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  • From: B <beeline AT mindspring.com>
  • To: InterNetWorkers <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Re: collapse
  • Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2001 20:42:21 -0400


I am in favor of removing the ability that these people and any like
them have to come to my home turf and commit acts of war.

As with anything, this type of atrocity requires motivation and means.
There's not much we can do about the motivation, as we do *not*
understand these people, their culture, their belief system, or their
situation. Some of us may sympathize with one or two of their
motivations, may understand intellectually one or two of their gripes
against our country, but very few of us can understand any of them
fully. That leaves only the means as a solid handle.

Bin Ladin provides the vast majority of the funding that does things
like send a dozen or more fanatics to live in the US and take flight
courses at flight schools so that they can fly our own airplanes into
our own buildings. Stop (or beggar) this guy and you save lives. This
one thing would help greatly, although I agree that it would not stop
the fanatics.

Along with cash, the "means" column primarily consists of
infrastructure. Take out their warehouses, their practice parks, their
manufacturing centers, and you've given them some major obstacles to
fomenting terror. Make sure that raw materials stay out of their hands.
(This is what we've been trying to do with Hussan, and apparently have
been successful for a number of years, in spite of international
bickering about the effectiveness of the method. There have been no
biologicals ... yet.) Clamp down on these terrorists, know who and where
they are, know who they see and talk to, watch and listen to them --
secrecy and surprise are their strongest allies.

If we are not aggressive and instead choose to go into duck-and-cover
mode, we will find that we have to radically change -our- culture, -our-
belief systems, and -our- situations. We're all already prepared to
stand in long lines and leave our pocket knives at home and be subject
to intense official examination (and eat mush with sporks) in an attempt
to make our skies safer. Train and bus travel will be affected in a
similar way. We'll put up with this in the hope that it will make it
impossible for those very few to abuse our public transportation again.

Will we also be willing to give up what little privacy we still have?
Carnivore is today chewing on many more bits and bytes flowing through
our Internet infrastructure than it was last week (see
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46747,00.html fo' mo' 'fo).
Are you now ready for Uncle Sam's basement-bound bureaucrats to read
your e-mail at will?

This incident is also a kick-butt vita-pac for those who would hang
cameras in all public places and hook them up to face recognition
software and run your face through face databases as you go shoe
shopping and eat lunch on a park bench. Are you resigned to having
faceless Mr. Officer know exactly when and where you are at all times?
(Actually, this would be OK with me if all of the cameras fed directly
to the internet and all of the views were available to anyone with a
connection. We could watch the watchers that way.)

These steps are real; we have the tech, we now have a motive to use it.
Will we decide, as a nation, to give up the freedoms that we usually
take for granted in order to be **safe**??? Or will we, as a nation,
decide to make attacks on our soil so unprofitable for the attackers and
their friends that no one will ever -ever- again consider it?

I tend toward peace; I grew up with Viet Nam as my nightly reality TV
show and I do not *like* murder and mayhem. I believe in the power of
law, leavened by humanitarian mercy where appropriate. However, I also
believe that *my* people, *my* culture, *my* belief system are the best
in this imperfect world, and I will protect them as well as I can, even
to the point of supporting the use of weapons of mass destruction. (It
should be noted that my culture and belief system acknowledges you and
your cultures and belief systems; indeed, my system requires me to
respect your right to your own beliefs.)

The Dali Lama is a fine person, a wonderful spiritual leader, a glorious
voice for peace in today's world; indeed, a voice I could follow -- in a
perfect world. However, if others in the past had not stood up to and
overcome the tendency of some people greedy for ever more power, the
Dali Lama would not have a home or a base of operations -- in fact, he
probably would not have life itself.

I am sad that the rest of the world is not on the same plane that we
are, as far as creature comforts and personal sanctity and
socio-economic opportunity goes, but this does not mean that I support
any outside influence that forces me to live otherwise.... Our country
is doing what it can to uplift those who want to join our prosperity, at
times to the detriment of many of our own citizens, yet we respect the
sovereignty of peaceful nations who do not feel or behave the same way.
Most of us feel that our way is best, and we believe that, given time
and opportunity, the rest of the world will come to agree with us.

Our emphasis on individual rights and freedoms is a mystery to much of
the rest of the world, a mystery indeed even to some of our own people
who would trade certain freedoms for safety or peace. We have to decide
whether we're going to hide under our desks and give away the
humanitarian advances that our founding fathers dreamed of and that
subsequent generations fought and died for -- and won -- or if we're
going to prove to those doubters that, even in the face of great
adversity, our culture, our special belief in ourselves gives us the
strength and power to overcome those who would destroy us.

If our government does indeed decide to attack the apparent perps, I
feel sure that it will do everything in its power to shield the
innocent. We're like that. However, if bombing the bastards back beyond
the stone age just before building a 1,000-foot wall without gates
around the entire country is what it takes to stop this crap, I'm for
it.

Come now. We're talking about a possible toll of 50,000-plus dead and
injured innocent victims, the vast majority of whom were just regular
working stiffs -- moms, dads, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins,
sons, daughters... a staggering number of them will never again see
their loved ones, never again get to complain about the humid summer
heat or make a snowball or smell a rose or scream at a horror flick or
wonder at a comet or dream of a vacation on the moon....



David Minton wrote:
>
> I think the idea is to make any country afraid to allow terrorists to work
> out of bases within their borders. Most countries would not allow terrorists
> to operate from their soil. The civilized world needs to make those that do
> now too afraid to allow the terrorists. The goal would be to get every
> county to use their own internal police and security forces to kick-out
> terrorists for fear of the wraith of the civilized world.
>
> David
>
> On 9/13/01 4:31 PM, "Michael Hayes" <mhayes AT mphiles.com> wrote:
>
> >> Well, it worked with the embassy bombing suspects. One of the main
> >> defendants was captured in Pakistan and extracted to the U.S. Now he's
> >> in prison for life.
> >
> > I'm not disagreeing here, but didn't that leave the rest of them to try
> > harder the next time? However, it's also foolish to think that by bombing
> > the hell out of them would have prevented it for the same reason the death
> > penalty fails as a deterrent. It's ugly...prevention through
> > intelligence/security, etc. was our last chance to avoid violence in this
> > case.
> >
> > Mike
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Thomas Beckett" <thomas AT tbeckett.com>
> > To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
> > Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2001 4:22 PM
> > Subject: [internetworkers] Re: collapse
> >
> >
> >> Medical Illustration wrote:
> >>> However, what exactly does anyone see as a good, non violent reaction to
> >>> this? Someone earlier mentioned capturing & imprisoning the responsible
> >>> parties, but I don't see that as a possibility without extreme violence
> >>> coming to both sides... So what exactly would a non violent solution
> > look
> >>> like in this case?
> >>
> >> Well, it worked with the embassy bombing suspects. One of the main
> >> defendants was captured in Pakistan and extracted to the U.S. Now he's
> >> in prison for life.
> >>
> >> TaB
> >>
> >> ---
> >> Come and play at the InterNetWorkers Web site!
> > http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/
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> >
> >
> > ---
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>
> ---
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