The latest terrorist threat suggests British residents have travelled to Pakistan to be trained and then return to instigate, at some time in the future an attack similar to the one in Mumbai.
If this is the case, and as we are fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan, supposedly to stop terrorist attacks on the British mainland, why doesn't the Government get tough.They constantly use the excuse that we are at war to prevent attrocities here. Then they should put their money where their mouths are and justify the case.
Stop all Pakistan passport holders from entering the UK until the threat is downgraded sufficiently. These people leave on their own accord, but following whatever indoctrination or possible terrorist lead training they then find themselves unable to get back in so easily. That way we protect our citizens and keep the potential trouble makers off our streets.
I know this would hit the law abiding few from visiting Pakistan to see relatives or holiday, but the benefit and protection to all British residents from whatever background or faith is paramount.
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Take it several stages further (+ vat). Not going to expand here as you all already know. Except those of a nervous disposition.
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agree in principle but in practical terms if billions of pounds of drugs and thousands of illegal immigrants can be smuggled into our country every here how are you going to stop the terrorists coming in?
I would withdraw all the armed forces from these countries and bring them here to fight our crime and try and tidy up some of the issues in our cities
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I get the impression the government's argument is it's better to fight them in Afghanistan than here.
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You can easily crush the terrorist threat in the UK. Both home grown and imported.
The cost to my, and your freedom and rights however, is a price too high.
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You're right BG. You cannot stop illegals coming in. But the report centred on legitimate persons who have been known to leave here to train in Pakistan. It would be a start.
Last edited by: Cpt. Flack on Fri 1 Oct 10 at 23:39
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Why do we all need to be so scared.
Grow a pair :-)
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So just let them walk over you. Apathy wouldn't have worked with my grandparents generation. It appears the norm today.
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>> So just let them walk over you.
Have we done anything other than this? Our underground and overground public transport was bombed, who was held responsible? What price did they pay? Were all persons who designed & orchestrated the attack ever brought to account?
They walked over the top of us.
Unfortunately, with this type of adversary, you cannot restrain, deter or punish by knuckle-dragger means. It wont work, because you will never know who they all are.
As for your accusation of apathy, a sore jaw to you sir.
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The West needs to handle Pakistan with kid gloves because
1. It is the route for supplies to Afghanistan. This was the news yesterday in the Telegraph -
"Gunmen in southern Pakistan have torched tankers carrying fuel destined for Nato troops in Afghanistan. Around 20 attackers armed with rocket launchers and assault rifles attacked these trucks. They set ablaze 27 trucks parked there,"
2. Pakistan has medium range nuclear warheads hidden in various locations throughout the country.
Why do you think USA gives aid to Pakistan on a huge scale -
"A Congressional compilation of US aid to Pakistan says Islamabad has received $6 billion in civilian aid after the September 11 terrorist attack in New York.
The Obama Administration in its latest annual budget has proposed $1.6 billion in military assistance and about $1.4 billion as civilian assistance to Pakistan.
This takes the total US aid to Pakistan to more than $20.7 billion post 9/11, according to the data compiled from information received from the Departments of Defence, State and Agriculture and US Agency for International Development."
>> Stop all Pakistan passport holders from entering the UK until the threat is downgraded >> sufficiently
Unfortunately, that won't work. Unlike India, Pakistan allows its citizens to hold dual nationality. As does the UK. So most Pakistanis in the UK are citizens of both countries holding dual passports. As the terror report said, it was "British Muslims training with al-Qaeda were planning an armed rampage through London as part of a terrorist spectacular aimed at European capitals "
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Alternatively...
If you are a Government department facing 25% to 40% budget cuts, "finding" something important to worry about would ease the threat of pruning.
Surely not.
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You have to ask yourself why would someone want to drive a vehicle packed with explosives intent on killing as many people as possible, including themselves.
For what reason would a child strap a bomb vest to their body to blow certain people to kingdom come,
To simply call them all terrorists is no explanation at all.
I could elaborate (and some) but there is nothing to achieve in doing that here.
"Study the past if you would define the future" (Confucius).
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Security is a tad tighter at heathrow at the moment, so
must be a raised threat level.
Sent from my iPhone 4, Heathrow T3
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>> You have to ask yourself why would someone want to drive a vehicle packed with
>> explosives intent on killing as many people as possible, including themselves.
>> For what reason would a child strap a bomb vest to their body to blow
>> certain people to kingdom come,
>> To simply call them all terrorists is no explanation at all.
Old men want power, young men want a cause. Old men con the young men into dying for a cause that keeps them in power.
Imagine that you are an important guy in a terrorist group, with all the trappings. What is the worst news that you can hear? Yep, that peace has broken out...now you are back to just being Bob the Postman.
