hey, thats not true colm you insensitive prick.  there is a series of loosely connected terrorist networks spread throughout the globe and numbering around 4000 people armed with guns and bombs that pose a devastating threat to our national existance.

Hey, they're more of a threat to us than to you. Why just last week not a five minute walk from here a highly trained international terrorist network had a car with a bag of nails in the trunk towed away and then set on fire.

How are we supposed to defend ourselves against these kinds of attacks? With tactical nukes, that's how.

How will the use of tactical nukes prevent these attacks? I'd say they are more likely to attract more of them. Retalliation is the worst possible strategy against guerilla terrorism.

oh, hell.  you guys are just wimps, scared by a few badly trained amateurs.  just the other week our fbi caught some brilliant and fanatical terrorists in the middle of carrying out their plot.
if we hadn't caught them when we did, they almost certainly would have eventually made a workable plan, purchased some kind of weaponry and without reasonable doubt killed thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of innocent americans.

we here in america are living on the edge of total collapse, fighting a devastating enemy.  dont complain if we occasionally let you guys handle a few of the smaller guys.

>> How are we supposed to defend ourselves against these kinds of attacks? <<

Don't suspect a friend.  Report them.

I blame an old biddy 3,000 years who got the strop after her husband got the maid up the spout. 

See what happens when you get involved in other people's family rows...

Yeah, "devastating threat to our national existence" only because WE give them that power.  And because incompetence allowed ONE group access.  And because that ONE group got lucky.

Even so, on that day we lost 3,000 people and billions of dollars of buildings.  And we quite rightly went to war in Afghanistan to prevent it happening again.

But THEN, we went on to invade Iraq because we were so 'scared'.  And we've now spent a trillion or so in Iraq, making the dust bounce.

Bottom line -- I know you were being sarcastic with that "devastating threat" language -- the terrorists simply don't have the horsepower to be a devastating threat to a nation of 300 million people. 

The attitude of "we must never, never, never, EVER let this happen again, and Haliburton and Blackwater will keep us safe" should be seen as abject cowardice.  And it's NOT cost effective.  Because you start jumping at innocent noises, and invading countries that had nothing to do with it.

Evolution is a fraude, ID is the one true faith

Global warming is a myth

"We quite rightly went to war in Afghanistan to prevent it happening again"


WHAT NEXT?

well, next we went into Iraq to prevent it from happening again.

soon we are going into Iran.

after that?  well. we'lll see.

> "soon we are going into Iran"

With what army? Paid by whom? China will not let you nuke a country that close to it's own borders.

we need an army now?

What's with this "won't let you nuke" language?

Hell, load a couple of F-117's and stealth your way in, have a drop-ex, sneak your way out while the clouds are still rising.

Sure, it might be as dramatic as assassinating Franz Ferdinand, and touch off WW-III.  But the act itself is fairly straightforward technically.

In theory, almost the entire world besides Canada, Great Britain, and the US thought invading Iraq was a stupid idea, but that didn't stop the US.

Actually Britian knew invading Iraq was not worth it but the US had decided at that point so that was that.

The US army didn't realy want to go in, it was just the white house people and some dizzy General

I hadn't noticed an excess of Canadians involved in our little adventure in Iraq either.  I strongly suspect that the Canadian leaders are smarter than the U.S. leaders.  Of course, I also suspect that my cat is smarter than the U.S. leaders.  They at least recognize when jumping something is a bad idea.

There was a very funny incident where Ann Coulter INSISTED that the Canadians supported us in Viet-Nam -- which was factually incorrect.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0206-23.htm

"I strongly suspect that the Canadian leaders are smarter than the U.S. leaders."

I've recently been talking with fairly articulate and world-smart Canadians who assure me of the opposite. The current minority government of Canada appears to be a bunch of Bush groupies.

Ah, shows what I know of Canadian politics.  It occured to me this weekend that while I know perfectly well that Gordon Brown in the British PM, I haven't the slightest clue about who the Canadian PM is.  Since I'm more likely to visit Canada than Britain, and I do more business with Canada than Britain, it didn't make a lot of sense.

As for the Bush groupies, I'd urge my Canadian brethren to rise up and vote against them.  No sense importing any more madness than you have to.

>And we quite rightly went to war in Afghanistan to prevent it happening again.

Please don't tell me you seriously believe this FUD.

