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War on Terrorism (Politics)
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Mick Harper
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In: London
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I get the impression he just did this pro forma to show he wasn't a wuss. I have some hopes of the man.
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Wile E. Coyote


In: Arizona
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Mick Harper wrote:
I get the impression he just did this pro forma to show he wasn't a wuss. I have some hopes of the man.


Kamala is Servalan, best let her get on with it.
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Boreades


In: finity and beyond
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😊👍
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Mick Harper
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Here's a weird one for you. Chad is one of the more strategically important countries in the world and the French and the Yanks keep pretty close tabs on it. Their man is President Idriss Déby, seventy, and in power for the last thirty years. And he's done a pretty good job (strategically). But not maybe in any other way because insurgent forces are knocking on the capital's door to such an extent that last weekend America told all its citizens to leave the country toot sweet. That does not happen very often.

Anyway, yesterday, the day after he was confirmed president for another term following the recent (boycotted) election, he has been declared dead, killed at the head of his army fighting the rebels. OK, so far, so routine. He's been bumped off and we await the emergence of the new strong man. But that's not what the world is saying. Every newsreader I have listened to for news and every expert I have listened to for views said what a shame it is that President Déby has been killed at the head of his army fighting the rebels.

All of them. Straight-face. Not even a mention of any other possibility. I dunno, I just can't work it out at all.
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Mick Harper
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It gives me no pleasure but I can confidently predict that the Taliban will take over Afghanistan some time this year. How can I make such a prediction? Well, when a population of a given country is being blown to smithereens in their thousands and blames the government for not preventing it rather than the smithereeners for causing it, there can be no other outcome.

It was the same story in Indo-China. The same unavailing attempts by the American pouring in trillions of dollars and it will be the same result -- the rebels will kill even more people after they get into power than they did in getting into power. Things will get a lot worse before they get any better. Eventually sanity will prevail but it is still better to avoid the twenty-year hiatus no matter how noxious the rebels are.

Sometimes, as in Syria, it is the government who are, as it were, the 'noxious rebels' but the lesson is always the same. Once you have a fair idea who is going to win, let them win. Don't be on the side of the good, be on the side of the inevitable.
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Mick Harper
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But the truly weird thing is that ISIS will then start smithereening the Taliban government and we will all be pro-Taliban since they are now 'the moderates' and we'll start propping them up with everything we've got. And will any of this stop us steaming into the next country where somebody is not doing what we think they ought to be doing? You betcha it won't.

The weirdest thing of all.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Biden wants to be nice to everybody in the Middle East. Realpolitik is suspended as everyone tries to figure out what this means and then tests the situation via their various proxies. Joe is getting tetchy, his supporters are getting tetchy, his enemies are having a bit of a laugh.

Joe needs to lose his reputation for being even-handed. Postponing the next set of talks with Iran would be a start.
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Mick Harper
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Giving in to the Iranians would be even better. They have done everything that has been asked of them, so why not give peace a whirl? Even the Saudis have started secret (huh!) talks with them after recognising that Iran is a regional power and, as such, is entitled to project its power regionally, the same way everybody else does. Giving them a hard time because they do it better than everyone else just makes them do it even more.
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Grant



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Won’t happen because Iran is the sworn enemy of Israel and as such must be destroyed. The way Syria must be destroyed and the way Iraq was destroyed.
Problem for old Joe is that the young members of his party don’t appreciate that the Israeli lobby is so powerful it can’t be denied. They are so in love with their new socialist religion they’ve gone all Jeremy Corbyn.
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Mick Harper
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Finally, Israel has come to its senses and appointed a true hawk as prime minister in place of namby-pamby peacenik, Netanyahu.
"I don't believe in a two-state solution," the new prime minister said. "I believe the only good Arab is a dead Arab."
"We disagree with this profoundly," said his leftist coalition partners, "and in two years when we take over the prime-ministership, we shall reverse the policy. If there are any Arabs left."
"I shall take over in four years time," Mr Netanyahu commented, "and continue the policy."
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Mick Harper
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Benny Ganz, foreign minister in both the old and new administrations, is currently in Washington for talks with the Defense Department. I have got hold of a copy of the minutes.