Why are there so many bombings in Iraq and so few in London and New York, and why do they primarily target civilians rather than the "occupying forces"? Because there is power to be had in Iraq. It doesn't matter how many people you blow up in New York, they aren't going to make you the Mayor.
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>>Yep, that peace has broken out...now you are back to just being Bob the Postman<<
I ran this sentence through my pre-wall Enigma machine, just to see if it was still functional really,
and it came up with the letters I, R, and A.
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>> >>Yep, that peace has broken out...now you are back to just being Bob the Postman<<
>>
>> I ran this sentence through my pre-wall Enigma machine, just to see if it was
>> still functional really,
>> and it came up with the letters I, R, and A.
You might want to re-run that, and perhaps you'll come up with the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA.
There is no peace there, just a couple of old leaders who managed to move themselves into mainstream politics.
Many of the lesser leaders, who didn't get power via the political process, just reverted to getting it by being leaders of the splinter groups.
Where you can convince young men of a cause, there will always be old men who sense power.
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>>You might want to re-run that, and perhaps you'll come up with the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA.<<
Yes, I am well aware of that + McGuinness & Adams,
I caught the tail end of Steven Hawkin's Universe on Ch. 4 at the weekend and I like to think that come the year 3010 'The Troubles' will be over, there will be no more war anywhere in the world, poverty and disease will be eradicated and we'll all live forever :)
But when I look back at the last 100 years, 1000 years, 2000 years etc., I'm not so sure,
There is no real reason why in the 21st century we should still be killing each other, why the west is *still* economically depressed, why one man can own $billions while another has to survive on less than a Dollar a day - apart from the continuation of 'the system' that brought about this sorry state of affairs in the first place.
India and China are going down the same route of the very, very rich and the very, very poor,
Do we ever learn from experience I wonder, or does history repeat itself, over and over and over again.
Amen.
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>> Yes, I am well aware of that + McGuinness & Adams,
>> I caught the tail end of Steven Hawkin's Universe on Ch. 4 at the weekend
>> and I like to think that come the year 3010 'The Troubles' will be over,
>> there will be no more war anywhere in the world, poverty and disease will be
>> eradicated and we'll all live forever :)
I do think that technology is the only thing that will eventually "save" us from the likes of poverty and disease, but people can always find a cause, if they need one.
I was reading the other day about how the Nazi party convinced many that the WWI reparations were bankrupting the country, when they were doing nothing of the sort.
Of course, when it is "them and us", too many people will believe "us" - divisions such as nationalism and religion being fertile ground for "them and us" situations, of course.
If you eradicate real divisions such as financial, health and lifestyle divisions, then perhaps ethereal divisions such as religion become even more important to maintain for those that need the "them and us".
So, yes, I think technology will help with many problems (and really they are the big problems, 3000 deaths from malaria every day vs a few thousand people killed every year by terrorists).
However, human nature will probably never change, and so people will still want more than they have and young people will still need a cause - so I don't think terrorism and war are going away any time soon.
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>>I do think that technology is the only thing that will eventually "save" us from the likes of poverty and disease<<
I like to keep an open mind to all things - I believe in the Sun because I can see and feel it,
Technology can be used for good or bad purposes of course
America has over 9000 nuclear weapons, Russia 12000, Britain 225, France 300 etc.,
Even Pakistan has around 80, the same with India.
Apart from depleted Uranium used in Iraq & Afghan, no nuclear weapons have been used in anger since 1945 - 65 years ago.
With the present economic situation in the west + the massive requirement for fossil fuels by China, India etc. + climate change affecting crops and the water table + the ever increasing world population + (shall I mention it) ...
The Middle East!
It will be interesting to see if technology leads to our salvation, or the exact opposite.
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>> The latest terrorist threat suggests British residents have travelled to Pakistan to be trained and
>> then return to instigate, at some time in the future an attack similar to the
>> one in Mumbai.
We ventured into a war on 'reports' of WMD not too long ago.
As for preventing the free movement of people, about 40 years ago the horse left the stable, and successive governments of the day encouraged more to come and live separatist lives, far too late to do anything selective now it's all over.
We now have the ludicrous case of inflicting our version of democracy (well what the yanks tell us) on other parts of the world with violent means (including getting others currently in favour to fire the bullets) whilst millions of their comrades live and visit here freely....seems quite obvious to me what the likely outcome is.
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Morning GB
Next week I will attain 53 yo which means there are 17 years to go. When I turned 18 I stated for all to hear, that if I were to reach three score and ten then I firmly believed (and I see no reason to change the view) that there would be little left of the society that I knew then and is fast disappearing now.
MD
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Hi yourself Martin, yes i would agree with you, even in sunny Devon.
The good lady She Who Must and i have become quite reclusive and i see this continuing, internet shopping has helped us to do this and saves us from the strange and unpleasant places that towns have become.
oh and many happy returns for next week..
