I'm confused. What the fuck is a terrorist? Is it people who are at war? Or are those insurgents? Are abortion clinic bombers terrorists? is Greenpeace a terrorist group? How about those guys...those founding fathers? Or Christopher Columbus slaughtering the Arawaks and Caribs? is he and his crew terrorists? Or are terrorists people who plant bombs in crowded public areas like cowards? Chechnyans (sp?) - they are terrorists? Are terrorists people from countries with no "democracy"? Or do we just go with whatever whimsical term the media deems fit?

Have you overlooked that reasonable cause is required in both the fourth admendment and the section of the Patriot Act? In either case if there is reasonable cause to think that someone is engaged in either criminal activity or "terrorist" activity I wan them investigated...end of story.

What makes you think they wouldn't have been elected?

Specially since you don't live in Spain and have no idea what is going on here...

Funny, I seem to recall that the entire basis of modern mathematics sources from 'arab society'. Words like 'zero', and 'azimuth' and such aren't anglosaxon in origin, y'know.

I guess you don't need to know how to build a toaster to run a couple international news organizations, either. Apparently al-Jazeera is operated by people who also let the blinking 12:00's stay on their VCRs.

... and somehow, I think there's a constructive middle ground between 'stuff their tongues up a pig's ass' and 'let's all just fuck off'. It'll obviously be left to people who see the world in color, rather than black and white, to work on a real solution.

I would say the 'press' they terrorize the hell out of us for ratings. most of this bullshit would go ways with out an audience. you ever see a suicide bombing video?

they set them up. the camera is in place about 1 hr before the bomb, then they cut the whole vid together with music so it looks like an MTV clip and then release it to the press. total BS. total serial killers if ya ask me. read my solution above

The definition of a 'terrorist' is some one that tries to strike fear (or terror) into people. You do not have to actually kill people to be a terrorist, nor do you (though most of the world may disagree cause of being narrowminded) have to be arab or islamic to be a terrorist. And yes, by the current definitions most people use the Founding Fathers could be construde as terrorists. The reason they arent? They didn't blow up any buildings with people in them. They are, by definition, rebels. They didn't like their leader and struck back, and faught to break free. It's a fine line that is probably more personal believes and opinion than anything else.

[QUOTE=rickholio]Funny, I seem to recall that the entire basis of modern mathematics sources from 'arab society'. Words like 'zero', and 'azimuth' and such aren't anglosaxon in origin, y'know.

*** wrong the arab lifted the 'o' from the hindus

I guess you don't need to know how to build a toaster to run a couple international news organizations, either. Apparently al-Jazeera is operated by people who also let the blinking 12:00's stay on their VCRs.

*** I could set up coke smuggling ring from south America. so could you. I could not build the empire state building. a criminal enterprise is not the same this as an actual enterprise. it is much easer to destroy then it is to build

... and somehow, I think there's a constructive middle ground between 'stuff their tongues up a pig's ass' and 'let's all just fuck off'. It'll obviously be left to people who see the world in color, rather than black and white, to work on a real solution.[

**** there is a reason I'm a photographer and not a politician :) however a 'walk away' would be a real good start to solving the problem. their leadership has stolen all the money and now points the finger at the USA and the west in general so they don't get it in the ass .. . and the arab leadership does finance the terrorism. every plot has a Saudi in the mix somewhere, our real good buddies, the Saudis. .

/QUOTE]

Where 'reasonable cause' is, by the admission of the authors of the law itself, and extremely loose and can be ipso facto justified by whatever 'evidence' is collected.

Additionally, the federal government already HAD the ability to investigate terrorists under the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Act. The USA PATRIOT extended that to any person, suspect of any crime, at any time, with minimal requirements. Everyday citizens can now be treated with the same disregard as foreign nationals with respects to search and seizure.

