Tuesday, July 19, 2005
FACING GREAT EVIL
Michael Ledeen at NRO:
And while we're on the subject of battlefields, from the Times:
So, police have been reduced to tailing individual jihadists and desperately trying to shoot at the last moment, just before one detonates a device. Or the police "leaked" this story as a way to get the word out in an attempt to get each jihadist to circumscribe his own behavior closely, perhaps counting on the potentially suicidal or bomb placing fellow being dissuaded from undertaking any "action" out of a fear that he might well find himself getting shot and dying without being able to kill any infidels.
Better than detaining them, after all. For, presumably, those approaches don't "undermine 800 years of British jurisprudence". ¶ by Robert, Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Michael Ledeen at NRO:
. . . George Orwell got it just right when, in the winter of 1940, he bitterly observed "highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." He knew what his countrymen, and most of the intellectual elite of the West, have relegated to a quiet intellectual closet: that Hitler and Mussolini had created monstrous mass movements in two of the most civilized, and most cultured countries in Europe. The Duce and the Fuhrer were wildly popular in the countries of Dante and Vivaldi, Beethoven and Goethe; they were not the products of some alien culture. They sprang from the most profound beliefs and passions of the highest cultures in the world (and those passions and beliefs spread to France and England, as well as to central and eastern Europe), which is why there was hardly any effective popular resistance in fascist Europe. The great evil was only abandoned by the Europeans when it was defeated on the battlefield. . .
And while we're on the subject of battlefields, from the Times:
UNDERCOVER police sniper squads are tracking as many as a dozen Al-Qaeda suspects because security services fear they could be planning more suicide attacks, writes David Leppard.
The covert armed units are under orders to shoot to kill if surveillance suggests that a terror suspect is carrying a bomb and he refuses to surrender if challenged.
The deployment of the teams in the past week signals the huge “intelligence gap” that has opened up since the London bombings.
Police fear the suspects could be planning a further wave of attacks but do not have enough evidence to arrest them, or place them under the government’s new anti-terror control orders. . .
The covert armed units are under orders to shoot to kill if surveillance suggests that a terror suspect is carrying a bomb and he refuses to surrender if challenged.
The deployment of the teams in the past week signals the huge “intelligence gap” that has opened up since the London bombings.
Police fear the suspects could be planning a further wave of attacks but do not have enough evidence to arrest them, or place them under the government’s new anti-terror control orders. . .
So, police have been reduced to tailing individual jihadists and desperately trying to shoot at the last moment, just before one detonates a device. Or the police "leaked" this story as a way to get the word out in an attempt to get each jihadist to circumscribe his own behavior closely, perhaps counting on the potentially suicidal or bomb placing fellow being dissuaded from undertaking any "action" out of a fear that he might well find himself getting shot and dying without being able to kill any infidels.
Better than detaining them, after all. For, presumably, those approaches don't "undermine 800 years of British jurisprudence". ¶ by Robert, Tuesday, July 19, 2005
