If this is true doesn't it mean that Bin Laden won the war on terror?
Every time I go to the airport I think this. Those full body scanners? Thanks to Bin Laden, now you practically get strip searched for every flight. You have to take off your shoes. You cannot take drinks on a plane.
You then have everyone on edge no matter where you go. You and a friend play CounterStrike. You get on the bus and start talking about good locations to plant the bomb. You will probably be wrestled to the floor by some over-zealous commuter.
It doesn't surprise me if this is true. The US attitude to privacy and civil rights have been becoming more like China's every year since 2001.
Osama bin Laden did not care about our freedoms, he wanted the U.S. out of the Middle East and believed based on Somalia that dramatically attacking us would lead to that result. This is very well documented.
We have to be careful to not assign whatever motivation or outcome we don’t like as “the goal of terrorism.” You can justify anything that way, and people do. “If you do the thing I don’t like, the terrorists win” can cut both ways.
Terrorists have specific goals they are trying to achieve with violence, usually ideological or political or both. Bin Laden thought his ideology would have room to grow if he could scare the U.S. into leaving. He was way wrong about that. The fact that we still have to take shoes off at the airport (annoying as it is) does not mean he won.
Bin Laden promised us that "America will not be able to dream of security until we live in security in Palestine." The TSA and NSA are making Bin Laden's dream come true. Our overreaction to Bin Laden is causing more harm than Bin Laden did. Bin Laden killed 3000 Americans, but more Americans -- over 4000 -- were killed in the Iraq war. We also did ourselves a lot of economic harm, having spent close to a trillion dollars on the Iraq war alone. Spurred by Bin Laden, we are doing this to ourselves. And I am not even counting the over 100,000 Iraqi civilians killed in the war and the damage to goodwill towards Americans.
I realise this sounds crazy, but Bin Laden was apparently worried about climate change, and his acts have probably acted as a brake on the growth of air travel. Coincidence? Probably.
Osama bin Laden's war aim, which he himself stated, was to get US soldiers out of Saudi Arabia. He's dead, and there are still US soldiers in Saudi Arabia. I'd say he lost.
What happened in the US after 9/11 was wrong, but to claim it as a victory for bin Laden is incoherent. Bin Laden never cared what conditions in the US were like.
So if the next Dalai llama was hiding in the US, would it be ok for the Chinese government to fly in special forces to assasinate him?
I imagine bin laden was still protected by Pakistani laws, same as people inside the US are protected by US laws, even if they've pissed off some other country
This kind of thing proves how much of a genius Osama Bin Laden was when he planned the 9/11 attacks. He knew we would throw away our values and move toward totalitarianism.
With the massive surveillance apparatus in place, US journalists scared to cover many of these stories that RT covers, etc., the US is one attack away from instituting a much more overt police state.
Peter King is one attack away from the White House.
In the midst of all this it's amazing how little dissent there is. I used to think it was mysterious how things like Nazi Germany could have happened, but now I think it's clear that it just takes a series of small steps in the wrong direction, and none of the actors have to be overtly evil.
Osama bin Laden's legacy lives on with every traveler being herded through body scanners, with every illegal search in our 120-mile-radius Constitution-free zones, and with every warrantless wiretap.
Until his legacy dies, he lives on, as strong as ever.
...
Can I at least bring a tube of toothpaste with me when I travel now?
there was an interesting discussion on this on reddit -
"technically Osama bin Laden himself stated that 9/11 was to wake up the american people, to commit an act so harsh towards actual Americans, that they would say "why me" and then research the situation.."
Poster then links to the source quotes from Osama where he explains his motives and reasons. Interesting read, if only for the direct quotes, which are pretty essential for this discussion. Until he linked it, I never realized how strange it was that these discussions happen all the time, without many people actually being able to pull up the source material.
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life."
- Osama bin Laden, October 2001
http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/31/gen.binladen.interview...
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed. The U.S. government will lead the American people in — and the West in general — into an unbearable hell and a choking life." - Osama Bin Laden (http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/01/31/gen.binladen.interview...)
When you read that, you know that each and every day, Ousama Bin Laden wins a thousand small victories as soulless "security" agents make americans (and travelers) lose freedom over an unjustified paranoia.
All that because of a single attack which produced an unsignificant number of casualties more than 10 years ago.
I don't think they could have envisioned that in their wildest dreams. And the best part is that the right wing extremists and security junkies are the terrorists' greatest allies, and still keep their legacy alive.
Every time I go to the airport I think this. Those full body scanners? Thanks to Bin Laden, now you practically get strip searched for every flight. You have to take off your shoes. You cannot take drinks on a plane.
You then have everyone on edge no matter where you go. You and a friend play CounterStrike. You get on the bus and start talking about good locations to plant the bomb. You will probably be wrestled to the floor by some over-zealous commuter.
It doesn't surprise me if this is true. The US attitude to privacy and civil rights have been becoming more like China's every year since 2001.
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