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Actually, I seem to recall that the al Qaeda organisation have several clearly-expressed and defined goals, not to do with destroying America but rather demanding American withdrawal from the Middle East - not supporting Israel, pulling out of Saudi and so on (don't have a list to hand at the moment but I'll look for one). Which stands to reason. People don't often form and particularly support paramilitary groups without a physical and relatively immediate cause. You could take neo-Nazis as an example of this; there are a very few around who actively work towards a world-wide race war, and quite a few who would like one or see it as inevitable, but the majority of neo-Nazi action (political and physical) is aimed at immediate targets like immigrants.
However, it's clearly not a good tactic for the US administration to suggest that "terrorists" might not be irrational, since it doesn't give them a free hand, and it doesn't suit their goal of promoting the idea that all terrorists are al Qaeda and al Qaeda are all terrorists (terrorists being people who oppose US interests, of course). It's the same as insisting that Palestinian violence is a product of a desire to see the Jews driven into the sea and has nothing to do with, say, the occupation of Palestine - they're all mad fanatic homicide bombers. It's also a tactic that is used against any opposition, in a more limited sense. Europeans who criticise Israel or the US are actually only expressing self-hatred over the Holocaust, or envy, or whatever. Democrats and liberals, similarly, are acting out self-loathing. Not really a new tactic, but I think helped by the permeation of psychobabble throughout the modern media.
Anyway, planes: I flew back to Philly yesterday on BA from Heathrow and to be honest, it wasn't much different from usual. Check-in was a nightmare as usual but mostly because people don't know how to use the express check-in machines. I got through security in a few minutes (I'm getting very quick at going through metal detectors, though, and they're much quicker at Heathrow than in any of the US airports I've been through). Immigration took bloody ages to get through but mostly because the immigration officer was bloody useless; other queues were going down ten times quicker.
I did have to get fingerprints taken and stand in front of a webcam, though, which I hate, and is utterly pointless. It will have as much effect on security as banning nailfiles. I can't even really see the point of it from a paranoid they-are-after-our-civil-liberties point of view - it's purely for show. In fact, at the moment I assume that *every* terrorist alert is purely for show, to justify the latest change in the alert level or just to maintain the general level of fear and paranoia that is essential to maintaining domestic support for the administration's actions, and until I see some actual evidence I am going to assume that this is exactly the same. There never actually seems to be any at all, from the start of this whole affair. |
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