And if that isn't enough, how about section 215? The FBI can use Section 215 to demand ?any tangible thing,? including books, letters, diaries, library records, medical and psychiatric records, financial information, membership lists of religious institutions, and even -- as Attorney General Ashcroft himself conceded in testimony before Congress -- genetic information. Again, this is based on the loosest of requirements, with no requirement to disclose, and again not limited to people under investigation for terrorist ties.

How can you reasonably argue that rights have not be diminished by this terrible peice of legislature ram-rodded through by ashcroft on a 7 day schedule?

I to agree with much of what he posted...and you are correct about the terroist attacks have nothing to do with Iraq. The US and other allies have been under attack at least since 1983.

I C your point to an extent - But American(13 colonies) ships fired on British vessels, attempted to invade what is now Canada, .....

Isn't a rebel more like an "Insurgent"? Trying to repell invading forces?

BUSH INC. strikes sheer terror everytime they open their mouth - Terrorists?

I know this seems like semantics, but what things are labelled indicates how they are percieved. :2 cents:

50.....,.....

Reasonable cause is still required and it is not "every day citizens" that will be investigated...it is criminals/"terrorists" Every day citizens do not provide "reason cause" to be investigated for criminal/"terrorist" activities.

These people disagree. It is, admittedly, a potentially biased source... but I've seen no counterclaim to the contrary. Citation?

al-Jazeera is an international news organization. al-Arabiya is as well. And perhaps you should visit dubai before you claim that arabs don't know engineering... a great many foundations of modern engineering were perfected by the arabs after sweeping across the byzantine lands in the late stages of the holy roman empire. Remember that the caliphate represented a storehouse of knowledge and wisdom unrivaled by all other cultures on the planet at one point (arguably... the chinese were doing pretty good too, but were fairly isolated and relentlessly harassed by mongols).

You're on a losing track claiming that arabs are behind the times in anything other than religious grounds, and those claims can only reasonably be made about extremist islamics, not moderates.

This may piss off the leftist orthodoxy, but now that the US is there, it'd better stay there. The only thing keeping that area from degenerating into a post-yugoslavia style civil war is that they'd rather keep shooting at the in-country bucketheads. Once there's nothing in the way of them killing each other, the whole area, and I mean the *WHOLE* area, will be sucked into a massive pan-arabic sectarian conflict. Syria and saudi arabia are already sending in wahabbi and sunni partisans, iran is sending in shi'a, afghanistan obviously has had people running back and forth considering their growing abilities in insurgent, asymmetric warfare.

When the iran/iraq war started, gas prices when ballistic... and that was when only 2 players were engaged in a local conflict. Imagine the devastation on the world economy if the entire opec region collapsed into open revolt and civil war.

That, imo, was what the senior Bush was trying to avoid... keep Saddam in as a beaten puppet state that at least maintained the status quo and kept the spice flowing. Now the stage is being set to engage in a panarabic battle of ideology and the rest of the world is the ones going to be fuct unless there's a serious increase in manpower to keep a lid on it.

BTW...most of the "extraordinary" parts of the Patriot Act had "Sunset" clauses. Just recently the Sentate Judicial Committee held hearings on the Patriot Act and said "Sunset" clauses. I watched the entireity of the hearings on C-Span.

The head of the CIA...FBI...and the Attorney General were vigorously interrogated about the Patriot Act. I found all of them to be forth coming in their answers...including Attorney General Gonzales. I saw Attorney General Ashcroft when he was before the Senate Committees and he hedged his answers. Attorney General Gonzales did not.

It is immaterial...now...that the Patriot Act was ram-rodded through by the previous Congress...as it has now been fully veted before the current Congress.

I suspect you wouldn't admit to loss of rights unless there was a cop with a baton and a flashlight searching your lower intestine for evidence. Even then I suspect you'd try to rationalize it.

"Reasonable cause" has been in the past a basis as slim as being a person who 'fits the description of a suspect' to be eligible for immediate personal search. Would you like to be worked up on the basis of looking like a suspected criminal?

If you took a car for a test drive that was later used in a drive-by and your fingerprints are on it, would that be okay for people to poke through your medical history?

