Comments on: London Incidents Update

By: Had Pami

Had Pami — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:24:02 +0000

http://www.livejournal.com/users/dfrankfurter/64019.html

By: Andrew Gray

Andrew Gray — Sat, 23 Jul 2005 00:44:51 +0000

Rupert: On 7 July, half of the police forces in the UK had cancelled all leave to send people up north, to Edinburgh and Perthshire, four hundred miles from London; that area of Scotland was pretty solidly blue due to the G8 summit and associated things. So even before a major terrorist incident in the capital, they were pretty tightly stretched at the time… and then in the followup, this is the first major incident for a long time. A lot of blank cheques get signed, a lot of material is put aside to deal with the “immediate business”… so whatever spare resources you have, great or small, will likely end up being absorbed by the current investigation, because it seems so vitally important.

Edward: For the matter of “safe zones”, note Scotland during the IRA campaigns; aside from a few small incidents, all the mainland attacks were targeted explicitly at England…

Incidentally, I think the expression either is or was “tell it to the horse marines”, which adds a nice touch of surreality…

By: c

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:34:46 +0000

You never seen pictures of the Germans in the Baltic. That were flowers but they were also real liberators, atleast if you were Estonian. Unlike the Americans and their quest for oil

By: Bob B

Bob B — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 18:22:39 +0000

As I recall it from the web back in March 2003, American troops were going to be cheered all the way as liberators after they applied a bit of the Shock and Awe to invade Iraq.

What went wrong?

Part of the problem might just be that “Shock and Awe” used to be called “Blitzkrieg” in c. 1940 and many folk in Europe didn’t take to that either.

By: Saif

Saif — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 17:08:32 +0000

Most of the 25000 killed were done to death by fellow muslims. It is a calumny to suggest they were all killed by UK/US forces.

By: Edward

Edward — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 15:27:14 +0000

Latest news is that they have released the two men detained yesterday, so all four are apparently still on the loose. I say apparently since something unusual does still seem to be happening at UC hospital, and clearly police will want to leave as much doubt as possible in the minds of those still at large.

By: Bob B

Bob B — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:21:13 +0000

“Pathetic…; in the meantime the entire British populace is kept distracted from the fact that Tony Blair lied to all the British people about the danger posed by Iraq.”

Not just to the British people:

“Speaking at the G8 summit in Evian [in June 2003], Mr Blair said he stood ‘100%’ by the evidence shown to the public about Iraq’s alleged weapons programmes.

“‘Frankly, the idea that we doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about a 45-minute capability for delivering weapons of mass destruction is completely and totally false,’ he said.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/2955036.stm

By: Edward

Edward — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:35:12 +0000

“Paul Beaver, an independent defense expert, said….”These attacks don’t look like they were a hallmark of any one group,” Beaver told The Associated Press. “They don’t fit into any clear patterns that we know of except they were timed.”

Well Rupert, if these ‘experts’ are in fact ex-security, you may be right about the level. ‘No clear pattern’ my eye. A nice British expression: go tell it to the marines. I think those who are ‘watching carefully’ will have learnt one hell of a lot about how Al-qaeda operates in the last fortnight. Here’s another one:

“Thursday’s attacks were more spread out and occurred during the lunch hour ? beginning at about 12:38 p.m.”

Well the ’spread’ of the tube bombs was a little larger, but remember numbers given are times of reporting the incidents to hospitals, not the time of the explosions themselves, and the ‘non rush hour factor’ seems logical given security levels.

By: Edward

Edward — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:20:45 +0000

If the following is accurate it makes sense:

Authorities said it was too early to determine whether the attacks were carried out by the same organization as the July 7 blasts ? or whether they were linked to al-Qaida.

But NBC News reported that British authorities told their U.S. counterparts that backpacks and explosives used Thursday were identical to those in the July 7 attacks. And the British Broadcasting Corp. reported “speculation” that the devices were so similar they may even have been part of the same batch.

By: Edward

Edward — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 12:15:09 +0000

Stranger than paradise?

“One witness traveling on a train in west London said he heard a bang like a gunshot and saw a young man sprawled on the carriage floor with smoke coming from his rucksack. “There was a man lying on the ground with his arms outstretched in a Jesus Christ position, lying on top of a medium-sized black and green rucksack,” passenger Abisha Moyo, 28, told the Daily Mail newspaper.”I went up to him and said ‘are you alright, mate’, but he just ignored me and kept his eyes shut.”