posted
Do you think Al Qaeda realizes it may not even have to bother attacking anymore?
Consider: Terrorists conveniently leak a plot to attack something. What happens? We spend millions of dollars in heightened security, and our budget situation gets worse. We get scared and the terrorists' cause makes the morning news. All this without any attack occuring, without any suicides needed, without any murdering, and without any cost for the terrorists. They can terrorize just through information leaks.
Do you think terrorists might actually be using this strategy?
And if so, is it more ethical than actual terrorism?
posted
The problem is that after a number of years of empty information leaks and nothing happening, they would not get the same response. In order to make empty information leaks have impact, a few of them cannot be empty. They have to back up their threats with real violence.
I wonder if they are already doing that very think though...
Posts: 438 | Registered: Apr 2004
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posted
It seems to me they probably would flood us with false leaks, until we stop paying attention, and then attack us for real again whenever our guard is down.
Posts: 2432 | Registered: Feb 2001
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posted
They loose credibility with every non-event that happens. If they leak an attack will happen next Tuesday, and nothing happens, they loose face.
Do you think Shiek Soandso is going to donate a couple of million to an organization that does not produce? To him, "If it bleeds, funds procedes"
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posted
Repeatedly crying wolf and then letting the wolf loose when the guard is down. Oooo, insideous.
Posts: 7050 | Registered: Feb 2004
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posted
Adam, not credibility with us, credibility with its supporters. People wouldn't support Hamas if all it did was shake its fist and never carry out terrorist attacks.
Posts: 3446 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote: It doesn't matter what their credibility is like outside of the group, because they know they'll be heros if they can pull off a calamatous attack
How will they be heroes if nobody supports them enough to think that they are heroes?
Posts: 16551 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
Isn't intelligence intelligent enough to discern whether or not a threat is real or 'conveniently leaked?'
Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote: Terrorists conveniently leak a plot to attack something. What happens? We spend millions of dollars in heightened security, and our budget situation gets worse. We get scared and the terrorists' cause makes the morning news.
Is it a bad time to mention weapons of mass destruction? Isn't this the same thing?
Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote:Isn't intelligence intelligent enough to discern whether or not a threat is real or 'conveniently leaked?'
How can they be? Terrorism can be so low tech that it would be easy to "fake" a terrorist threat. Buy a couple of tickets on a jet, rooms at hotels, supplies, leave traces behind enough to indicate that SOMETHING was bought but never with enough to link to anyone specific. I doubt it is just words we are monitoring.
Terrorists win whenever the powers that be change who they are and what they do in response to terrorist actions (or even inactions). I qualify "win' with being any time policies or actions change that are a detriment to citizens of our country or a benefit to whatever al Qaeda stands for (which, for the life of me, I don't know). 9/11 has paid off a lot for al Qaeda and not just in lives lost. The USA is now a country living in fear with convenient "fear switches" with the color coded system (which will be out of play probably within a year...they are already backing off on its usage). The Patriot Act, by some thought to be overly restrictive, could be seen as a "win" for terrorists. Our way of life and beliefs are put to the side in order to make a safer country, whatever that means. And most of all, they succeeded because they have become so elusive that we were forced to stir up trouble in an unrelated country that not only avoided the war on terrorism, but created a whole new recruitment center and proving to the supporters of al Qaeda that they were right (about hating us, that is).
Oy. Just like the War on Drugs. Poorly chosen name with unwinnable and unfocused goals.
quote: What happens? We spend millions of dollars in heightened security, and our budget situation gets worse. We get scared and the terrorists' cause makes the morning news.
Well I'm just saying that the intelligence community should be fairly certain that it's a viable threat before releasing it to the media.
Is that too much to ask?
Posts: 2756 | Registered: Jul 2002
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quote:"We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah," bin Laden said in the transcript.
quote:He also said al Qaeda has found it "easy for us to provoke and bait this administration."
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.
posted
It's what Gandhi practised to get rid of the British in India, and it worked perfectly. If the Palestinians tried it they might get miraculous results.
Posts: 867 | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Like Neal Stephenson's take on the fall of Batavia. Historically, there was a false report that the Dutch had lost a major battle, and it caused a panic in their stock market. In Stephenson's novel, this was all engineered by French agents.
Done repeatedly, it's basically a seige scenario: make it cost so much to keep defending yourself that eventually you starve or surrender. I just doubt the U.S. could possibly do either.
Posts: 535 | Registered: Sep 2000
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The CURE for terrorism is to make communicatition cheap, easy, and totally nonviolent. That's why we don't really have a problem with domestic terrorists.
I think it was Penn Jillette who said it--it's a lot harder for a nutjob to get a bunch of other nutjobs to do evil nutjob things to get noticed when you can get flown out to New York, stay in a nice hotel, eat all the food in the green room, and spout your crazy nutjob beliefs on Sally Jesse Rafael in front of the whole world.
That's why we've got to hand out freedom. At that point, terrorism becomes unneccesary.
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As for terror "warnings"--that's a page straight out of the terrorist handbook. You:
a. Do the worst you're capapble of doing b. Say that what you're doing is just a "warning" and the real threat is yet to come.
In this case, the video from Osama is very comforting--it means he's got nothing. It doesn't mean he's got nothing forever. It just means there won't be any trains blowing up over here during the elections. The worst he can do right now is ship over a video.
Posts: 1894 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
We don't really have a problem with domestic terrorists? I thought most instances of terrorism in the US had been domestic. I though the anthrax scare was a pretty big thing.
posted
False leaks still have a source. They can be traced back to a person who knows they're false, and why they were created in the first place. If we go after the false threats as if they were true, then theorhetically we'll eventually find the true terrorists.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
The issue isn't false threats by people who aren't terrorists but fake plans leaked by real terrorists.
Posts: 2443 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
I didn't say there hadn't been any American vs. American terrorism. I just said it's not prevelent enough to think of it as a problem.
When it happens, we get real worked about it, and give the guy a cool name like Unabomber, and we all remember him for a long time and write dozens of books and TV movies to figure out why anyone would do anything like that. It always turns out to be one fella, acting alone, not an organized "network" of Terrorists.
How many Israelis do you think can name every terrorist who's killed anyone there in the last fifty years? How many people in the Phillipines?
Posts: 1894 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
You said we don't really have a problem with domestic terrorists. Considering every domestic terrorist attack has dominated the news for months, and there have been more of them than foreign terrorist attacks, I think you're setting your threshhold abnormally high. You're basically saying there's only one terrorist attack worth thinking about, and its 9/11, and since it was foreign, all we care about is foreign terrorism.
In some weird and twisted ways, you're right. Its pretty evident the administration and associates aren't paying attention to the most typical profile of a terrorist in the USA -- white male. However, its also statistically ludicrous, its like saying all the individual bombs we dropped on Japanese cities don't matter because the nukes were so much bigger.
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