Showing posts with label Terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Terrorism. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot by James Travers

Gunpowder: The Players Behind the Plot by James Travers the rear jacket copy makes it sound like this book includes an investigation of the primary sources contained on the plotters who attempted to blow up parliament. Unfortunately documents are mentioned but are only sparingly quoted from. What we get instead is a rather disjointed discussion of the investigation of the plot. This is only for the expert there are more assumptions here then fax.

Not recommended.

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour M. Hersh

Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib by Seymour M. Hersh is a collection of Hersh's columns from the New Yorker. As the subtitle would suggest most of them are on the War on Terror. As well as the scandal around Abu Ghraib. Each column is introduced with updates up to 2004 when the book was published. When these first came out they were earth shattering but now they have seemingly fated into the backround. If you've been following the story over the last several years there isn't much that isn't referenced by everybody else. It's still interesting to be reading the columns that broke the news.

Recommended.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler by Nigel H. Jones

A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis: How the Freikorps Blazed a Trail for Hitler by Nigel H. Jones covers the creation, deployment and absorption of the paramilitary right wing groups in Germany after World War One. This is part of the larger "A Brief History" series it's actually a decent size over 100,000 words. I'm not too sure what they'd consider a long history. Jones talks about not only the precursor of the NAZI Brown Shirts but others as well. He seems to be it pains to find members of the Freikorps who disagreed with Hitler and Nazism. The book is heavy on philosophical explanations for why the groups were popular. I'm not sure if it was really that complex. There's material on the various terrorist actions and attempted takeovers that they were responsible for. I was unaware of many of their actions in the east. Contains appendices and suggestions for further reading.

Recommended!

Friday, October 24, 2008

Delusion: The True Story of Victorian Superspy Henri Le Caron by Peter Edwards

Delusion: The True Story of Victorian Superspy Henri Le Caron by Peter Edwards is a biography of the British spy that provided intelligence on the Fenians and other Irish terrorist groups. He gave material both to the Canadian government and British. This allowed the foiling of various terrorist plots as well as two invasions of Canada from the United States. The book also gets into a nice amount of detail about Irish politics in the middle years of the 19th century. Edwards manages to avoid the traps of popular history [i.e. dramatization]. He's done quite a bit of research and it shows in an extensive notes and a bibliography section. For anyone who's interested in an early terrorist groups, Irish, British, Canadian or American history.

Highly recommended!

Note: this book was provided through Mini Book Expo.

Monday, April 21, 2008

After Terror: Promoting Dialogue Among Civilizations edited by Akbar Ahmed and Brian Forst

After Terror: Promoting Dialogue Among Civilizations edited by Akbar Ahmed and Brian Forst this is a collection of very short essays discussing how a clash of civilizations can be prevented. I can't fault the contributor list there are some very heavy hitters here they include Benjamin Barber, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Amitai Etzioni, Bernard Lewis, Martin Marty, Queen Noor, Joseph Nye, Judea Pearl, Jonathan Sacks, Ravi Shankar, Bishop Desmond Tutu, E.O. Wilson and James D. Wolfensohn. Unfortunately the essays are very short most a few thousand words. Which really isn't enough time to develop an idea. Some ideas are interesting but a lot of the essays and up sounding like platitudes. Rather interesting was Bernard Lewis who actually comes off sounding like a rational individual unlike in his recent ranting.

Not recommended!

Is available through Abebooks.

Friday, June 01, 2007

Rudy Giuliani gets hammered

Check out this blast against Rudy Giuliani from Rolling Stone. An exert:

Rudy giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a "stuck pig," and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

WOW.

Monday, May 07, 2007

"effort by government to discredit Mr. Bartleman."

The Air India bombing inquiry is back under way and not surprisingly more bureaucratic infighting was inevitable. I'm rather surprised the judge felt the need to make this rather blunt statement at this time. This report should be very interesting, how much of it the new government of Canada decides to make public will be a separate issue.

Wednesday, March 07, 2007

The Blame Game

Apparently some people are more interested in bureaucratic infighting than getting to what actually happened with Air India.

When Major raised the issue, Jensen was quick to absolve his former police colleagues and put the blame squarely on the other side for precipitating the turf war.

