Posts by Russell Brown
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Busytown: What was lost, in reply to Danielle,
A decade of ever-increasing paranoia and withdrawal and pain, in the place of that first gathering of light and voice and hope.
That’s what I was trying and failing to say in the other thread. Thank you.
I liked it so much I quoted it in my post too.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Lucy Stewart,
I can assure you from personal checking that to a lab full of biologists, "the DNA results made them 99.5% certain it was bin Laden" is a hysterically funny joke.
Could you elucidate? I'm prepared to believe they had DNA (familial?) for comparison, but obviously I have no idea what they might have been able to show.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Danielle,
but to the general public, it was entirely unexpected, and crippling
This. I think it can be pretty safely assumed that most people in the USA - with the exception of foreign policy experts and academics - had absolutely no clue.
Which was a little weird, given that al Qaeda-trained jhadis had already killed six and injured thousands when they tried to destroy the World Trade Center towers in 1993. You'd think that might have stuck in people's minds.
The response in 2001, taking its cue from Bush, verged on the infantile: there was a determination to ascribe the attack to "evil" and a widespread resistance to any acknowledgement that however foul the politics might have been, there was a political motive to the attacks.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
With all due respect to President Obama, vengeance is not justice. It wasn’t in 1946, and it isn’t now. Justice is hard and elusive; perhaps we will never find it in this world, or any other. But I just thought we were supposed to be better.
I am not troubled by Bin Laden being killed in the raid, but I have been surprised and irked by how readily this has been depicted as justice having been done. I think the latter demands a rather higher standard.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to richard,
Personally I’m feeling extremely uncomfortable about the fact that he was killed (together with a bunch of people with him) rather than being captured.
Who bells the cat – are you volunteering?
I fear you have attributed someone else's quote to me, sir.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Pick me – because I’m finding it increasingly difficult to escape the conclusion that if Jerry Mateparae wasn’t lying (either by commission or omission) he was promoted above his level of competence more than a decade back.
Thing is, they all know the substance of the story is correct, former Labour government ministers included. I am very confident of that.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Craig Ranapia,
And I think this allegation should be easy enough to substantiate, shouldn’t it?
It did happen, sorta, a while ago. I gather it was more to do with Garner having the PM's number on his phone, Stephenson not believing him it was the number and someone dialing Key to prove it. Framing it as Stephenson trying to "impersonate" Garner seems quite calculated to smear Stephenson. And, of course, it has nothing to do with the substance of the story.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Hilary Stace,
Unfortunately, John Campbell didn’t ask him for his reaction to John Key’s attack on his (Stevenson’s) credibility today at his press conference.
That was a cynical and unpleasant display by the Prime Minister and his Minister of Defence today. They dismissed Jon Stephenson's credibility without providing a skerrick of evidence for what they were saying. They basically dared people to call Jerry Mataparae a liar instead.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Tom Semmens,
Successive Al Jazeera commentators have argued quite convincingly today that the "Arab awakening" has marginalised al Qaeda in the Middle East. Its vision of a caliphate was irrelevant to the times.
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Hard News: You know what ..., in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Perhaps now the leader of a terrorist group with zero capability to mount attacks in the West (or no desire to – given that single nutters with no money manage to engage in murder and mayhem, it must be one or the other) is dead, the US can stop searching for imaginary terrerists and leave the Muslim world to sort out its own development.
Actually the last entry on Wikipedia’s timeline of al Qaeda attacks is really quite recent:
2010 cargo plane bomb plot
On October 29, 2010, two packages, each containing a bomb consisting of 300 to 400 grams (11–14 oz) of plastic explosives and a detonating mechanism, were found on separate cargo planes. The bombs were discovered as a result of intelligence received from Saudi Arabia’s security chief. They were bound from Yemen to the United States, and were discovered at en route stop-overs, in England and in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.
One week later, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) took responsibility for the plot. U.S. and British authorities had believed that AQAP, and specifically Anwar al-Awlaki, were behind the bombing attempts. They also believed the bombs were most likely constructed by AQAP’s main explosives expert, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri.
Al Qaeda is also thought to be connected with the 2004 Madrid train bombings (191 dead), and claimed responsibility for the 2005 London Tube bombings (56 dead), as well as several attacks in non-Western countries. Clearly, actions carried out by cells, or by people radicalised by bin Laden, like the 2007 Glasgow Airport attackers, aren’t the same thing as actions directed by the lately deceased, but it’s not exactly “imaginary terrorism” either.