Should hanging out with a group of people unhappy about the current administration, or marching in a public protest, be cause to have a friendly federal agent go through your medicine cabinet and toolchest when you're at work, because you're a suspected insurgent?

The simple fact is, prior to USA PATRIOT cops could only search for what they had on the warrant, and it had to be exercised with your knowledge unless you were a foreign national suspected of espionage or terroristm. Now, they can look for whatever, whenever, not telling you shit until someone feels like it, with the only barrier a limp-wristed 'probable cause' standing in the way.

Moving up a step, check out sections 216 and 220. Now they don't even need to prove probable cause in proximity to where you ARE to be snooped on. You could live in San Diego and have some judge in Des Moines rubberstamp the go-ahead. A double-dunk curtailment of personal AND states' rights.

Terrible idea, terrible law, terrible consequences.

Like I said, it comes down a lot to personal believes and opinions and is a very fine line. I think tactics should also play a part in it. Many 'terrorists' hide from the person they are attacking. Where as a rebel, army or alone, is willing to get up into the other persons face to get the job done. When the 13 colonies rebelled, they openly told the British government to get their asses outta America. When they didn't, they brought out the guns and said 'get out, or we drive you'. Which is far drifferent from saying 'leave me alone or I'm going to go blow up a shopping mall'. Now nothing says the Founding Fathers would have done the same thing had they rebelled today, since in the 1700's it was pretty to blow up a bus. :winkwink:

And about rebel ships firing on British ships, if I remember correctly, and I could be wrong, they only fired on military ships.

BTW...I do not know if any or all of the "Sunset" clauses were allowed to set and I am not sure if the Congress has even voted on it at this point...but what ever has been done or will be done...to repeat the Patriot Act has now been fully veted before the current Congress.

You also are not allowing for the fact that the Supreme Court ultimately decides what laws are constitutional and what laws are not. The Supreme Court has already ruled against the Justice Department in more than one instance of the appication of certain parts of the Patriot Act and or kicked it back down to a lower court. Attorney General Ashcroft was not pleased with the lower court decisions and the Sumpreme Court decision.

Point being...checks and balances are alive and well.

The fact that you 'find people forth coming in answers' is immaterial to the fact that the law stripped people of rights they once had as afforded by the fourth amendment and backed by volumes of standing case law. "Forthcoming" means little more than that they believe in what they're signing on to as being a good idea. Gonzales was also quite forthcoming with the memo issued on the legality of the use of torture.

There was no sunset clause on provision 213. Police can still 'sneak and peak' on any suspect at any time for thin cause with no notification. Provision 215, the ability to obtain secretly private records has been sunsetted. There is at least 35 instances of this clause being invoked since September 2003.

As for 'fully vetted', I daresay not. Some of the provisions have been sunsetted, but without a full and public hearing of the abuses of those provisions prior. That happened a little over a month ago. Additionally, just before the sunset provisions came into effect, the administration was pushing for investigators to be able to get Tax, Medical and Library records with NO need for judicial approval. Even the pro-act'ers balked at removing that last slender defence.

True - it does come down to personal beliefs...
American ships only attacked british military ships and supply ships....fair enough...

So has Israel

Dianne Feinstein in particular attempted to find abuses of the Patriot Act and admitted that she could not...and at this point niether has the ACLU...all though I think they may have stated some "alleged" abuses...but have been unable to come up with anything concrete.

Ah, I see... there's no proof, therefore no violations, and if there's no violations then the egregious stripping of privacy is moot because... well, just because.

Whew. That's a relief. I guess I don't need to worry about weapons of mass distruction now either. I mean, there's no proof that any terrorist ever got a hold of one, or at least nothing aside from alleged abuses. I bet Iraq will be happy! :disgust

Whether or not those former rights were abused is, again, immaterial. The point now is that they NO LONGER EXIST. An expectation that a cop won't traipse through your house on thin evidence without your knowledge IS NO LONGER VALID. How can you reasonably claim that personal freedoms were not abridged by this one thing alone?

