Terrorism in the USA:threat & response

[carl]

If you go back 100 years you can see the same type of thing happening, disenchanted people in various parts of the world blowing up innocents. They were the Anarchists. People calling themselves Anarchists killed a US President, set off a bomb on Wall Street killing dozens, knocked off a Tsar etc etc etc.

This is an article I found about the Anarchists. It was written in 2009. It could have been written yesterday.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...s-1801195.html

The article contains these words about the motivations of the Anarchists then and the Jihadists now:

But neither had a very clear picture of what the world would look like after the smoke from their bombs had cleared. Their visions of the future were vague: both no-state and the caliphate were hazy hope-dreams. Below and beneath them, there were deep structural similarities.

Both groups believed their violence was justified by the larger illegitimate state violence they witnessed as young men.

They justified their attacks to themselves by claiming they were trying to give the wealthy, or the West, a taste of how "their people" felt. Yet in both movements, intriguingly, it was largely middle class intellectuals who turned to violence.

There is a lot more in the article. I was impressed. What we are seeing doesn't seem to be all that new in its essence. It may be new that the impulse is being given a slightly, only slightly, more coherent political direction by groups like AQ this time around.

One thing I noted during the manhunt for white hat was they got nowhere until they told the people of Boston they could move around, then white hat got made seemingly within minutes. So the authorities in Boston, by locking down the city, deprived themselves of millions of eyes to help in the search. When they availed themselves of those eyes things went much better.

I know why they did it, they were afraid that white hat had a suicide belt and they didn't want to chance it. But they could find him until they chanced it. That is something that will have to be considered in the future.