h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I for one am much releived to find my family in London safe.

My condolences and prayers for those injured and killed and for their loved ones.

Let us be very careful how we respond though.
The point of indiscriminate revenge breeding more enemies is well made. I think we need to be careful not to sacrifice civil liberties unnecessarily. To make our lives harder and give innocent muslims in Britain a hard time is exactly what Al Qaeida want!

Rather let's try to think what they don't want us to do. Let's strengthen the bonds of friendship with the more moderate islamic nations. Let's stop selling arms to unstable regimes from whom terrorists get their weapons. Let's put more investment into rebuilding Iraq and Afghanistan and give the people there dreams to live for rather than a cause to die for.

Hear hear!

When the attack on the World Trade Center happened, my hope was that those in charge of the USA would realise that the whole thing had been triggered by their behaviour in world affairs, and adjust their perspective to include the needs of the entire plant, not just those of the USA. This proved to be a vain hope. But now my own country has been attacked, I hope that we can show ourselves to be thoughtful diplomats rather than vindictive killers.

One thing I would say though - and I apologise to those who have already read this that I've posted elsewhere - is that we should hesitate to use the term 'al-Qaeda' when talking about those responsible.

A lot of what's below I gathered from watching a three-part BBC documentary called 'The Power of Nightmares', which was where I first heard the idea that Al-Qaeda didn't exist until the West invented it.

The media generally seems to put forward the idea that there is an actual organisation called Al-Qaeda. The more I find out about it, the more sure I am that if there is, it's only a very loose series of related groups and cells and activists with no overall internal organisation or structure of command. Most of these groups who say they're related to or part of Al-Qaeda have only started doing so since the September 11th attacks on New York which is the first time the term was bandied about.

The only reason it became prominent as a name, and the whole thing was drawn to the attention of the public, was because the Americans had captured somebody and could only prosecute him if he could be proven to have been acting as part of an organisation that had the attributes mentioned above.

Therefore hearsay from a handful of prisoners and informers - the main one was later found to be unreliable and had motives for giving the Americans the information they wanted because he needed to escape certain people - was talked up into their being one huge shadowy organised organisation called Al-Qaeda with Osama bin Laden as its leader with command over the whole thing.

What I think al-Qaeda is most likely to be is an umbrella name for various groups with similar aims to gather under. There *are* terrorists. There *are* people with religious motives for doing what they're doing. Osama bin Laden probably approves of what they're doing, and in some cases was fairly likely to be involved in funding or training part of the operation.

But what I'm pretty sure there is not, is one overall single organisation called Al-Qaeda with bin Laden as the evil genius behind it all - but because we're used to the James Bond villain-esque idea, that's what we're encouraged to believe and we do because it's far easier to do that than get our hands round the actuality of the thing.

Have we ever seen anyone claiming to be the President or Secretary or Official Spokesman for al-Qaeda? No, and I'm pretty sure we never will.

British people are strong when united will not be intimadated by terroists.

It seems an unfathomably stupid thing to have done, in respect of political consequences. Although the magnitude of damage is far greater and I don't mean to belittle what has happened today, in terms of stupidity and bad publicity and consequences for the perps, it seems to be right up there with kidnapping Shergar.

Aye, i agree with all that has been said here.

But what are the broader ramifications of these attacks? What will happen at the G8 conference now? What are the ramifications for the Olympic bid? What are the consequences for the British economy? What will those consequences mean for the World Economy?

These are all questions that need to be asked, and answered.

And the most important questions of all is, what will the attacks do to public feelings on terrorism?

And who did it?

We sould not fight between each other over this we should fight terroism as a united front.

Aye, but is violence the answer?

Looking at the Madrid bombings, I think not.

Agreed but eye for an eye tooth for a tooth?

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is precisely the sort of braindead attitude that caused this whole sorry mess in the first place.

Presicely. That's what caused the Madrid bombings. It was quite simply in retaliation for Spain's involvement in the Iraq conflict.

If everyone lived by an eye for an eye, we'd all be blind. Comments like that aren't what's needed at the moment.

Best way to fight back? Go out tomorrow and do exactly what you did yesterday. The only way terrorism can work is by disrupting people's lives enough to force a change, be it in attitude, government policy, or whatever. The only way to fight back is to bury the dead, fix the damage and carry on. That might sound callous, but we're dealing with some very callous people.

Damn right. I think I might cycle to work instead of taking the tube, mind...

Given the amount of disruption there's likely to be, I don't blame you.

>>That might sound callous<<

Not at all - sounds spot on to me. I've just read Ken Livingstone's statement, which makes a similar point in admirably unemotive language - moved me a great deal.

And some won't have the choice of doing tomorrow what they did today.
Or atleast they won't if the trains aren't up and running between Amersham and Harrow.

>>Agreed but eye for an eye tooth for a tooth?<<

The last thing we need right now is more corpses.

Plus, going by that logic would force us to kill 50,000 westerners a day.


One thing that I have noticed about this attack is that Blair and co haven't come right out and said that it was al-Qaeda. Everybody thinks it, but nobody is saying it (at least not outright). This puts it in stark contrast with the Madrid bombings where the government was only too happy to blaim it on ETA to suit their political aims.

Interesting point. It could of course be that the current government doesn't know, and doesn't have anyone to blame because they can't just say that it was al-qaeda because if it turns out that it wasn't, they're going to get mullered for lying to the public again.

It was pointed out on the news programme I was watching just now that even the UNO Security Council immediately blamed ETA for the Madrid bombings, whereas they didn't mention anyone at all this time in their statement.

This post has been removed.

This post has been removed.