be remedied. Therefore, Paris will have a hard time satisfying both groups.
  • Ultimately, the commitments Paris has made to its people over the last 150 years are incompatible with the commitments it has made to Berlin in the last 20 years.
  • However, the French state has a very clear history of conceding to its population’s demands. At the very least, it is inevitable that Paris will have to give in to one of the groups, either by admitting that the social contract cannot be changed or by offering it in an amended form to the disaffected youth and citizens of immigrant descent.
  • It is likely that it will give in to the more established group — the workers and middle classes — since they have shown with their tactics that they have the ability to seriously threaten the French state’s efforts to function by targeting its energy infrastructure. Simply moving forward with a policy that three-quarters of the population rejects is unsustainable. At the point when Paris gives in to one side, however, France may cease to be at conflict with itself and instead come into conflict with Germany.
  • anonymous on 22 Oct 10
     
    "Unrest in France sparked by protests against the government continued Oct. 21. The turmoil is ostensibly over proposed government pension reforms, but it is about much more than that. The protests themselves are a confrontation between the government and unionized labor - older generations that want to protect benefits hard won in the 19th century and enhanced in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, another group of French citizens - disaffected youths, many of immigrant Arab and African descent - are protesting not for employment benefits, but for employment itself." By StratFor on October 22, 2010.
anonymous

The new president of the Cato Institute wants the think tank to adopt the personal phil... - 0 views

www.slate.com/...yn_rand_as_policy_.single.html

shared by anonymous on 13 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Zey, the other live tweeter, wrote that Allison would “oust out elements in Cato that disrespect Rand and JA's philosophy.” Pearson continued: Allison “expects challenges in the area of reforming foreign policy there but seems to look forward to the challenge.”
  • anonymous on 13 Sep 12
     
    "Objectivists don't see foreign policy that way. The Ayn Rand Institute, founded in 1985 by Rand's intellectual/financial heir Leonard Peikoff, has spun off arguments for war rooted in a philosophy of self-preservation. Shortly after 9/11, the man who'd inherited a movement and $750,000 from Rand published "End States Who Sponsor Terrorism," whose title summed it up. "The choice today is mass death in the United States or mass death in the terrorist nations," wrote Peikoff. "The greatest obstacle to U.S. victory is not Iran and its allies, but our own intellectuals.""
anonymous

Terrorism and the Not-So-Exceptional Individual - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...-not-so-exceptional-individual

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 12
     
    "It is easy to dismiss novice militants as inept, but we should keep in mind that if some of these individuals found an actual terrorist facilitator rather than a federal informant, they probably would have killed many people in an attack. Richard Reid, often referred to as the "Kramer of al Qaeda" after the bumbling character from the television series Seinfeld, came very close to taking down a jumbo jet full of people over the Atlantic Ocean because he had been equipped and dispatched by those more capable than himself. Working under the leadership of exceptional individuals, even al-Hamzi and al-Midhar ("Dumb and Dumber") helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which was crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11."
  • Erik Hanson on 21 Jun 12
     
    I don't think that answers the question of coercion and entrapment, though. Certainly a federal official was able to convince a few bumblers to commit to fake terrorist plots, but there can be no certainty that those "caught" in this fashion would have otherwise committed a real terrorist act.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 12
     
    The article focuses on actual Al Qaeda supported terrorists, but when I started reading I was put in mind of what you're referring to. Which is quite real and very annoying The FBI and DHS appear to handhold lone-wolf bumblers, entrap them, and then point and say "see, we're catching terrorists!" which is, of course, bullshit. Those people couldn't catch a cold. The DEA is noted for doing the same thing and tricking people that are either small time or aren't even drug abusers into becoming easy prey for the institutional-justification-machine.
anonymous

