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

What do I consider rhetoric?

"We know Bin Laden is guilty of other stuff - so lets get him anyway"

"Palestinians are celebrating on the streets"

"This is a wake-up call for the US"

"Terrorists declare war on the US"

"...cowardly attack..." (I am sorry, but 12 or more people on suicide missions are all sorts of things, obsessed, manic, inhuman even, but not cowards).

There is much more like this. Grief - I don't need t tell you that words are powerful tools of destruction.

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***B

AS a Canadian it has been an 'interesting' day of 'media watching' from the newsroom of one of Canada's TV stations in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Firstly, our CBC network has been refusing to carry all the random and uneditted CNN bits full of speculation and fear mongering. Our equivalent of the BEEB just keeps repeating the early long range footage of the towers burning.
The network I work for (Global TV) concentrated on the effect of having all the international flights that would have landed throughout the US today (thousands!) being diverted to Canada with orders for everyone to stay aboard until every passenger could be checked and cleared of the possibility of being part of a 'second wave'.
The passengers are not being told why they are sitting at the end of an abandoned runway, beside dozens of other 'foreign' aircraft, at tiny airports that normally see only see a dozen or so domestic flights daily and have no customs or many police officers.
The logistics of feeding them and finding shelter for them when they are 'cleared' is an ongoing nightmare.
We had 80 planes on the tarmac in Halifax at noon today, 70 in St. John's Nfld and at least thirty were still circling offshore. Even these airports, which do normally handle perhaps a half dozen international flights per day can't deal with this.
But rumours of a plane being shot down by US jets near Philly are still running wild...
Two Korean planes, had a narrow escape near Alaska, when they refused or were unable to respond to NORAD waving them off. Fortunately they were both intercepted by Canadian F-18's and guided to Whitehorse in the Yukon, where they will no doubt spend the night at the end of an abandoned runway (surrounded by the town's only two Mounties - with rusty submachine guns), wondering in untranslatable Korean "why us?".
peace
jwf

People say all sorts of things about the people who hijacked those plains. However, nobody knows who they were or what went on in their minds. I suspect that human motivations are generally too poorly understood for there to be any chance that anybody actually said something accurate about the guilty parties here. It's easy to call people evil, insane and cowardly. It's less easy to understand what drives people to do such things. I think to end terrorism we have to understand why it happens in the first place. Address the cause, not the effect - the disease, not the symptom. What has led up to these events? That's what we need to figure out. Rhetoric has nothing to do with that ... it's about creating a certain perception that then makes people react in a knee-jerk fashion.

Now, it seems that the fifth plane was a Korean Air Lines plane en route to Alaska that was forced down to land by the Canadian Air Force in the Yukon when an emergency beacon was accidentally triggered.

There has also been some initial speculation on the date being intentional, since September 11 translates to 911, the number for emergency services here in America. But I think that has died down now.

ok- about the plane crash near Philly- it was not shot down. It is suspected that it's target was camp david and the pilot brought it down in a non-populated area (a forest) so as not to kill any more innocent people on the ground.
There are so many rumors going around about this all it is hard to keep them straight.

jwf -

One of the many things I was wondering about was how Canada was coping with a large number of international planes landing at almost no notice. Thank you for telling us.

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***B

>>Address the cause, not the effect - the disease, not the symptom. What has led up to these events? That's what we need to figure out.<<

Just look at the targets. The WTC, centre of 'US/world' commerce and the Pentagon, symbol of American military might.

No one will probably ever know for sure 'who' did it, but when you consider the deadly simple message sent by targetting those two symbols of US world domination - then perhaps more effort will go into understanding 'why' and doing something about it besides revenge.

peace
jwf

Well put, jwf.

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***B

I fear this ... the USA will want to dominate the world now more than ever, politicians will become even more power-hungry as they become more paranoid, and will try to exploit this event and milk it for all its worth.

Somebody, please tell me I'm wrong.

Well, I wonder if I am over-reacting, I fear I am not, but I fear WWIII. I've heard on the news that there have been 'blasts' in Afghanistan, nothing to do with us, say the Americans, but i am tempted to say 'yeah, right'. Face it, Dubya isn't known for his brain power - so he'll want to have a testosterone smelling contest, a 'p*****g' contest I believe that they call it.