Benny: What have you got for us?
US: The usual. A billion pounds in military aid, same as last year.
Benny: Can you add a bit this year, we've got through a hell of a lot of hardware raining down death and destruction on Gaza.
US: It would be cheaper if we cut out the middle man and bombed the shit out of them from here using B-52's.
Benny: No, we'd prefer the cash.
US: It's your call. What was it all about this time?
Benny: We're trying to ethnically cleanse East Jerusalem and there was some push-back.
US: Sounds routine. Why the need for extra?
Benny: Well, Hamas has learned how to make rockets out of spare piping and can rain death and destruction on us for about ten dollars a throw.
US: So?
Benny: They spend ten dollars, we have to spend half-a-mil on an Iron Dome anti-missile missile. You do the math.
US: There's a cheque in the post. It'll be signed 'Biden' not 'Trump', tell your accounting department.
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Mick Harper
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Let us muse on ransomware for a moment. We can, I think, assume two things (1) there is no practical defence and (2) it's mainly coming out of Russia. First off, even if Russia could be got onside, it will make no difference since such an easy and such a lucrative crime can be perpetrated from anywhere in the wold and there is no way of definitely knowing from where. Even if it was, it would simply be endless whack-a-mole.

Second off, how to get Russia onside anyway? If you are going to spend all that effort on sanctions for his other misdemeanours Putin is hardly likely to say, "Okay, cap'n, wilco" for this one. He knows perfectly well that they can't be definitely tied to Russia (the country, I mean, not the government) so why should he bust a gut doing anything about an activity that is generally to Russia's advantage and can't be sanctioned about because nobody can really know where it's all coming from.

But this leads me back to cyber-crime generally. I've long urged that the police stop spending billions on organised crime and terrorism -- things they traditionally do, enjoy doing but don't have much success with and don't affect Joe Citizen very much -- and do the simple things like intercepting phone blaggers. Once law and order start traditionally setting up Cyber Squad! we can all look forward to a trouble free electronic future.

But we could help by outlawing legal phone blaggers. It's got like offshore banking: whatever utility it once had, it has long been outweighed a hundredfold by the dis-utility of it all.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Wile E. Coyote wrote:
Mick Harper wrote:
You still haven't told us why he shouldn't have been allowed to do all these things. He had passed all the tests you keep going on about. He would have passed all the 'improvements' that you keep going on about. I suggest it is, as your English press would put it, time to put up or shut up. Or, of course, advocate the 'keys in the river' policy.


OK so you have a ex-terrorist who has been released from prison early, his conditions say he is not allowed to travel to London. You relax this and allow him to London, and he kills 2 people at a conference, which he was attending on the rehabilitation of MAPPA cases. You will now be called to a MAPPA meeting, to find out if any mistakes have been made. The type of things they will discuss are did allowing him back to London to recount his experiences then trigger his behaviour, as he had previously spent a lot of time with his fellow jihadists planning attacks on this area. They will know this was the area he previously was obsessed with wanting to attack. Did they miss any signs that he had not been rehabilitated? Were the right professionals consulted before letting him go to London? Most probably they will consider were any increased risks to the public of his attendance, and balance this against the restriction on his rights of refusing to let him attend.

Such is the modern paradigm.



BBC wrote:
But the intelligence was never shared with Khan's probation officer nor the Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) panel that managed him in the community. MAPPA did not even know that Khan was being investigated by MI5 - one of whose officers often secretly attended the panel's meetings.


Wiley points out the obvious.

It is incredible that the MAPPA panel, who are there to manage the risk to the public, did not know. They were in effect managing the risks blind.
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Mick Harper
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What diff? It is one of those things for which a hopeless solution is preferable to an impossible question. Either we lock terrorists up for ever -- and even that means defining 'terrorists' impossibly widely -- or we take a punt and accept being blown up occasionally.

I agree with you, Wiley, that the public have to have confidence that the theoretical uttermost has been seen to be done but your demand surely runs into the objection that 'intelligence shared is intelligence made insecure'. Presumably followed by more blowings-up. Everyone is always demanding that information be shared but agencies never have and will always find ways they never will. True, it's mainly for bureaucratic advantage rather than security concerns but you have to work with the tools you have. It's not hard to picture what a Multi-Agency Anything will be: mid-level functionaries going through the motions.

Above all, this is a tiny problem. What's the death toll of released terrorists averaged out? One a year?
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Wile E. Coyote


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This is surely because, in these cases the convicted terrorist is out on early release under licence, risk managed by the highest ranking police/probation officers to protect the public.

The trouble with liberals is that they want cons released early, so they decide to risk manage them. Fair enough. The argument goes that they can always be sent back to the chokey if they start behaving in a suspicious way, eg visiting their own haunts, testing positive for class A's etc. So everyone keeps eyes on the con. Turns out in Khan's case some folks knew what was happening.....but decided to not tell the MAPPA meeting who would have banged up Khan. The story might have been that this was for operational reasons, ie they could have caught others. Fair enough.

If this is the case, the answer is clear, do not let the terrorist out early. Let him serve the sentence. Own your liberalism. Do not jeopardise public safety.
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