Why So Much Anarchy? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...why-so-much-anarchy

shared by anonymous on 06 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Civil society in significant swaths of the earth is still the province of a relatively elite few in capital cities -- the very people Western journalists feel most comfortable befriending and interviewing, so that the size and influence of such a class is exaggerated by the media.
  • The End of Imperialism. That's right. Imperialism provided much of Africa, Asia and Latin America with security and administrative order. The Europeans divided the planet into a gridwork of entities -- both artificial and not -- and governed. It may not have been fair, and it may not have been altogether civil, but it provided order. Imperialism, the mainstay of stability for human populations for thousands of years, is now gone.
  • The End of Post-Colonial Strongmen. Colonialism did not end completely with the departure of European colonialists. It continued for decades in the guise of strong dictators, who had inherited state systems from the colonialists. Because these strongmen often saw themselves as anti-Western freedom fighters, they believed that they now had the moral justification to govern as they pleased.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • No Institutions. Here we come to the key element. The post-colonial Arab dictators ran moukhabarat states: states whose order depended on the secret police and the other, related security services. But beyond that, institutional and bureaucratic development was weak and unresponsive to the needs of the population -- a population that, because it was increasingly urbanized, required social services and complex infrastructure.
  • with insufficient institutional development, the chances for either dictatorship or anarchy proliferate. Civil society occupies the middle ground between those extremes, but it cannot prosper without the requisite institutions and bureaucracies.
  • Feeble Identities. With feeble institutions, such post-colonial states have feeble identities. If the state only means oppression, then its population consists of subjects, not citizens. Subjects of despotisms know only fear, not loyalty. If the state has only fear to offer, then, if the pillars of the dictatorship crumble
  • Doctrinal Battles. Religion occupies a place in daily life in the Islamic world that the West has not known since the days -- a millennium ago -- when the West was called "Christendom." Thus, non-state identity in the 21st-century Middle East generally means religious identity.
  • As the Roman Empire collapsed and Christianity rose as a replacement identity, the upshot was not tranquility but violent, doctrinal disputes between Donatists, Monotheletes and other Christian sects and heresies. So, too, in the Muslim world today, as state identities weaken and sectarian and other differences within Islam come to the fore, often violently.
  • Information Technology. Various forms of electronic communication, often transmitted by smartphones, can empower the crowd against a hated regime, as protesters who do not know each other personally can find each other through Facebook, Twitter, and other social media.
  • while such technology can help topple governments, it cannot provide a coherent and organized replacement pole of bureaucratic power to maintain political stability afterwards. This is how technology encourages anarchy.
  • The Industrial Age was about bigness: big tanks, aircraft carriers, railway networks and so forth, which magnified the power of big centralized states. But the post-industrial age is about smallness, which can empower small and oppressed groups, allowing them to challenge the state -- with anarchy sometimes the result.
  • Because we are talking here about long-term processes rather than specific events, anarchy in one form or another will be with us for some time, until new political formations arise that provide for the requisite order. And these new political formations need not be necessarily democratic.
  • When the Soviet Union collapsed, societies in Central and Eastern Europe that had sizable middle classes and reasonable bureaucratic traditions prior to World War II were able to transform themselves into relatively stable democracies
  • But the Middle East and much of Africa lack such bourgeoisie traditions, and so the fall of strongmen has left a void.
  • The real question marks are Russia and China.
  • The possible weakening of authoritarian rule in those sprawling states may usher in less democracy than chronic instability and ethnic separatism that would dwarf in scale the current instability in the Middle East. Indeed, what follows Vladimir Putin could be worse, not better. The same holds true for a weakening of autocracy in China.
  • anonymous on 06 Feb 14
     
    "Twenty years ago, in February 1994, I published a lengthy cover story in The Atlantic Monthly, "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet." I argued that the combination of resource depletion (like water), demographic youth bulges and the proliferation of shanty towns throughout the developing world would enflame ethnic and sectarian divides, creating the conditions for domestic political breakdown and the transformation of war into increasingly irregular forms -- making it often indistinguishable from terrorism. I wrote about the erosion of national borders and the rise of the environment as the principal security issues of the 21st century. I accurately predicted the collapse of certain African states in the late 1990s and the rise of political Islam in Turkey and other places. Islam, I wrote, was a religion ideally suited for the badly urbanized poor who were willing to fight. I also got things wrong, such as the probable intensification of racial divisions in the United States; in fact, such divisions have been impressively ameliorated."
anonymous

