UK on highest alert after airport attack
 

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/europe...ert/index.html

Something to be worried about, or nothing too serious? You decide GFF!

Looks like they were a few days late in ramping up the threat level. :(

Speaking of which, will the US threat level ever got to low or whatever the lowest on the totem poll is. That is just asking for it, if it does. Why even have such a level?

Not as long as there are people out there who threaten our way of living from thousands of miles away with crude technology and tend to stick to their own area and have loose affiliation with other like minded people.


The low levels are just there to comfort our minds into thinking,'Things will get better because there is a low level threat on the threat meter.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QK5-jIfOBjQ

Not as long as maintaining a bullshit threat to "wage war against" can produce power.
Always rememer: Pool accidents, peanut allergy and deer accidents (deer meets car) have caused more deaths worldwide than terrorism.
There is no "terrorist threat". Well, as a matter of fact, there IS one, but that is SO tiny that all the fuss in the media is ridiculously blown out of proportion.
And as long as civil liberties are butchered for "freedom and safety" the terrorists win. Keep that in mind. They're fighting our way of living. And they are winning because "we" as in "our elected governments" are slowly demolishing our way of living piece by piece with the justification that it's all "to fight the terrorist threat".

I fucking laughed when I saw the front page of the Daily Mirror the other day. Underneath a picture of a car on fire: 'BRITAIN UNDER ATTACK'.

Inside, the editorial line had something like: if the police and authorities are given the power and freedom to act they can stop the terrorists. I.e. id cards and government databases are ok, keep voting Labour. Then the column finished off with Together We Can Beat This in bold letters.

I think we should round up all the old IRA terrorists and send them over to Pakistan to blow some shit up, see how they like it.

Seriously though, I think it's only a matter of time before we start seeing more anti-islamic violence in places like Bradford and Oldham. Also I guess the public's level of vigilance has slipped somewhat since the IRA's peak of bombings. Crude car bomb like the one in London wouldn't have lasted five minutes in the 90's without someone reporting it.

It's very easy for people like Tagonist to laugh off the threat of terrorism because with one notable exception, there's been fuck all in the way of terrorist attacks in the US and certainly you've not been on the wrong end of a concerted terrorist bombing campaign. Over here however, people grew up with the very real threat of being randomly blown up by the Irish and the thought of a similar, protracted campaign is not a pleasant one.

Not really a big surprise, I think those guys want to show Brown who's chief. Isn't he from Scotland?

I'm German. We had our fair share of politically motivated terrorsits (who quit doing things in the late nineties). But true, there never was anything like the IRA over here.
I wasn't talking about the terror scare in the US or anywhere specifically though.
Fact is, the terrorists DO win if we erode our civil liberties in order to prevent what? Less people dead from terror in ten years than on swiss highways in a month?
Of course, it's borderline cynical to weigh up dead people like that.
But set in relation, even taking the death toll of the IRA in account, the threat posed by terror is very, very small.
Yes, I know the arguments about islamists trying to get their hands on ABC weapons. I admit, should something like that happen, we'll all be in pretty deep shit. But so far nothing has. (And, even IF something like that happens it wouldn't really matter much for the statistic... Unless they detonate a real warhead in, say, downtown London or something...) .
Most bomb plots have been blown over before they could be executed, and the ones that did happen were at best crude attempts.
I don't think any country in the western hemisphere needs harsher laws and less civil liberties to fight terror. The laws (and erosions) which are in place already work fine.
Plus, downtown London is the place with the MOST surveillance technology in the world. And still that's the place where those supposed terrorists strike.
So surveillance tech either needs to be upped to the TOTAL extreme, or doesn't do shit in preventing terror. Yes, that is a bit oversimplified, but still.

Not that I'm a fan of all the surveilance we have here by any means but it's as a result of cctv footage and mobile phone tracking and recording that so many arrests were made so quickly. We still operate on an innocent until proven guilty theory here (as opposed to innocent until we've flown them to Egypt and had them tortured, sup special rendition) which makes pre-emptive arrests based on surveilance evidence rather unreliable, legally.

Like I say though, as a nation we're pretty vigilant which makes it a lot harder for anyone to commit these crimes.

Yes, Brown is Scottish. However, technically, so was Blair. You have to remember during the IRA attacks Scotland wasn't once a target, coupled with the last real time we were targets of terrorism was the Lockerbie disaster.

I personally think we were attacked due to the terrorist seeing Scotland as somewhat of an easy target, and I wouldn't be surprised at seeing more attacks situated outside of London.

I reckon Bradford's pretty safe though :tpg:

I was working in Edinburgh that day (it was the opening of the Scotish Parlement), I was amazed they didn't target there instead.