Hey, everyone. As much as I'd like to see bin Laden taken out, I'm not sure that it would be best to do it immediately. One of the pundits on MSNBC tonight suggested that it might be better to have the Northern Alliance capture him, then have Islamic nations try him for "crimes against Islam," and then hand him over to the west. Once he would be handed over to the west, it might be best to try him in a world court for crimes against America, rather than try him here on US soil, where there would be further threat of terrorist attacks. I mean, God forbid, we were to hold him in one of our jails (even if we didn't disclose which one) and his terrorist buddies started just randomly attacking sites here... it might just be better to try him at some world court (apologies to the Hague [sp?] as it would likely fall to them) and then convict him and publicly execute him. Then it might not look so much like the big bully US coming and rounding up the self-proclaimed defender of Islam... What do you all think?

I think you've hit on the right plan. I don't know if you've been following the comments of David Kline elsewhere in this conference, but I posted something he said today that closely parallels this in the David Kline topic. He's been a war correspondent in Afghanistan and knows about the Islamic mindset. It's topic 54 in the news conference. The fact that we aren't doing anything rash to anger the Islamic world is a wise move.

Here is a long article on the pitiful state of affairs in the CIA, by by Seymour M. Hersh in the New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/FACT/

MIT Technology Review online December 2001 issue SPECIAL SECTION: TECHNOLOGY VS. TERROR http://www.techreview.com/magazine/dec01/mag_toc.asp Articles abstracts: Detecting Bioterrorism By David Talbot Lives could be saved by sensors and therapies now under development�along with software that could help distinguish an anthrax assault from an outbreak of the flu. Networking the Infrastructure By Wade Roush New classes of detectors, plus safer building designs, point to an "intelligent city" that senses danger. Will Spyware Work? By Kevin Hogan Monitoring voice and e-mail traffic sounds like a good way to thwart terrorism. The problem? Sorting through the results takes too long for early warning. Recognizing the Enemy By Alexandra Stikeman Creating a central database of photos to identify terrorists through face recognition is a bureaucratic nightmare. Essay: The Shock of the Old By Edward Tenner On September 11, a nation primed for a futuristic attack failed to foresee a low-tech assault. Why?

A very interesting piece in the New Republic on the FBI's need to start gathering "strategic intelligence" as opposed to simply short-term tactical info., By that, the author means doing more what the CIA does (or is supposed to do) -- spot trends, look for patterns, etc. Here's an excerpt: "A smart intelligence analyst, looking at emerging trends in Islamist terrorism, might have predicted that terrorists would try to hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings. After all, September 11 may have been the first time terrorists carried out the strategy successfully, but it was not the first time they tried it. In 1994 hijackers from the Armed Islamic Group--which is affiliated with Al Qaeda--hijacked an Air France jet in Algiers and apparently planned to crash it into the Eiffel Tower, but failed when French commandos stormed the plane when it stopped for refueling. In 1995 Filipino authorities detected a Manila-based Al Qaeda cell's plan to blow up eleven American airliners in mid-flight and crash a twelfth into the CIA headquarters. "With that terrorist m.o. in mind, and recognizing that the plot would only work if one of the terrorists involved could fly a jetliner, the analyst might have advised agents to keep an eye on flight schools that offered such training. At the very least, a good analyst--thinking along these lines--might have raised alarm bells at FBI headquarters in August when agents from the Minneapolis field office began investigating Moussaoui, whose suspicious behavior had led his instructors at a Minnesota flight school to contact the bureau. The Minneapolis agents had arrested Moussaoui on an immigration violation and--after getting a lead from French intelligence that he had ties to bin Laden--had asked headquarters in Washington for permission to seek a national security search warrant that would allow them go through Moussaoui's computer. But FBI lawyers denied the request for a search that might have tipped off the bureau to the September 11 plot." See the full article at: http://www.thenewrepublic.com/123101/zengerle123101.html

Today, we're on the Superbowl watch for terrrorism. Hopefully, the extra measures will pay off. No one is bringing anything in to this event without a thorouth search and the area has a wide swath cordoned off around it.