Obama v. Reagan: Fun Comparison I Did To Piss Off Wingnuts on Reagan's B-day - 1 views

m.dailykos.com/...ff-a-wingnut-on-Reagan-s-B-day

shared by anonymous on 09 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • OBAMA:   Our troops were repeatedly attacked in Afghanistan, yet when Obama came into office, he increased troop strength by 68,000.  (Along with an actual plan, unlike his predecessor.)  His track record of killing terrorists far outweighs his predecessors.
  • REAGAN:   Reagan retreated from Lebanon immediately after the 1983 terror attack by Hezbollah that resulted in the murder of 243 Marines.  According to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 68), Reagan's cut and run INSPIRED Bin Laden, who viewed the United States as a “paper tiger” because of its rapid withdrawal after the attack.
  • I believe in the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here even though sometime back they may have entered illegally. -Ronald Reagan 10/28/1984
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • No matter how  decent they are, no matter their reasons, the 11 million who broke these law should be held accountable. -Barack Obama  July 2010
  • Obama has consistently CUT taxes, not raised them.   REAGAN:   He got through a big tax cut once he took office. But to hear conservatives talk, that's where the story ends. They forget he raised income taxes in 1982, 1984, 1985, 1986 and 1987.
  • Actually, he raised taxes 11 times to include four MASSIVE tax increases!  
  • REAGAN:   Whether you are looking at the economic policies of Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, reigning in the deficit was clearly of no concern. Reagan tripled the Gross Federal Debt, from $900 billion to $2.7 trillion. Ford and Carter in their combined terms could only double it. It took 31 years to accomplish the first postwar debt tripling, yet Reagan did it in eight. Reagan soared the spending, Clinton brought in back down a bit, and W. took it way back up.  To be fair to the Gipper, NO ONE did deficit like W.  He spent the Clinton surplus like  a drunken sailor.  And by the way, Obama's spending initiatives were  less than half of his predecessor.  
  • OBAMA:   Even though Obama inherited a huge debt from W., and focused on a stimulus that benefited the people instead of Bush's stimulus for Wall Street, he still has a much better record on spending than the Gipper and much better than W.  Obama did not triple the gross federal debt like Reagan did.  Obama is following the Clinton model of spending up front and then focusing on deficit reduction.  I predict at the end of Obama's term in 2016, the deficit will be cut drastically--but it can't be anywhere close to what Reagan or Bush had at the end of their two terms.  Why?  Because the GOP loves to throw money at their base...tax cuts for Big Oil and the wealthiest amongst us which add hundreds of billions to the debt but create nothing.  That ain't happening--you are welcome teabaggers.
  • REAGAN: COMPLETELY supported the Brady Bill, the holy grail of gun control.  Reagan even wrote an op-ed piece for it in the evil NY Times.
  • OBAMA: The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence flunked Obama on every single gun control issue.  Proposed nothing for federal gun control laws when he had a super majority Dem Congress.  When he had that Dem majority, in fact, federal gun rights EXPANDED by allowing guns on trains and in our national parks.  Yet the NRA still told their idiot members that Obama was coming to take their guns.... and gun sales skyrocketed.
  • REAGAN:   Reagan APPEASED terrorists.   Here he is with the Taliban:
  • anonymous on 09 Feb 14
     
    "Imagine a world that never knew Ronald Reagan:   No Scalia, No Rumsfeld, No Cheney.  No Bushes and all of their appointments and disasters.  No funding of dictators like Saddam Hussein (Reagan propped him up big time) or psychopaths like Osama Bin Laden (that worked out well)." This is one hell of a rant.
anonymous