"Absense of Evidence, is not Evidence of Absense."

Nice. :thumbsup That was a rumsfeldism, wasn't it? Along with the unknowable known unknowns?

Zen, and the art of political doublespeak...

This is an excellent post!! Terrorism works because of ignorant leaders like Bush. As long as there are short-sighted idiots like Bush, terrorism will continue to work.

I don't claim to have an answer for terrorism, but acting just like them will solve nothing. It will only serve to make them hate us even more, and to create a whole new group of terrorists.

because you can't tell who all the Al-Qaeda people are??

When you invade a country like Afghanistan or Iraq you kill a lot of INNOCENT CIVILIANS which along with occupation of these countries BREEDS new terrorists.

You need to be a whole lot more targetted and get the peaceful Muslim soceity on your side against the extremists not against you.

You, surferking, your copied and pasted vision is shortsighted and utterly stupid:
Of course those who backed the Iraq war refute any link with the London bombs - they are in the deepest denial

Shortly after September 11 2001, when the slightest mention of a link between US foreign policy and the terrorist attacks brought accusations of heartless heresy, the then US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice got to work. Between public displays of grief and solemnity she managed to round up the senior staff of the National Security Council and ask them to think seriously about "how do you capitalise on these opportunities" to fundamentally change American doctrine and the shape of the world. In an interview with the New Yorker six months later, she said the US no longer had a problem defining its post-cold war role. "I think September 11 was one of those great earthquakes that clarify and sharpen. Events are in much sharper relief."

For those interested in keeping the earth intact in its present shape so that we might one day live on it peacefully, the bombings of July 7 provide no such "opportunities". They do not "clarify" or "sharpen" but muddy and bloody already murky waters. As the identities of the missing emerge, we move from a statistical body count to the tragedy of human loss - brothers, mothers, lovers and daughters cruelly blown away as they headed to work. The space to mourn these losses must be respected. The demand that we abandon rational thought, contextual analysis and critical appraisal of why this happened and what we can do to limit the chances that it will happen again, should not. To explain is not to excuse; to criticise is not to capitulate.
We know what took place. A group of people, with no regard for law, order or our way of life, came to our city and trashed it. With scant regard for human life or political consequences, employing violence as their sole instrument of persuasion, they slaughtered innocent people indiscriminately. They left us feeling unified in our pain and resolute in our convictions, effectively creating a community where one previously did not exist. With the killers probably still at large there is no civil liberty so vital that some would not surrender it in pursuit of them and no punishment too harsh that some might not sanction if we found them.

The trouble is there is nothing in the last paragraph that could not just as easily be said from Falluja as it could from London. The two should not be equated - with over 1,000 people killed or injured, half its housing wrecked and almost every school and mosque damaged or flattened, what Falluja went through at the hands of the US military, with British support, was more deadly. But they can and should be compared. We do not have a monopoly on pain, suffering, rage or resilience. Our blood is no redder, our backbones are no stiffer, nor our tear ducts more productive than the people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those whose imagination could not stretch to empathise with the misery we have caused in the Gulf now have something closer to home to identify with. "Collateral damage" always has a human face: its relatives grieve; its communities have memory and demand action.

These basic humanistic precepts are the principle casualties of fundamentalism, whether it is wedded to Muhammad or the market. They were clearly absent from the minds of those who bombed London last week. They are no less absent from the minds of those who have pursued the war on terror for the past four years.

Tony Blair is not responsible for the more than 50 dead and 700 injured on Thursday. In all likelihood, "jihadists" are. But he is partly responsible for the 100,000 people who have been killed in Iraq. And even at this early stage there is a far clearer logic linking these two events than there ever was tying Saddam Hussein to either 9/11 or weapons of mass destruction.