Last edited by: gordonbennet on Sun 3 Oct 10 at 08:49
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And all Irish people from free movement. They're all terrorists too. And anyone Catalan as they'll be in Eta.
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Ban the Scots.. and Liverpudlians whilst we are at it..
Lets have some proper ghettos...:-)
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What more than we have now?
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We don't have ghettos of the type I am referring to. The type where they are not allowed out: ever...
:-)
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Arrived back from Tel Aviv today into Manchester via Paris CDG. Sniffer dogs out at exit of baggage reclaim. Connected??
Also, Tel Aviv appears to be the only airport which permits any and all liquids on board a plane without query. Makes life with children much easier. I can only think the reason is that they profile every passenger so they know who are high risk and give them an extra strong grilling and search of the bags.
Mind you, we brought jam home today from our flat. It sailed through CDG without setting off any alarms. Just shows how stupid and lacking in any coherence these security regimes are.
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>> think the reason is that they profile every passenger so they know who are high
>> risk and give them an extra strong grilling and search of the bags.
You'd have PC luvvies fainting on the spot if that ever happened here, sounds like simple common sense to anyone vaguely normal.
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>> think the reason is that they profile every passenger so they know who are high risk and give them an extra >>strong grilling and search of the bags.
El Al can manage that because they carry relatively small numbers as the national carrier of a nation facing very specific threats.
Won't work for the diverse millions flying with Ryanair!!
Last edited by: Bromptonaut on Sun 3 Oct 10 at 22:08
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We flew back from Greece on Thursday landed at Terminal 1 and there were two black Labradors in Baggage reclaim, an informed opinion here suggests they were cash/drugs dogs - but in heightened tension who knows ? Lucky I left the Bonios at home!
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>> I can only think the reason is that they profile every passenger so they know who are high
>> risk and give them an extra strong grilling and search of the bags.
This happened to my wife when she flew to Israel. Got dragged into a room at the airport and grilled for over an hour. Whole nine yards. They pretended to have found something in her luggage. After reducing her to tears they let her go.
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>>Also, Tel Aviv appears to be the only airport which permits any and all liquids on board a plane without query
Caught an internal flight from Tel Aviv a couple of years ago. We expected to be queueing for ages at security and had cups of boiling coffee we had just bought. Inevitably the queue whizzed through and I apologised profusely for turning up holding the drinks. The security fellow passed them round the x-ray machine for us! We also 'fessed up to a needle and thread, and a small pair of scissors my wife had forgotten about. We were wished a pleasant fllight and ushered through. I risked a comment that it was nice to see some judgement permitted.
The reply was "we're more focused on stopping the wrong people getting on the plane than worrying about things like that". We had of course been interviewed before check in by young army conscripts, overseen by some more senior looking types looking at the people in the queue.
That in a country that half the world wants to blow up, and where they've had plenty of practice at stopping it.
Meanwhile at Heathrow they'll confiscate your nail clippers but ignore a Cross ballpoint that resembles a 6" nail.
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>> The reply was "we're more focused on stopping the wrong people getting on the plane
>> than worrying about things like that". We had of course been interviewed before check in
>> by young army conscripts, overseen by some more senior looking types looking at the people
>> in the queue.
>>
>> That in a country that half the world wants to blow up, and where they've
>> had plenty of practice at stopping it.
Profiling who should be searched is always going to have its problems.
As mentioned above, it is not realistically scalable to all passengers and risk falling foul of groups who can recruit and train those that will most easily pass the profiling.
The US used profiling until the early 70s to decide whose hand baggage should be scanned, but only when they scanned everybody's did the actually reduce the number of hijackings.
Of course, that is when it was scaled to large numbers of passengers.
And it's not as if Israeli profiling is somehow foolproof
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanunu
It may just be that there are so many buses, shops, restaurants, checkpoints that you can send a 12 year old to blow up, that there is no point going to the hassle of trying to blow up a plane.
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>> For what reason would a child strap a bomb vest to their body to blow
With enough brainwash, you can achieve anything. It is even easier for children - they don't have their own judgment yet.
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>>The US used profiling until the early 70s to decide whose hand baggage should be scanned, but only when they scanned everybody's did the actually reduce the number of hijackings.
Makes sense. But the UK uses random searches - e.g the shoes business. I've been through Luton when everybody in my scanner queue was being made to remove their shoes, while those in the next queue weren't. The apparent explanation for this is that policy required at least one third of passengers to have their shoes checked, and the airport's way of implementing this was to have shoe-off and shoe-on queues!
Apart from the obvious possibility to avoid the shoe queue, who thinks any kind of random search will deter a suicide bomber? It might work on cigarette smugglers but it sure as hell won't on somebody who's expecting to die!
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Latest Terrorist Threat - MD