Think Again: Ronald Reagan - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...think_again_ronald_reagan

criticalthinking politics

shared by anonymous on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • The Gipper wasn't the warhound his conservative followers would have you think.
  • These days, virtually every time someone on the American right bashes President Barack Obama for kowtowing to dictators or failing to shout that we're at war, they light a votive candle to Ronald Reagan.
  • He launched exactly one land war, against Grenada, whose army totaled 600 men. It lasted two days. And his only air war -- the 1986 bombing of Libya -- was even briefer.
  • ...25 more annotations...
  • at an early meeting, when Secretary of State Alexander Haig suggested that achieving this goal might require bombing Cuba, the suggestion "scared the shit out of Ronald Reagan," according to White House aide Michael Deaver. Haig was marginalized, then resigned, and Reagan never seriously considered sending U.S. troops south of the border, despite demands from conservative intellectuals like Norman Podhoretz and William F. Buckley.
  • Reagan's political genius lay in recognizing that what Americans wanted was a president who exorcised the ghost of the Vietnam War without fighting another Vietnam. Although Americans enjoyed Reagan's thunderous denunciations of Central American communism, 75 percent of them, according to a 1985 Louis Harris survey, opposed invading Nicaragua.
  • So Reagan created Potemkin Vietnams. His biographer Lou Cannon calls him "shameless" in using Grenada to revive America's Vietnam-wounded pride. The war resulted in more medals per soldier than any military operation in U.S. history. When he bombed Libya in 1986, Reagan goosed American nationalism again, declaring, "Every nickel-and-dime dictator the world over knows that if he tangles with the United States of America, he will pay a price."
  • Reagan's role in winning the Cold War lies at the core of the American right's mythology.
  • The legend goes like this: Reagan came into office, dramatically hiked defense spending, unveiled the Strategic Defense Initiative (his "Star Wars" missile shield), and aided anti-communist rebels in the Third World. Unable to keep pace, the Kremlin chose Gorbachev, who threw in the towel.
  • Reagan began abandoning his hard-line anti-Soviet stance in late 1983, 18 months before Gorbachev took power.
  • Reagan, who had long harbored a genuine terror of nuclear war reflected in his decades-old belief -- often ignored by backers on the right -- that nuclear weapons should eventually be abolished.
  • In 1983, two movies triggered Reagan's latent anti-nuclear views: Matthew Broderick's WarGames, which portrays a young computer hacker who almost starts a nuclear war, and ABC's The Day After, which depicts Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of one.
  • According to Colin Powell, national security advisor from 1987 to 1989, Reagan had been deeply affected by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still
  • This combination of electoral and psychological anxiety led Reagan, late in his first term, to begin a dramatic rhetorical shift. Declaring that "nuclear arsenals are far too high," in January 1984 he told the country that "my dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the Earth."
  • When they did meet in Geneva, in November, Reagan whispered to Gorbachev, "I bet the hard-liners in both our countries are bleeding when we shake hands."
  • An initial meeting scheduled for 15 minutes lasted five hours.
  • By 1988, though the Soviet Union had not yet released Eastern Europe from its grip, Reagan was explicitly denying that the Soviet Union still constituted an "evil empire" and had begun calling Gorbachev "my friend."
  • Commentary's Norman Podhoretz declared that neoconservatives were "sinking into a state of near political despair."
  • By 1984, after Reagan withdrew troops from their peacekeeping mission in Lebanon, Podhoretz moaned that "in the use of military power, Mr. Reagan was much more restrained" than his right-wing supporters had hoped.
  • In 1986, when Reagan would not cancel his second summit with Gorbachev over Moscow's imprisonment of an American journalist, Podhoretz accused him of having "shamed himself and the country" in his "craven eagerness" to give away the nuclear store.
  • Will wrote that he "is painfully fond of the least conservative sentiment conceivable, a statement taken from an anti-conservative, Thomas Paine: 'We have it in our power to begin the world over again.' Any time, any place, that is nonsense."
  • the irony is that in Reagan's own "war on terror," his policies more closely resembled Obama's than Bush's.
  • Almost five years later, in his final moments as president, he told press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that "the only regret I have after eight years is sending those troops to Lebanon." Then he saluted and walked out of the Oval Office for the last time.
  • Of course, the 9/11 attacks gave Bush a massive jolt of popularity and sent Congress diving for cover, all of which made the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq much easier.
  • For many contemporary conservatives, being a Reagan disciple means acting as if there are no limits to American strength. But the real lessons of Reaganism are about how to wield national power and bolster national pride when your hands are partially tied.
  • That means understanding that America's foreign-policy debates are often cultural debates in disguise.
  • If Obama does not want to be Jimmy Carter, if he does not want Americans to equate his restraint with their humiliation, he must be as aggressive as Reagan in finding symbolic ways to soothe Americans' wounded pride.
  • Obama needs to remind Americans that their most successful Cold War presidents -- Reagan included -- saw the conflict as a primarily economic struggle.
  • In the nascent economic and ideological struggle between the United States and China, wars that Washington cannot possibly pay for -- and which leave the country more reliant on foreign central bankers -- don't make America stronger; they make it weaker.
  • anonymous on 07 Jun 10
     