It is no mystery why those who have backed the war in Iraq would refute this connection. With each and every setback, from the lack of UN endorsement right through to the continuing strength of the insurgency, they go ever deeper into denial. Their sophistry has now mutated into a form of political autism - their ability to engage with the world around them has been severely impaired by their adherence to a flawed and fatal project. To say that terrorists would have targeted us even if we hadn't gone into Iraq is a bit like a smoker justifying their habit by saying, "I could get run over crossing the street tomorrow." True, but the certain health risks of cigarettes are more akin to playing chicken on a four-lane highway. They have the effect of bringing that fatal, fateful day much closer than it might otherwise be.

Similarly, invading Iraq clearly made us a target. Did Downing Street really think it could declare a war on terror and that terror would not fight back? That, in itself, is not a reason to withdraw troops if having them there is the right thing to do. But since it isn't and never was, it provides a compelling reason to change course before more people are killed here or there. So the prime minister got it partly right on Saturday when he said: "I think this type of terrorism has very deep roots. As well as dealing with the consequences of this - trying to protect ourselves as much as any civil society can - you have to try to pull it up by its roots."

What he would not acknowledge is that his alliance with President George Bush has been sowing the seeds and fertilising the soil in the Gulf, for yet more to grow. The invasion and occupation of Iraq - illegal, immoral and inept - provided the Arab world with one more legitimate grievance. Bush laid down the gauntlet: you're either with us or with the terrorists. A small minority of young Muslims looked at the values displayed in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and Camp Bread Basket - and made their choice. The war helped transform Iraq from a vicious, secular dictatorship with no links to international terrorism into a magnet and training ground for those determined to commit terrorist atrocities. Meanwhile, it diverted our attention and resources from the very people we should have been fighting - al-Qaida.

Leftwing axe-grinding? As early as February 2003 the joint intelligence committee reported that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent "by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". At the World Economic Forum last year, Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group thinktank, said: "The net result of the war on terror is more war and more terror. Look at Iraq: the least plausible reason for going to war - terrorism - has been its most harrowing consequence."

None of that justifies what the bombers did. But it does help explain how we got where we are and what we need to do to move to a safer place. If Blair didn't know the invasion would make us more vulnerable, he is negligent; if he did, then he should take responsibility for his part in this. That does not mean we deserved what was coming. It means we deserve a lot better.

Terrorism is very simple. They do something, that makes you change your view of safety. Thats it. Once this happens, they have won.

these security measures only address the violent acts of terrorism, not terrorism itself. killing Bin Laden will not put an end to terrorism for its is based on ideology. I just saw a CNN documentary about terrorism in Europe.

I agree that fundamentalist thinking really has to be removed from Muslim/Islamic nations. A state headed by dogmatic religious dictators doesn't work in the modern world where laws are created, applied, and upheld because of their merit and not because they're mentioned in some ancient text supposedly from Allah or God.

The part I disagree with is when people say they hate our way of life. I don't think that's true. I think they love our way of life and see us as prohibiting them from partaking in our way of life. Their is nothing about having a nice house, car, food, and fun that anybody on earth wouldn't want.

If the war in Iraq is a true step forward for creating democracy and not merely stripping the place of it's natural resources for our benefit only, I think it's a good thing in the long run. I wonder if we're really that noble though.

There is no credible evidence to suggest 100,000 people have been killed in Iraq. That number comes from the Lancet Study. You might want to read that study and it's methods and decide for yourself if you think it's a credible number. I for one do not.

If you're talking about the pullout plan, then sadly I agree with you.

This government has indeed proved it.

The world didn't start 10 years ago ...

When you get a check, the numbers on it are " arab": they invented it.
They also were the first to have running water, mainly in south of Spain ( the Alhambra ). I wont continue to try to educate you, since civilisation for you is limited to a McDonald, a Wall-Mart and a trailer park.

DF, will you agree that their civilization has fallen?

Absolutely ... So has the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans and Chineese ( tough they are working on a comeback ) for the " old civilisations ".

In the case of the Arabs, the fought against each other, weakening their stronghold and leaving the territory opened to the Brits ... and selling out for a few gold coins ....

The wheel goes round and round again ....