Sorry, Grief, I don't think you are wrong.

176645

The report on the blast in Kabul is that it is the work of rebels within the country. Their leader was seriously injured (killed?) in an attack by Taliban Government forces yesterday.

Well, whatever, the attacks on Afghanistan and the speculations around them are certainly not helping matters. And there's a fairly good chance that, even if they haven't been bombed by the Americans yet, they soon will be.

Just like Tripoli

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***B

Well lets just hope that the response is measured. It will take time to sift the evidence and to work out who is responsible and what can be done. 24/7 media coverage pushing a line for retaliation (they're getting bored of showing just the images and want to move the agenda on somewhere) will not help matters.

However I fear you are right and that somebody will wake up to find that they've just been bombed. Just like that Sudanese "chemical weapons" factory that was attacked after the US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. You know, that factory that actually made all the regions pharmaceuticals.

what will happen if we never find out? will we just pick someone we aren't on good terms with at the moment? or might we actually learn something from it? somehow i agree that if we do, it will be about security or military, not a deeper solution.

RE the choosing of the date - September the 11th 2001 is the one-year anniversary of the S11 anti-capitalism/globilisation protests in Melbourne.

I don't know details about this, save to say they were protesting against globalistaion...could this have something to do with the attack on the WTC, a symbol of capitalism?

I agree that it's a bit unlikely, but it was suggested to me by a friend, so I'd thought I'd chuck it in for discussion.

Also - the choosing of the time...and I fear I could be starting a whole lot of useless speculation here - why 8:48? Not everyone would have been at work...would they? Or I s'pose if they were aiming for 9am, that's when most people would have been there, so they were attempting to kill as many people as possible. Horrendous. Thoughts on this?

It could be that they were constrained to pick that time because they would have a larger choice of "weapons" taking off at that time.

Isn't Sept. 11 also the anniversary of the Camp David Accord (do I remember that correctly?).

SC

Let me share my thoughts:

-That people are saying, "Let's get Bin Laden" doesn't frighten me very much. That's a visceral, gut reaction from people who need someone to blame, and if someone in authority had said, "We have positive proof that the Canadian Prime Minister ordered these attacks," rest assured that Canadian flags would be burning tonight, just as people are cursing Afghanistan, the Taliban, and Mr. Bin Laden right now.

-I rather doubt that Bin Laden is behind this. I agree with a commentator on CBS who said that this is a giant step up from what Bin Laden's organization has alledgedly done in the past. This was a coordinated, well planned, well funded, intelligent surgical strike at our centers of power. Up to this, all they've been able to pull off were car bombs and boat bombs, which are reasonably simple to do.

-Keep in mind that 2403 people died in the Pearl Harbor attack, most of whom were servicemen who signed on to put their lives in danger for this country. What happened yesterday killed perhaps thousands of civilians who posed no direct threat to any country.

-The word "cowardly," in my opinion, refers not to the people who actually carried out the attack. Rather, it refers to the terrorist leaders who prefer to carry out sneak attacks against defenseless civilians rather than standing up and airing their complaints in a way that allows for dialogue and compromise, and who hide in such a way that their enemy can't attack them without serious political backlash. In this way, Mr. Bin Laden could be considered a coward because he hides behind the Taliban and the Afghan people while allgedly promoting anti-U.S. activities.

-Finally, whoever attacked the U.S. made one mistake. They probably believe that the divided nature of U.S. politics means that they will be safe from retaliation indefinitely. But the U.S., far from being a toothless animal, is rather like a leashed attack dog. Outside of strictly defined boundaries (such as attacking civilians, assassinating heads of state, torture, biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare, and putting our ground troops in needless risk), the U.S. is unable to do anything. But get within the radius of our leash, and we can and will maul you to a very quick and painful death. Incidents like this only serve to lengthen the leash, and terrorists don't seem to realize that. The U.S. people were content to let acts of terror happen in other countries if only a dozen or so Americans die. But killing thousands on our own territory raises the bar of what we find as an acceptable response. If this is the work of another country, I expect something up to an invasion of ground troops, something we've been very reluctant to do in the last decade.

Wampus