War on Terror – Wis[s]e Words

NSA tapped 2 million dutch phone calls in one month

Published on October 21, 20132 Comments

So it turns out the NSA managed to intercept and tap some two million Dutch phone calls in just a month. Does this come as a surprise to anyone? Our own government is already far too keen to listen in to us and is obliging telecom companies and internet providers to keep traffic data for at least six months. The Americans were supposedly doing this as part of the War on Terror, but it seems politicians, civil servants and various commercial bigwigs were also tapped. Again, not suprising that once a capability to this is in place, it will be used for other purposes.

What’s more, does anybody actually think the NSA has stopped tapping phone calls here? Or believe the Dutch government is all that keen on getting them to stop? Our secret services and police are thick as thieves with the yanks anyway; they don’t care, they just care it came out.

Those who forget their past are doomed to bullshit endlessly about it

Published on August 9, 2011

Stormie Normie Geras is one of the last of the Decent Left deadenders, still a true believer in The War Against Terror. It’s a given that when presented with an article in The Guardian calling for spending cuts in the ministry of defence he’ll won’t be totally honest in his refutation, shall we say? Misrepresenting and misreading it in the worst possible way is all very much to be expected here, but what struck me was how good Normie is at not remembering recent history when it’s inconvenient to his arguments:

Do not do anything like invading Afghanistan again. Or, as he puts it, ‘Are we, pliant planters of the Nato flag anywhere in the world the Pentagon prescribes, going to get involved in another Iraq – or, worse, another Afghanistan? Of course not, says bitter experience.’ So, were Britain ever to be on the receiving end of a 9/11-type of attack, prepared from a country hosting an organization dedicated to carrying out such attacks against it, and resulting in the deaths of thousands of people in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh or some other British city, the government of the day should just ‘pass’ on the idea of a military response.

What actually happened was that the UK invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and then the “9/11-type of attack” took place, with the people responsible explicitely stating that it was these invasions that motivated them. Something war supporters like him having been trying to wish away ever since, but the truth remains that invading “a country hosting an organization dedicated to carrying out such attacks” did not make Britain safer but instead made it a target for people who before these invasions had no reason to attack Britain. Note also that the UK never found it necessary to invade the Irish Republic to end IRA terrorism or attack the main source of its funding, a certain terrorist loving country called America…

The military wing of melanie phillips

Published on July 24, 20112 Comments

The guys at Blood and Treasure are discussing the Norway Attacks and how the ideology behind it sounds so familiar. Ken MacLeod sums up:

Familiar indeed. ‘Cultural Marxism’, the Frankfurt School, feminism and political correctness as the root of the problem, the EU apparat as its enforcer, Muslim immigration and terrorism as its consequence or indeed as its weapon … now where have we heard these ideas before?

An ideology for justifying violence against racial minorities, the Left and the labour movement has been developing in plain sight, rather than in the underworld of NSDAP re-enactors. And it overlaps mainstream right-wing thinking.

There have warnings that this sort of atrocity would happen sooner or later in Europe. It’s not just the rhetoric that came along in the wake of the The War Against Terror, but also a slew of incidents in which rightwing extremists were caught with enough explosives to kill a small town, or massing guns, or with chemical warfare equipment, largely going unreported in the media. Remember the ex-BNP members and their weapons cache that nobody wanted to call terrorists? In the last decade there has been a climate in which Islamophobia and fear of “Eurabia”, the susposed clash of civilisations have become mainstream, in that these are no longer extreme opinions to hold, but arguments that can be seriously debated by serious mainstream commentators. In that climate, when day in day out you have certain politicians (Wilders not being the last example to come to mind and loonies in the media foaming at the mouth about the life and death struggle “Islam” and “the west” are locked into, it should not come as a surprise one of the internet hard men ranting about striking a blow for civilisation actually did.

That Osama killing

Published on May 2, 20111 Comment

Slightly suspicious, isn’t it? Suddenly, after a decade of failure Osama Bin Laden is found conveniently in a compound in Pakistan, an American special forces team is flown in and manage to subdue Osama after a brief firefight, then executed him, dumping his body in the sea on their way back. It all seems tailor made for conspiracy theorists.

Which shouldn’t distract from the main question: why not take him alive and let him stand trial for his crimes? The stupider sort of American may believe this is justice, but it remains a revenge killing that shows how of little value America’s supposed ideals are when things get tough. This looks like a triumph for America but instead it is an act of fear — a truly strong country would find the strength to put its enemies on trial.

UPDATE: come to think of it, having Osama executed in this way makes Khadaffi’s accusations of NATO trying to kill him and his family that more plausible.

What an asshole

Published on February 23, 2010

Ian McEwan talks about his novel Saturday and the confrontation at the heart of it between his protagonist, nice upper middleclass neurosurgeon Henry Perowne and the villain of the piece, Baxter, which is symbolic of some greater confrontation:

IMcE: Let’s put it this way: I am not writing an allegory here. I am not making Henry stand for something. But, nevertheless, just a little or maybe a lot below the surface in his confrontation with Baxter is an echo of the confrontation of the rich, satisfied, contented West with a demented strand of a major world religion.

As you know Bob, the plot of Saturday takes place on Saturday, 15 Februari 2003, the day two million people marched through London against the War on Iraq, but which none of the characters in the book joined, even the vaguely antiwar ones, because they all had something better to do. The march only features as the catalyst that brings Henry and Baxter together in their not quite symbolic, symbolic confrontation and in several minor encounters which are only there do drive McEwan’s point home that going on an antiwar march is a deeply unserious thing to do. That McEwan indeed intended the confrontation between villain and protagonist to be symbolic — “an echo” — of the War on Terror (as viewed bya a middleaged bedwetting upper middle class writer fearful of the loss of his priviledges) is no more than the rank icing on a rotten cake. Christ, what an asshole.