I understood that the Taliban was harboring Al Queda, and that Bin Laden masterminded the 9/11 attack from Afghanistan, and that attacking Afghanistan and overthrowing the Taliban to get Bin Laden was a reasonable thing to do, yes.

Do you have a different understanding?

-----"And we quite rightly went to war in Afghanistan to prevent it happening again."------

Let's get this; a load of Saudis, on the direct orders of somebody living in Germany who respods to a Yemeni, attack your country and so you bomb Afghanistan.

++ Stephen

> Let's get this; a load of Saudis, on the direct orders of somebody living in Germany who respods to a Yemeni, attack your country and so you bomb Afghanistan.

So Germany should have been held responsible and if it did not co-operate (which it did, those law-abiding mofo's), attacked?

Maybe OBL's grand-nephews in Yemen should have been taken out. Who knows. This globalization stuff's hard.

Osama's immediate family were in the US, studying. Your govt flew them out right after the twin towers went down.

The Bin Ladens are a very wealthy family in Saudi. Huge in construction etc.

The story out there is that Osama demanded his share of the wealth, and has been using that to fund his activities. Their side of the story is that they have ex-communicated him.

I guess, I don't see the point of saying he was Yemeni (which is only sorta true, no? his father was Yemeni, he was more Saudi, no?).

Afghanistan is where he was and wasn't doing anything or at least not enough to make things right. Perhaps the Americans should have given them a 90 day invoice (not 3 weeks or whatever it was) which is customary.

It's odd to think the attack on Afghanistan is in the same category of lack of justification as the one on Iraq.

Osama's mother was Syrian. After the divorce he went to live with mother and contacts with the father became minimal.

The break with the family occurred sometime in the mid-nineties when he had his Saudi citizenship rescinded. He was living in Yemen at the time.

Bin Laden company is the biggest construction company in Saudi Arabia. A nice twist to the story is that when I got back from summer holiday in 2004 I found that Bechtel had taken over all the unoccupied apartments adjacent to mine and were building a large ten foot high reinforced concrete wall around it. This kind of work was really common in Saudi that year, and caused me to quip that 9/11 was nothing more than an elaborate conspiracy by concrete manufacturers. No prizes for guessing what company was building the barriers for Bechtel. Bin Laden!

Bin Laden was a Yemeni immigrant who arrived in Jeddah and made good. His stroke of genius was that when he was asked to build a house for the king he did it at a loss, and thus ensured a permananent supply of contracts ever after, as as well as astute he was and his company remains, highly efficient. He had a fair number of wives and loads of children, who would always holiday in the West (there is a famous photo of all the young Bin Ladens on holiday in Stockholm one year). Some live permananently in the West.

The story of them being allowed to leave early after 9/11 is a simple Michael Moore lie to get at Bush (though if he had I would have considered it justified under the circumstances). The last King of Morocco was famed for imprisoning whole families - it was not one of his more endearing traits and the US has many faults but that is not one of them.

-----"It's odd to think the attack on Afghanistan is in the same category of lack of justification as the one on Iraq."----

Only because when that happened 9/11 was nearer, the spin was better, nobody liked the Taliban, and it looked for a few weeks as if it had worked.

I still think the first Gulf War was justified, but feel I should have seen the Afghan operation for the disaster it has turned into.

I think the Taliban just needed a face-saving way to turn over OBL to the Americans (the $100-200 million that OBL and the militant muhajadeen and madrassahs were briniging in was easily replaceable by the Americans). But neither party (or a third) found a solution.

As the main American goal was to cut off al-Qaeda from a base to operate from, not Afghan democracy or burka-free society, etc, .. I dunno the goal seems judicious, and it was the right country. I'm not sure what the US could have done differently besides wait a few more weeks (tactically difficult because of the coming winter).

"there is a series of loosely connected terrorist networks spread throughout the globe and numbering around 4000 people armed with guns and bombs that pose a devastating threat to our national existance."

That loosely coupled network isn't a threat to the US's continued existence. It's a threat to global capitalism modeled after the Maoist revolution in China.

The threat to the US and European national existence is the coalescence of the loosely coupled network into a force that capable of challenging nation-states. The UK bombing conducted by muslim doctors basically proves that muslim populations of all walks of life are open to the message that groups like Al-Queda are delivering.