. . . five Scumbags of Interest with respect to the London bombings.

Posted by: Attila at 04:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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They were there, but with all the intelligence gaps we've been looking through a glass darkly. And now (almost), face to face.

Via Goldstein.

Posted by: Attila at 02:33 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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. . . the video (at Political Teen) of Christopher Hitchens hitting Ron Reagan, Jr., with a rolled-up newspaper.

It was the finest of guilty pleasures; Hitchens is a lefty I love to love.

Posted by: Attila at 08:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Holy shit.

I hope this is just British hysteria, a la all those bogus Jack the Ripper letters in the 19th century. I'm going to assume some joker just sent a prank warning.

But it's very worrisome.

UPDATE: It looks like most of the suspicious packages have been dealt with, and it was just the "centre" of the city that had to be evacuated. So there have been confused tourists heading back to their hotels much too early—not a bad tradeoff for public safety.

I'd still like to hear what happened to that last suspicious item.

Authorities are stressing that this isn't connected with events in London, but I'm not sure they wouldn't say that anyway.

UPDATE: Looks like everyone is safe and sound, but some people did have to sleep outside. That last package was determined to be harmless.

The authorities defend the incident by saying their intelligence was "specific," and "credible."

Posted by: Attila at 05:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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That's my new idea for supporting Britain. It's shallow, it's fun, and it involves spending money. What could be better?

For the next four weeks I intend to buy as many British products as possible. Especially Tanqueray Ten gin and Twinings Earl Grey tea. I'll replace my Ketel One vodka with Three Olives, and load up on mustard, chutney, marmalade, and lemon curd.

(For a crime writer, Colman's mustard is a two-fer: Dorothy L. Sayers headed up one of Colman's most successful advertising campaigns before she quit advertising altogether to devote herself to writing mysteries.)

Maybe next winter I'll even buy a bottle of Bushmills, though I tend to prefer Jameson, because it's Irish Irish. (And I don't drink whiskey during the summer, because that's a yucky thing to do: summer calls for gin or vodka drinks. Just like I would never wear high heels with shorts, because that's too slutty even for me.)

Gluttonous lushes of the world, unite and support the British in whatever way you can.

Posted by: Attila at 01:59 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
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will it be confusing to schoolchildren that on 7/4 they are supposed to celebrate our liberation from the wicked English, and on 7/7 they are supposed to feel bad that some people living in England were killed?

"The ones we killed in the 1770s were bad Englishmen. The ones that got killed in 2005 were good Englishmen. The ones that burned the first White House in 1812 were very bad Englishmen indeed. The ones that oppressed the Irish . . . can you guess? I'll bet you know the answer to that one, right?"

I hope my kids grow up fast enough that I can bring some nuance into the discussion. I'm especially looking forward to explaining "blowback" as it relates to international diplomacy. The discussion of the Hitler-Stalin pact will be fun. My daughter will learn to block out the sound of my voice, just as I blocked out my own mother's voice as she discussed mathematical principles.

Posted by: Attila at 01:15 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Malkin's tracking the investigation. Naturally, she includes tart observations about dangerous individuals who were allowed to remain in London despite their terrorist ties.

Posted by: Attila at 01:06 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I've heard radically different estimates of how many terrorist plots get foiled every year. It's almost impossible to measure such a thing, and if you did you'd have trouble breaking it down by target country.

Lair has a problem with the "we are all Londoners" meme that so many of us indulged in yesterday (including me). After all, he points out, that means we in the West have to switch nationalities every time there's a successful attack. Sure, it's silly (though I'm sentimental that way).

What we all are, he asserts, is infidels. Correct. And "infidel," by the way, encompasses a lot of Muslims: at least two of the train stations selected were near neighborhoods inhabited predominantly by Muslims.

Measuring how many of these plots are thwarted gets snarled up if you try to figure out which "infidels" they are aimed at. After all, AQ and its allies are perfectly willing to substitute one Western target for another.

