UK Academics Arrested For Researching al-Qaida 681
D Afifi writes "Two political researchers at the University of Nottingham, in the UK, have been arrested under the Terrorism Act for downloading Al-Qaida material from a US government website. The material was to be used for research in terrorist tactics. There has been a huge public outcry, with university staff planning a march to demonstrate against the attack on academic freedom. Yet, one of the students, an Algerian, is still held in custody under immigration charges and is being fast-tracked for deportation."
More types of "Illegal Data" (Score:5, Interesting)
Under-age porn, "terrorist" material, DRM removing software, MAFIAA products, etc...
There is NOTHING wrong with this (Score:5, Interesting)
Information hosted on a US government website? That is forbidden material? Entrapment anyone? How about err... uhhh... holy fuck!
So the UK government noticed this material being downloaded and never looked at where it came from? WTF? Is the US Government now hosting terrorism inciting materials for the internets?
This, I truly hope, leaves buckets full of egg and chicken shit on the faces of some government employee types.
Immigrant. (Score:5, Interesting)
#1 Arrest under Terrorism act for having al-Qaida-related material.
#2 Immigration charges and subsequent deportation.
The two are related insofar as discovering 1 resulted in 2.
#2, the illegal immigration, *should* result in deportation - he is perfectly able to make a claim on humanitarian grounds or claim asylum. The fact remains that illegal immigrants should be deported.
#1 should be approached as:
a) person found with dodgy material
b) person was investigated
c) things happen
Now, the main objection is vs c). he was engaging in legitimate academic research (you COULD argue he is a terrorist and this is a clever coverup, but I wont go there
The fact that "An illegal immigrate faces deportation" is no surprise and should not impact your judgement here.
This probably comes acros as a bit confused - its been a long day.
Re:Guns don't kill people; people kill people.. (Score:5, Interesting)
One of her good friends who was, I believe, reading for Physics, did his senior thesis on how to make a nuclear weapon. I also believe, though I'm not clear as its been a while since she told me this story, that the fellow in question was not exactly American.
His thesis brought him to the interest of some of the old-line type of "terrorist" organizations like the PFLP. *THAT* brought him to the attention of the FBI and he was arrested and interrogated.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Re:Immigrant. (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, that's a fact, is it? So you happened to be born on a particular patch of soil and have never had a run-in with oppressive government -- luck of the draw, right? Your great-great grandfathers had the honor and the foresight to carve up the entire globe into completely arbitrary empires, and now you're happy to sit there in your Aeron chair with your computers and your big-screen TVs and your Internets and pat yourself on the back about it? "Sorry about where you were born, olde chappe, but you'd best to hie back there forthwith, wot!" Never mind the fact that the direct fallout of colonialism can be seen in the oppressive governments and violent chaos now evident in much of the developing world -- as long as they don't try to climb over "our" fence, you're OK with it, I guess?
Fucking ridiculous (Score:4, Interesting)
You can view video clips of Tony Blair and CIA officials basically stating that Al Qaeda doesn't exist on You Tube (IIRC from the BBC originally).
http://polidics.com/cia/top-ranking-cia-operatives-admit-al-qaeda-is-a-complete-fabrication.html [polidics.com]
Maybe they are trying to stop people from researching this stuff.
Re:Another line a long line of insults (Score:5, Interesting)
It was about oil. No tin foil hat. Oil. It wasn't about Saddam. He had a fat mouth that got him lynched. Yes, he was a murderous SOB but then there are loads of them around and we don't do even a fraction of them justice.
And the plan backfired. A commodities market has grasped the weakness of the currency and the high demand, and they now are poised to raise oil until it's at the blood-letting levels, where they'll back off and ride the profits until 'something happens' to deflate the market. In the interim, the economies of the middle east, Venezuela, and Mexico (although Mexico can't capitalize assets to reduce their bleeding) are pretty much glowing with petro-currencies, largely worthless dollars.
If we were going to halt terrorism, we should have targeted the perps in the 9/11 fiasco, and dealt with them. We have not, only serving as poster boy enemies for recruiters of psycho-jihadis. And the rest of Islam looks at us, like the rest of the world, like we must be insane. Indeed our gutless leadership is just that. It takes guts to admit you're wrong, and they'll never do it. This while deficit spending is far out of control, the Fed inflates the currency instead of forcing banks/derivative holders to take a bath, and the average Joe and his grandchildren go broke.
Oddly, we don't have cameras watching our every move, and have at least a modicum of academic freedom, contrasting with the poor researchers in TFA in the UK.
