Terrorism (correction)

From: Clint O'Dell (clint@freethoughtradio.com)
Date: Tue Oct 09 2001 - 21:21:53 MDT


>>Seems like an obvious and useful strategy. A strategy even the civilized U.S.A. uses when exchanging prisoners.<<
Was meant to be:
Seems like an obvious and useful strategy. A strategy even the civilized U.S.A. uses when interrogating prisoners.

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Sometime during the Reagan administration in the early to mid 1980s a plane was hijacked and many people were held hostage on board for several days. The motivation of the hijacking was for the release of a dozen or so prisoners held captive in Israel and other parts of the Middle East. Reagan then showed the world how well this tactic works by obliging. Obviously I would like to know who those prisoners were and why they were important to the fundamentalist Muslim group who hijacked the plan.

Terrorism has been around for a while, each decade having a new "public enemy number one". Each time the leader is taken out and another one takes their place and evolves terrorism to a new level. In the 1980s terrorist strategy was to take hostages, in the 1990s the strategy turned to bombing, in 2001 it still looks like bombings except the targets are bigger.

Yet this newest evolution of terrorism seems different. What was their motive? What were their demands and to whom where those demands met? It seems in order for terrorism to work someone must be capable of giving something to the terrorist that the terrorist otherwise couldn't obtain or would have a greater and more risk taking difficulty obtaining on their own. To get someone to hand them what they want, striking terror into that person's mind is an intelligent and easy way to get it; at the same time minimizing risk. However, simply terrifying someone isn't the only ingredient. The terrified person needs to see a way out. He or she needs to be promised to have the terror relieved if they give up something the terrorist wants.

Seems like an obvious and useful strategy. A strategy even the civilized U.S.A. uses when interrogating prisoners. But what is different about the World Trade Center attack? There wasn't a warning. No demand of military arms as was done toward the end of the Reagan administration to supposedly bring peace in the Middle East. No demand for a release of prisoners, and no demand for money.

Or was there? Perhaps there were demands. Private demands through administrative channels which were not met. If that is the case then our government knew the World Trade Center was going to be attacked, and they weren't able to stop it. If they knew an attack was going to occur then why couldn't they stop it?

Perhaps our political leaders know a whole lot more about the history of what lead up to this event than they're admitting to. Maybe they know "exactly" why the World Trade Center was attacked. Perhaps they knew it was Bin Laden because they have been giving his party money and military supplies like the agreement Reagan made with another terrorist group in the 1980s.

Clint O'Dell
clint@freethoughtradio.com





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