The point is, the cells are being rolled up continually, on every continent. California Mafia has an update on the cell in Lodi. It sounds like a joke, until you think of how close Lodi is to Sacramento, and how central it is to the U.S.'s most populated state. Shipping, agriculture, the state government: all were within reach.

Comparing the horror of London yesterday with what these motherfuckers "accomplished" in Madrid leaves one underwhelmed—and almost makes me understand those Brits in the pubs yesterday afternoon, yawning bravely and asking if that was all the terrorists had before ordering another warm beer.

It was a failure. The terrorists brought a knife to a gun fight. We know that their ability to pull these things off depends upon their resources: they will always go for the biggest target, the greatest symbolism, and the highest body count. It was a tiny bloodbath, not even in the same league with 3/11 in Madrid.

Even 9/11 was a failure, measured against its goals: AQ meant to bomb the Capitol building, but failed. Its supposedly brilliant planners hoped that the WTC towers would fall over, and on top of other buildings in the financial district. Most analysts agree that the White House was the initial target of the plane that hit the Pentagon: the hijackers hadn't realized how hard it is to see the White House from the air.

The 9/11 attack was supposed to kill tens or hundreds of thousands, not several thousand. And the U.S. government was supposed to be decapitated, with both the Capitol building and the White House in ruins.

These guys are far from defeated, but they grow weaker every year. It will take many more years, but we are winning.

We are.

Posted by: Attila at 12:50 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Via Goldstein, the Stratfor brief everyone's talking about. This details a rumor within the intelligence community to the effect that Blair's government knew in advance about the subway bombings. This is being spun furiously by moonbats and Buchananites alike.

The problem? There are two versions of this rumor: in the first, UK authorities told the Israelis about the terrorist attacks minutes before they actually occurred, and in the second version, the Israelis tipped the British off a few days earlier.

Obviously, it's unlikely that both are true, and extraordinarily unlikely that UK security knew anything actionable before this happened. (Sure there might have been one of those memos like the one Condi Rice got grilled about by the 9/11 Commission, which essentially said, "Bin Ladin would like to strike here in the States somewhere, sometime. You betcha.")

This sounds a lot like a combo plate: a little bit of "Blair knew!" with some "the Jooos did it!" on the side.

We're missing the Masons and the Trilateral Commission, but they'll pop up sooner or later.

Posted by: Attila at 09:55 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Political Teen has the video of his statement. He's clearly fighting to control his emotions; you can tell by the cadence of his speech. Other than that, he keeps the stiff upper lip.

Sully is so shaken up that he hasn't posted about gay marriage all day. Go to his site, though: there's wonderful stuff on the British reaction, and that strange stoicism that put a lot of Britons into pubs today, assiduously following sports. The sportscasters didn't mention the bombing, and the games weren't called off: it's just the quiet British way of telling the terrorists to get fucked.

Posted by: Attila at 09:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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From a Protein Wisdom commenter comes this map of the explosion sites.

Posted by: Attila at 03:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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If, as one must suspect, these bombs are only the first, then Britain will start to undergo the same tensions—between a retreat to insularity and clannishness of the sort recently seen in France and Holland, and the self-segregation of the Muslim minority in both those countries—that will start to infect other European countries as well. It is ludicrous to try and reduce this to Iraq. Europe is steadily becoming a part of the civil war that is roiling the Islamic world, and it will require all our cultural ingenuity to ensure that the criminals who shattered London's peace at rush hour this morning are not the ones who dictate the pace and rhythm of events from now on.

Always nice to hear from one of the few remaining intellectually honest leftists in the world.

After the Rodney King verdict there were riots in Los Angeles. My boyfriend—now my husband—called me and told me to stay put that night. I did, and I watched television all evening to stay on top of what was going on. (That was before the internet was widely available, at least in its present form.)

The next day I figured out how to take the freeway around the center of the city. I swung by work to collect my papers and headed to Glendale, where Attila the fiance lived. It wasn't clear how long the riots were going to last, so I went to Vons that afternoon to stock up on food. Although Glendale wasn't too close to the center of the city, we were going to stay inside until we saw actual law and order in L.A.