Similar incident on tv show numb3rs. (Score:4, Interesting)
I have little doubt that this episode was inspired by the whole national security climate which silences research all the time.
Re:Guns don't kill people; people kill people.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Toady you can get it for free on the internet instead of paying $200 for a textbook. Anyone who can get the exotic materials and refine them could have bought the textbook any time since the end of WWII. The information being on the internet does not increase the risk of someone building a nuclear bomb.
Re:The Pete Townsend defense, eh? (Score:1, Interesting)
I spent four months researching the Bank Secrecy Act, Patriot Act Title III, and the Federal Money Laundering Prevention Act and their relation to terrorist finance- as well as their Indian counterparts. I could tell you the ins and outs of any number of terrorist finance schemes. And it was all for a substantial legal article for coursework.
There were 12 other people in that class, and I'm willing to bet that *every single one of us* downloaded at least one document that, pulled out of context, is as shady as the terrorist manual at issue here. Fortunately we had the advantage of doing so in the US, although several students wrote on just these very issues. Apparently doing so is hazardous to your freedom in the UK.
The only way to write effective law regarding a national security issue such as this is to have a robust academic discussion to adequately examine the issue. Arresting students for participating in that discussion doesn't make anyone safer.
Re:Spread it around? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is basically the PG version of it.
Re:More like "Brazil" (Score:5, Interesting)
"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do."
--Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Re:No surprise... (Score:4, Interesting)
What sort of things does Sweden accept asylum for?
Re:There is NOTHING wrong with this (Score:5, Interesting)
No, those groups seem to prefer acts of genocide accomplished with organized armies. Much more civil, clearly. And much more peaceful, too. Oh, how much those savage Muslims have yet to learn.
And how do we define a terror attack? Is it when you cluster bomb urban areas? Is it dropping nuclear bombs? Supporting brutal paramilitaries? Blockading food and medicine transports?
In fact, why only count terror attacks? Surely all violent attacks should be tallied to see which religion produces most violence in this world.
What do you reckon the results would look like then?
Re:Mr. Atta (Score:3, Interesting)
was studying passenger jets, not Al Qaida literature.
Actually he was studying Urban Planning (I wasn't referring to his taking flying lessons). The point being that merely being a student at a European university doesn't automatically remove all suspicion LEO might hold.
The real terrorists plotting a crime have already been recruited, and don't need to read any more Al Qaida stuff.
I don't think fact bears you out here actually. The 7/7 attacks notwithstanding, many of the attacks and foiled attacks have been fairly amateurish (thankfully!). These guys really could benefit from some quality info on how to kill en masse.
Arresting someone for reading Al Qaida stuff is at best a "pre-crime"
Well no, not if possession of the material is itself an offence. A crime (in addition to what the common law says is a crime) is whatever Parliament decides is a crime. Now you and I might agree that it ought not to be a crime merely to possess literature, but that is another question.
they might be converted and decide to commit crimes in the future
Or they might already have it in mind before seeking out said literature, who knows?
More likely, this is another case of panicked stupidity causing the innocent to suffer.
As I noted above, they didn't find enough to charge him, so more than likely you are right. At the very least we should presume his innocence. Or maybe they thought sending him back to Algeria would sort the problem.
Re:No surprise... (Score:4, Interesting)
I never said taking action was foolish... Just taking action that is disproportionate to the real threat is foolish... After all you wouldn't call the SWAT team to take down someone who's late on their parking tickets now would you? Why does ever tom dick and harry need to take off their shoes when going through airport security because one idiot thought 'hey I'll try to light my shoes on fire and blow up the plane'...
Honestly, sit back and wait for it... Its not like they're gonna steal more planes and run them into buildings. The whole 'Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me' will prevent that... Besides passengers are now more apt to fight back with hijackers nowadays than they were before 9/11... which is one good thing that came out of all of that.
Re:No surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.thelocal.se/7726/20070627/ [thelocal.se]
Dharmarajah says she was collected from the social services office by police officers.
"The police took me to the police station, allowed me to call some of my friends in the US, and then took me to a refugee camp in Märsta," she tells The Local.
The police officers then took Dharmarajah's passport.
"They explained to me that I was an asylum case, and that asylum cases can't keep their passports."
"It's crazy," she says. "I never wanted asylum in this country. I don't want to live here; I don't want to work here."