    By Peter Beinart at Foreign Policy on June 7, 2010. I have always been fascinated by the difference between perception and reality when it comes to Reagan.
anonymous

By the Numbers - 0 views

www.slate.com/2260461

criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 15 Jul 10 - Cached
  • "The creation, selection, promotion, and proliferation of numbers are … the stuff of politics," the editors write in their introduction. No debate lasts very long without a reference to data, and as the numbers boil their way into the argument, you must challenge them or be burned blind by them. The essays presented in Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts—about human trafficking, the Bosnian death count, the Darfur genocide, armed conflict, drugs, terrorism, and more—counsel exactly that sort of skepticism.
  • Often, the editors write, even the most rigorous-seeming statistics conceal squishy measurements. Inflated numbers are designed to create the sense that something must be done now. Depressed counts are intended to convince the recipients that the problem is too small to worry about. Whether it's body counts in Iraq or kilos of Colombian drugs, the creators and disseminators of the numbers usually have greater interest in their size than their veracity.
  • the drug bureaucracy spends extra billions to produce bigger numbers because the public associates "more" with "better."
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Sex, Drugs, and Body Counts performs similar forensics on the assertion, oft-repeated in government reports, that al-Qaida allots 10 percent of its budget to operational costs and 90 percent to administration and infrastructure. When you trace the claim to its origin—a report on terrorism—you find no footnote or sourcing at all. The author apparently concocted it from thin air.
  • The best advice in the book comes in the editors' concluding essay, which calls on everybody in the numbers racket—NGOs, government, academics, journalists—to confess humbly and honestly that they "don't know" rather than flinging dubious numbers.
  • anonymous on 15 Jul 10
     
    "A terrific new book of essays encourages us all to be skeptical about statistics." By Jack Shafer at Slate Magazine.
anonymous

America May Have Overreacted to September 11 … but Americans Didn't - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...nt-overreact-to-september-11th

geopolitics reflections

shared by anonymous on 11 Sep 10 - Cached
  • Predictably, but unwisely, Democrats and Republicans demanded ludicrous amounts of funding for security and intelligence institutions whose functions they barely understood, and to counter a threat that had no resemblance to any the United States had confronted before.
  • Predictably, but unwisely, Democrats and Republicans demanded ludicrous amounts of funding for security and intelligence institutions whose functions they barely understood, and to counter a threat that had no resemblance to any the United States had confronted before.
  • Predictably, but unwisely, Democrats and Republicans demanded ludicrous amounts of funding for security and intelligence institutions whose functions they barely understood, and to counter a threat that had no resemblance to any the United States had confronted before.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Whatever the subject, “smaller-is-better” arguments seldom win the day in Washington.
  • Now for the good news: I just peeked outside and we are emphatically not becoming a police state.
  • The conclusion: Contrary to received wisdom, Americans have been, if anything, more tentative and cautious in their approach to the jihadist threat than many of our European allies, who routinely use surveillance, administrative detention, and prosecutorial methods much more intrusive than those employed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, our primary counterterrorist organization on the home front.
  • anonymous on 11 Sep 10
     
    Did America overreact to September 11? In a recent column in Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria answered that with an emphatic and mournful "yes." In Mr. Zakaria's telling, we've squandered billions of dollars heedlessly feeding our national security bureaucracies, which hardly provide us, as the French nicely put it, a very good rapport qualité-prix. Worse, we've created an intrusive, abrasive, civil-rights-mauling security and intelligence apparatus that "now touches every aspect of American-life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism." By Reuel Marc Gerecht at The New Republic on September 11, 2010.
anonymous