"Within the RCMP I did not notice that," he said. "With respect to the new CSIS organization, yes, I felt they believed that there was an issue (of) staking out their turf."

Of course it was those damn spooks.... Give me a break.


Wednesday, June 21, 2006

Yes Virginia terrorism can be funny

take a look at these government signs with amusing captions. Well I guess the lucky thing is that they seem to have forgotten about the duct tape. Now we still have those color-coded threat levels. I'm sure it's just a matter of time till Harper gets his act together and we get them appear.


Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Torture just doesn't work

Torture Awareness Month

the apparent and systematic human rights abuses in the war on terror make no sense from a military perspective. Basically if one actually does get information it can be either be a wildly inaccurate [see Joseph Stalin's purges] or will end up in screwing you in the long run. For example in the battle of Algiers the French did manage to destroy much of the FLN's organization within the city. But when France discovered the tactics used the revulsion was enough to make the war's continuation all but impossible.

Yes I'm going to mention Sir Robert Thompson again because he's right. Governments that don't act like governments will be treated like one side of the Civil War not as a legitimate government.






Saturday, June 10, 2006

Zarqawi

Anyone else wondering if the ratting out of al Zarqawi was an internal purge by bin Laden?

Wednesday, June 07, 2006

Inconsistencies?

I'm scratching my head over this article. Which rambles on about the "problems" in the terrorism investigation in Toronto. Supposedly there are inconsistencies in the story but the article doesn't really talk about any besides finding some quotes which believe the arrests are politically motivated. As Flit pointed out on June 5 that this case and the counterfeit visa case are different. Skepticism is of course a good thing and everyone is presumed Innocent but knee-jerk conspiracy charges without any real evidence makes one a joke.




Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Doesn't Harper have speech writers?

as this article rightly points out apparently PM was forced to dig out the same platitudes as another right-wing leader. And I don't mean Churchill that man could speak.

OK I'll give you that Harper is better than Martin at public speaking but really is that saying much?




Monday, June 05, 2006

now this should aggravate the brown shirts in our midst

here's Gwynne Dyer's latest column scary thing is that he's right not that it matters these days. It could get pretty ugly up here for a while. We shall have to see.

A kind of 9/11 did happen in Canada. The largest casualty toll of any terrorist
attack in the west before 2001 was the 329 people who were killed in the
terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 182, en route from Toronto to London, in
1985. Two hundred and eighty of the dead were Canadian citizens. Since Canada
has only one-tenth the population of the United States, it was almost exactly
the same proportionate loss that the United States suffered in 9/11.It was
immediately clear that the terrorists were Sikhs seeking independence from
India, but here's what Canada didn't do: it didn't send troops into India to
"stamp out the roots of the terrorism" and it didn't declared a "global war on
terror". Partly because it lacked the resources for that sort of adventure, of
course, but also because it would have been stupid. Instead, it tightened up
security at airports, and launched a police investigation of the attackThe
investigation was not very successful, and 21 years later most of the culprits
have still not been punished. But Sikh terrorism eventually died down even
though nobody invaded the Punjab, and nobody else got hurt in Canada. The US
would have had to lean on the Afghan regime quite hard to get the al Qaeda camps
shut down after 9/11, but that, on the whole, would have been the right reaction
to that attack, too. And nothing more.

There's been quite a bit of talk on some message boards none of which I'll dignify with a link basically saying that it's time to send the Muslims all home or worse. The British didn't obliterate the Catholics after the Gunpowder Plot.






Saturday, June 03, 2006

Allusions of Safety

with the news that Canadian police have foiled a terrorist plot with three times the explosive involved in the Oklahoma City bombing it should make Canadians realize that we to are involved in the West fight against radical Islam.

So far there's been no word about the targets involved only that they were in southern Ontario and not Toronto's transport system. We'll have to wait for further developments.






Wednesday, May 24, 2006

Afghani windowdressing, democracy marches on

With the news that the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai will be investigating the casualties in the air strikes, the Afghan government is proving to be quick in its attempts to mimic Western-style democracy. After all what could be more Western and Democratic then a pointless investigation? What exactly are they going to say? That it was stupid to send in the air strike [which it was] or that they were justified and sh^t happens? It'll be very interesting to see what they come up with since they can't exactly criticize their benefactors for what they're doing. the American public would not like that one bit.