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1999-February/014125.html [utah.edu]
not have a job. Over 500,000 people are directly unemployed or are
in some sort of job education program. However that figure does not
give a true picture of reality. In fact in many of the larger cities
80% (!) of the non-Swede population do not have jobs. In fact
non-Swedes, procentually, are the overwhelming majority of unemployed,
those on welfare, or in job training.
I received a humanitarian asylum in Sweden because of my opposition
to the war in Vietnam.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/4620167c-c3c9-11dc-b083-0000779fd2ac.html [ft.com]
In your extensive free time, head out to bars and tell the women you're a refugee from the US. Read up on how the Swedish media portrays the US and just feed the same stories back to them. They all speak perfect English. You'll get a Swedish girlfriend too! Of course, you're leaching off fundamentally decent and generous people, but don't let that put you off.
Re:No surprise... (Score:1, Interesting)
If I were a US politician I'd probably try to encourage assimilation with some sort of green card scheme which offered them a fast path to citizenship. Actually most of the problems with Mexican immigrants like crime and non payment of taxes comes from their illegal status. If you offered them a path that allowed them in and gave them citizenship in a few years in return for obeying the law, I suspect they'd be model Americans.
Then again, I don't really have first hand experience of this. Maybe there are issues that I don't understand here. But the situation with illegal immigrants seems very different from the millions of asylum seekers from Islamic countries living on benefits in Northern Europe.
Re:No surprise... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No surprise... (Score:2, Interesting)
With ~2000 people dead on 9/11, assuming they all had at least another 50 years of life to go, that's 100,000 hours of life killed that day.
Assuming 600 million passengers [nytimes.com] each year, each of them averaging 10 extra minutes wasted due to TSA policies, that's 100,000,000 hours of life wasted each year for the last 7 years.
100,000 hours of life lost to terrorism on 9/11
700,000,000 hours of life lost to the government, in airports alone, since then.
Re:No surprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think your best bet is to build a raft and sail out into the middle of the atlantic...
Yes there is (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, that's a bit convenient a definition.
But the fact is, the western world too has a long and funny history of targetting civilians explicitly. The terror bombings of WW2 (started, duly noted by Germany, but continued by the Allies just as well) were probably the best example, though more recent examples do exist. The theory was explictly to kill enough civilians, as to (A) cause a huge morale drop and make them beg their government for peace, and (B) cripple the economy by killing enough of the workforrce.
The industrial cities of Germany for example have not been colateral damage in trying to bomb the factories, they have been the targets themselves. That was the actual target: bombing the city and terrorizing the population. (But again, so did Germany with UK cities, so I'm not trying to make it sound like only one side was doing it.)
The whole doctrine and technique of firebombing them didn't even work against factories. How it worked was dropping a big bomb with an otherwise thin shell, so the blast would blow the shingles off house roofs, followed by lots of little fire bombs that would then fall in the house and set it ablaze. The houses of civilians were _the_ target.
Against factories that particular mix had little to no effect. Against troops or military targets that mix would have been outright stupid, and noone used it for that.
Again, the whole doctrine was to kill as many civilians as your can, and scare the seven shades of shit out of the survivors. That's a terror tactic by any other name.
Want another example: the USA has actively researched biological warfare and had stockpiles of nasty germs until the 70's. I do believe that the doctrine wasn't to drop them just on enemy troops.
The west only gave up on that shit, when we finally figured out that nukes are enough of a deterrent anyway, and killing 3% of a city's population with modified Brucellosis is peanuts compared to nuking it. And again, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction isn't about nuking enemy troops. If you look at any country with nukes, right as we write this, the nukes are aimed at the (potential) enemies' civilian cities. The threat is, very much, "if you dare attack us, we'll wipe out your population and turn your country into a radioactive wasteland."
The neutron bomb was developed for the explicit reason of killing or injuring as many humans as possible, while causing as little damage as possible to everything else. It's not a bomb you'd use to disable a military factory, it's a bomb which would kill its workers (and the whole city nearby) and at most blow the windows off that factory.
Etc.
So, you know, freakin' _please_. I'm even willing to swallow _some_ "us vs them" dehumanizing arguments, but "we wouldn't ever target civilians" is so much bullshit it could fertilize a few acres.
Re:No surprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:No surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm pretty neutral on the issue (which is REALLY rare here), though.
Yeah, but I suspect most Mexicans who enter the US illegally will assimilate quite fast.