It was a scary time: a few homeowners in the Bohemian part of Venice had resisted the cultural pressure to not own guns. A few of these people took up posts on their roofs to keep the mostly black hoodlums from invading their homes.

In Koreatown, closer to the center of events, grocery store owner used bags of rice as sandbags to create perimeters around their businesses. These people had military-issue rifles, and each store had at least two men guarding it.

At Vons I got enough staples to last a few days. The line was very long; I could tell it would take around 45 minutes to get out of there. (And I'm an American: five minutes is a long time to wait for the checker in the grocery store.) In the meantime I talked to a black woman about what a terrible situation we were in. No one mentioned race, because it was understood then that the problem was hoodlums versus civilized people.

And so it is with muslims: the vast majority are decent, but those who are must be willing to condemn those who want to bring Western Civilization down.

There is no room for waffling, here. AQ wants to take us back to the 12th century.

And I'm not going.

You might want to take this moment to choose sides.

Posted by: Attila at 02:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I hope I'm being clear.

Posted by: Attila at 01:30 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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1 Quite eloquent.

Posted by: jody at July 07, 2005 08:14 PM (uWBw8)

2 Perfectly clear:-)

Posted by: Heather at July 07, 2005 08:18 PM (nafy6)

3 100% true. fuck them all the cunts

Posted by: MARVEL at July 21, 2005 08:43 AM (qeRgj)

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Well, Britain.

And Britain is a very different place from Spain. As Al Qaeda is about to find out.

Goldstein has the roundup of roundups, so he's an excellent place to start.

My mother-in-law lived through the bombing of London during WWII as a young woman, and nearly lost her life. My husband and his siblings were adults before they figured out why she became tense every time pots and pans clanked together—or got dropped—in the kitchen.

I slept late today, and when I woke up I logged in and saw what had happened. My first thought was AQ.

I started some tea, and my husband came up the stairs. "They bombed London."

"I saw."

"In a way, it was a good target, because of G8."

"But it's the British. This might prove to be a big mistake."

"It probably will."

Today we are all British, except for the mealy-mouthed politicians who are already suggesting that this bad thing happened because we made the poor misunderstood terrorists mad.

What, exactly, had New York and Washington done to make them mad before 9/11?

Greyhawk:

An attack on a nation hosting the leaders of the civilized world certainly sends a message, after all. A carefully considered reply delivered soon would be appropriate.

Fuck, yeah.

Posted by: Attila at 01:13 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday, Mr. President.
Happy birthday to you.

Thanks for messing with people's minds, W.

(And don't forget to pray for him. That site, BTW, is NSFMPF [Not Safe For My Pagan Friends—Christian content. BEWARE!].)

Posted by: Attila at 11:30 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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1 Good thing for a Not Safe for Pagans warning. I would have melted.

Posted by: Ciggy at July 07, 2005 06:24 AM (Ru8KL)

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When I heard about Abu Ghraib, I thought it was a few isolated incidents. And I winked at Gitmo's abuses, because, well—detainees there are rumored to actually gain weight before they leave.

But prison ships; I hadn't heard of these being used since the revolutionary War, when thousands of privateers were held in squalor in New York Harbor by the British. It's inhumane, and I just don't know if I can go on making excuses for this kind of thing.

This could be a turning point for me.

Posted by: Attila at 11:35 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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A week or two ago, I finished America's Secret War, by George Friedman. It was a lovely book: insightful enough to be interesting, and wonky enough that I could use it to read myself to sleep with confidence. (The next day, I'd have to re-read the parts I'd read at night while the ambien was kicking in, but so what?)

Check it out.

Posted by: Attila at 11:56 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The FBI may have just broken up a terrorist cell in Lodi, California. Yes: that Lodi. Yipes. Or, rather: Oh, Lord.

Posted by: Attila at 11:12 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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remains barren; the bureaucrats who are haggling about how to proceed might want to read this Wall Street Journal article.

Posted by: Attila at 03:03 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Hindrocket has an excellent digest of a Melanie Phillips speech over at Power Line. Phillips is a British writer who points out that the West's responses to terrorism play into the hands of those who would harm us.

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