The 'Israelification' of airports: High security, little bother - 0 views

www.thestar.com/...on-high-security-little-bother

security

shared by anonymous on 16 Nov 10 - Cached
  • First, the screening area is surrounded by contoured, blast-proof glass that can contain the detonation of up to 100 kilos of plastic explosive. Only the few dozen people within the screening area need be removed, and only to a point a few metres away. Second, all the screening areas contain 'bomb boxes'. If a screener spots a suspect bag, he/she is trained to pick it up and place it in the box, which is blast proof. A bomb squad arrives shortly and wheels the box away for further investigation.
  • That's the process — six layers, four hard, two soft. The goal at Ben-Gurion is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes.
  • In Israel, Sela said, a coordinated intelligence gathering operation produces a constantly evolving series of threat analyses and vulnerability studies. "There is absolutely no intelligence and threat analysis done in Canada or the United States," Sela said. "Absolutely none."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "We have a saying in Hebrew that it's much easier to look for a lost key under the light, than to look for the key where you actually lost it, because it's dark over there. That's exactly how (North American airport security officials) act," Sela said. "You can easily do what we do. You don't have to replace anything. You have to add just a little bit — technology, training. But you have to completely change the way you go about doing airport security. And that is something that the bureaucrats have a problem with. They are very well enclosed in their own concept."
  • anonymous on 16 Nov 10
     
    "While North America's airports groan under the weight of another sea-change in security protocols, one word keeps popping out of the mouths of experts: Israelification. That is, how can we make our airports more like Israel's, which deal with far greater terror threat with far less inconvenience. "It is mindboggling for us Israelis to look at what happens in North America, because we went through this 50 years ago," said Rafi Sela, the president of AR Challenges, a global transportation security consultancy. He's worked with the RCMP, the U.S. Navy Seals and airports around the world." By Cathal Kelly at thestar.com on December 30, 2009.
anonymous

Airport Attack Highlights Russia's Deeply Embedded Issues - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...russias-deeply-embedded-issues

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 25 Jan 11 - Cached
  • Moscow faces a deeper-rooted problem than what must currently be done about Chechnya or Dagestan — and that problem is Russia’s inherent indefensibility and insecurity.
  • Russia, though vast in size, has few geographic barriers separating and protecting it from surrounding nations. Lacking well-placed oceans or mountains, Russia has throughout history had to essentially create these barriers in the form of buffer states by dominating various nations, whether it be Estonia or Tajikistan or somewhere in between.
  • The mountainous terrain has bred ethnic groups like Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis that have a warrior-like and clan-based mentality and are especially opposed to taking orders from Moscow.
  • anonymous on 25 Jan 11
     
    "Moscow witnessed another act of terrorism on Monday as a suicide bomber detonated an explosive device and killed dozens of people at Domodedovo International, Russia's busiest airport. All signs point to the attacker hailing from one of the republics of the restless Northern Caucasus, likely either Chechnya or Dagestan, where Islamist militant-fueled violence and instability are regular occurrences. Monday's attack marks the second time in less than one year that such militants have struck beyond their unstable republics and into Russia's bustling capital, more than 1,000 miles away."
anonymous

Norway: Lessons from a Successful Lone Wolf Attacker - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...-successful-lone-wolf-attacker

geopolitics norway terrorism

shared by anonymous on 30 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • While Breivik did not express any anti-Semitism in his manifesto (something he has been heavily criticized for on U.S. anti-Semitic websites), clearly the anti-immigration and anti-Marxist ideology of the PCCTS has been influenced more by white hate groups than by al Qaeda.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Jul 11
       
      Meanwhile, the U.S. media bends over backwards to portray this as "inspired" by Al Quaeda.
    • Erik Hanson
      Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
       
      Sorry for just getting to this, but anyone who doesn't see Oklahoma City in this is blind.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 17 Aug 11
       
      No need to apologize. This notion of terrorism as something *other* people do is really faulty.
  • anonymous on 30 Jul 11
     
    On the afternoon of July 22, a powerful explosion ripped through the streets of Oslo, Norway, as a large improvised explosive device (IED) in a rented van detonated between the government building housing the prime minister's office and Norway's Oil and Energy Department building.
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