There are parts of my town that look exactly like Mexico, whole stretches with nary a sign in English, with mariachi and polka music blaring, and not a single business does business in English. This doesn't seem like assimilation to me. In the colleges here we have a sanctioned club (MeCHA) based on retaking the original Mexican territories back, based on the claim of "La Raza" ("The Race"). 1 in 10 cars here have Aztec imagery on them. None of these point towards a desire to assimilation.
Unlike previous waves of American immigrants, they don't want to be American, they just want a living wage, while keeping their culture. Its more Balkanization than assimilation. During the last Mexican elections, illegal immigrants in the U.S. were allowed to vote in their homelands elections, and voted for a candidate whose platform was based on building a highway that dead-ended at the American border.
A minority of them are willing to learn English to the point of actually doing so.
Even if we offered the path to citizenship, they still wouldn't want to be culturally American. Sure, they would finally have to pay for services such as education and healthcare (and other tax-based services), but they still would want to be Mexican first, and American in income.
The problem with border security has nothing to do with Mexicans though. Its more along the lines of; "if a poor latino can walk across the border with his family undetected, what keeps a a clever terrorist from doing so with 100 pounds of explosives?"
To avoid the flamebate mod, I have nothing much against illegal immigrants, as long as they are forced to pay taxes, and live by the greater societies standards. I feel damn sorry for them, actually, since I know I'd rather not be in Mexico. My border policy would be turning them back, and handing them a book on Che Guevara (and the history of the American revolution), and a M16 with a box of ammo.
Re:No surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Netherlands used to be pretty much on the top of the freedom-list, but we've left that list long ago... I don't have that many facts about Canada at hand, but I believe it's not much better over there. And about the UK - I take a trip there (ok, ok, Scotland it is:-)) every now and then; I sense a lot more freedom over there, a lot less tensions between ethnical groups, police that don't act like they're Cartman "respect my authority" and so on.
So, in short, the UK may appear to be idiotic, but in essence they're a lot less idiotic than for example the Dutch are.
Greetings from the Netherlands.
Re:No surprise... (Score:2, Interesting)
For the netherlands, immigration policy is basically determined by the sanctimonious stance that we have a moral responsibility towards everyone that enters our country, regardless of their means, intentions or mindset. Like in England, we have (cases of) deported succesful (working) immigrants because they once entered illegally, and we usually keep the ones that have no job, no skills and no mastery of our language, because it would be "inhumane" to send them back. Our most prominent failures:
- deporting a 17-year old Bosnian girl two months before her college finals, who had been here 7 years - she lost her asylum status because Bosnia was declared non-hostile after the war was ended. She was planning on attending university after graduation.
- deporting an entire Turkish family after being here for 15 years. The father was a succesful grocer, and the children didn't even speak Turkish (they grew up in Amsterdam). But it was decided that since they came here illegally, they had no right to be here.
Sometimes I'm ashamed to be a dutchman. It's been happening more and more lately...
Re:No surprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
I think you're close to right, although this Iranian guy [telegraph.co.uk] now sells kebabs after settling on the island of Spitsbergen when his immigration attempts into Norway failed. Not quite lawless but it doesn't require residency permits, which I guess makes it easier for people to move there if they want to.
Re:No surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no culture war with Hispanics in the US except in the collective imagination of the far-left/old-right alliance. Most of the issues (crime, poverty, welfare etc) are class-conflict issues that have nothing to do with culture. This is in sharp contrast to Moslem immigrants in Europe, where a clear Kulturkampf exists. last time I checked, Mexican immigrants don't engage in forced female circumcisions. honor killings, imam-sanctioned gang-rapes, mass-riots and supremacist terrorism. There was a 1 million strong Hispanic pro-immigration rally in the US just a few years ago, and not one drop of blood was spilled. Compare that with throngs of fanatic Moslems burning down France in the wake of the Mohamed cartoons...
Re:No surprise... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Here is proof they are not terrorists: (Score:1, Interesting)
The US Government should therefore be declared a proscribed organisation under the provisions of the Act.
Re:No surprise... (Score:5, Interesting)
Here in the US, some years ago, a Middle Eastern student was arrested and charged with supporting terrorism primarily because he had a lot of material (none of which was illegal) that worried some folks. During the trial, a number of experts testified for the prosecution regarding how the materials are often used in preparing for terrorism. On cross examination, the attorney for the defense asked, "How much of the claimed material do you yourself possess?". Answer? Pretty much all of it - and posted on the researcher's Web site - obvious, as he was researching it! Followup question: "So why are you not on trial?".
The case fell apart and the defendant was acquitted. They didn't have any evidence he was planning anything or in touch with any terrorists. Just the material he possessed.