Category Archives: 9/11 & Aftermath

The BBC reports thirty-seven deaths confirmed so far in today's London bombings.

Here's a piece of Glyn Maxwell's story, towards the beginning of The Sugar Mile, of the bombs falling on London sixty-odd years ago (and no, I'm not planning on making a habit of poetry in this blog):

Everyone's come to look at where we were.
There's nothing to see, though, is there, Julie. There,
there. I say it to you but you're not crying
    I'm the one.

You're the one not doing a single thing
but looking at your fingers, I'm the one.
Everyone's come to look at our old home
    when it's too late

for visits. Should have been there yesterday.
Given you lemonade we did have plenty.
Didn't think I'd cry, it's not as if I'm
    at the pictures,

it's just that I loved that house it's never sunk in.
It never has. Mrs. Piper, she was digging
yesterday and she said for Victory
    poor old Jule.

Look, there's Joey Stone. I knew he'd come.
Nothing's happened to him. I had this dream.
There's the silver balloons, are they just there
    to say hello?

Halloo, silver balloons. Can you lift us up
and put us down in a bluebell field of sheep
high in the mountains? We want to hitch a ride,
    me and my sis,

if that's your destination. What did you say?
What did you say there, Jule? The Crystal County?
You heard her. The Crystal County, silver balloons,
    at the double!

Remember that rise to “orange alert” back in in the 2003 holiday season? The one that disrupted international flights? The one based on well-hyped “credible” threats and “credible sources” (Official: Credible threats pushed terror alert higher)? The one where Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the information suggested “an attack on the United States and the United States' interests — both within the United States and outside — is imminent”?

Well, it turns out that the whole thing was just a big mistake.

All that “chatter” that caused the Bush Keystone Kops to panic was actually just … a fantasy:

senior U.S. officials now tell NBC News that the key piece of information that triggered the holiday alert was a bizarre CIA analysis, which turned out to be all wrong.

CIA analysts mistakenly thought they'd discovered a mother lode of secret al-Qaida messages. They thought they had found secret messages on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language television news channel, hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the “crawl,” where news headlines are summarized.

But of course, in fact it was no such thing. And even Ridge himself now admits that it was pretty nutty. (His exact words are “Bizarre, unique, unorthodox, unprecedented.”)

You can't make this stuff up. Not sober, anyway.

PS. Why are we still on “yellow alert”? Not to mention that the whole concept is moronic.

Meanwhile get your parody terror alert systems here

From Amnesty International's Report 2005:

The USA continued to hold hundreds of foreign detainees without charge or trial in the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The refusal of the US authorities to apply the Geneva Conventions to the detainees and to allow detainees access to legal counsel or the courts violated international law and standards and caused serious suffering to detainees and their families. The ruling by the US Supreme Court in June that the US courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the lawfulness of such detentions appeared to be a step towards restoring the rule of law for the detainees, but the US administration sought to empty the ruling of any real meaning in order to keep the detainees in legal limbo. The USA also failed to clarify the fate or whereabouts of detainees that it held in secret detention in other countries.

Such serious abuses carried out by a country as powerful as the USA created a dangerous climate. The US administration’s unilateralism and selectivity sent a permissive signal to abusive governments around the world. There is strong evidence that the global security agenda pursued since 11 September 2001, the US-led “war on terror”, and the USA’s selective disregard for international law encouraged and fuelled abuses by governments and others in all regions of the world.

In many countries, new doctrines of security continued to stretch the concept of “war” into areas formerly considered law enforcement, promoting the notion that human rights can be curtailed when it comes to the detention, interrogation and prosecution of “terrorist” suspects.

The “security excuse”, whereby governments curtailed and abused human rights under the cloak of the “war on terror”, was particularly apparent in a number of countries in Asia and Europe. For example, thousands of members of the ethnic Uighur community were arrested in China as “separatists, terrorists and religious extremists”. In Gujarat, India, hundreds of members of the Muslim community continued to be held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. In Uzbekistan, the authorities rounded up and detained hundreds of people said to be devout Muslims or their relatives, and sentenced many people accused of “terrorism-related” offences to long prison terms following unfair trials. In the USA, there have been reprehensible attempts by officials to argue that torture was not torture, or that the USA bore no responsibility for torture carried out in other countries, even if it had sent the victim there.

Former Homeland Security Czar Tom Ridge Defends Color-Coded Alert System.

Yellow alert forever?