The EU is the most developed example of a postmodern system. It represents security through transparency, and transparency through interdependence. The EU is more a transnational than a supra-national system, a voluntary association of states rather than the subordination of states to a central power. The dream of a European state is one left from a previous age. It rests on the assumption that nation states are fundamentally dangerous and that the only way to tame the anarchy of nations is to impose hegemony on them. But if the nation-state is a problem then the super-state is certainly not a solution. European states are not the only members of the postmodern world. Outside Europe, Canada is certainly a postmodern state; Japan is by inclination a postmodern state, but its location prevents it developing more fully in this direction. The USA is the more doubtful case since it is not clear that the US government or Congress accepts either the necessity or desirability of interdependence, or its corollaries of openness, mutual surveillance and mutual interference, to the same extent as most European governments now do. . . . The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the nineteenth century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle. In the prolonged period of peace in Europe, there has been a temptation to neglect our defences, both physical and psychological. This represents one of the great dangers of the postmodern state. . . . The premodern state may be too weak even to secure its home territory, let alone pose a threat internationally, but it can provide a base for non-state actors who may represent a danger to the postmodern world. If non-state actors, notably drug, crime, or terrorist syndicates take to using premodern bases for attacks on the more orderly parts of the world, then the organised states may eventually have to respond. If they become too dangerous for established states to tolerate, it is possible to imagine a defensive imperialism. It is not going too far to view the West's response to Afghanistan in this light. . . . Today, there are no colonial powers willing to take on the job, though the opportunities, perhaps even the need for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the nineteenth century. Those left out of the global economy risk falling into a vicious circle. Weak government means disorder and that means falling investment. In the 1950s, South Korea had a lower GNP per head than Zambia: the one has achieved membership of the global economy, the other has not. All the conditions for imperialism are there, but both the supply and demand for imperialism have dried up. And yet the weak still need the strong and the strong still need an orderly world. A world in which the efficient and well governed export stability and liberty, and which is open for investment and growth - all of this seems eminently desirable. What is needed then is a new kind of imperialism, one acceptable to a world of human rights and cosmopolitan values. We can already discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle. . . . The postmodern EU offers a vision of cooperative empire, a common liberty and a common security without the ethnic domination and centralised absolutism to which past empires have been subject, but also without the ethnic exclusiveness that is the hallmark of the nation state - inappropriate in an era without borders and unworkable in regions such as the Balkans.

I've been watching Greece go through the throes of becoming ain integral part of Europe. It is not all that easy and there are still a lot of pre conceived notions to get past before it will truly work. I was very sorry to see the Drachma disappear into history. Happliy, I was sent a few samples so I also hold Greek history in my hands along with English, Scottish and Welsh.

What we DO NOT want to do is to make a martyr out of him. If that happens, then make it a dead one. Sorry gang, but this man is deadly and a menace even his own family disowned.

05-24) 11:59 PDT SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) -- Jay Walker jump-started an online shopping craze by inventing Priceline.com, the Web site that lets people bid on airplane tickets and hotel rooms. Now Walker is hoping his newest brainchild revolutionizes a completely different field: national security. The premise behind Walker's USHomeGuard is simple: America has 47,000 power plants, airports and other "critical infrastructure facilities." Walker believes a terrorist can get within 100 feet of most of them, unchallenged and undetected, and kill or injure thousands. But if onsite cameras beamed photos to the World Wide Web, Americans could monitor these sites from home. If they spied a potential attacker -- a masked man trying to scale a power plant fence, or a van parked next to a reservoir -- they could alert security agents with a click of the mouse. Agents would call local authorities and help avert disaster. Walker envisions spotters getting up to $10 per hour, paid by the government agencies and companies that need protecting. He wants to sell USHomeGuard to the federal government for $1, then charge fees to run the system. Critics dismiss USHomeGuard as a doomed scheme that exploits Sept. 11 paranoia. Others question the effectiveness of a security system built on the Internet -- itself vulnerable to hackers, power outages and congestion. David Wray, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said federal officials have not done any "serious evaluation" of the project, adding that the agency isn't contemplating a defense strategy that hinges on Internet surveillance. Despite such skepticism, more than 10,000 people have visited USHomeGuard's new Web site, and Walker said he could get hundreds of thousands of Americans to sign up for home-based, work-when-you-can jobs. "We like to think of USHomeGuard as a digital victory garden," Walker told a recent tech conference, referring to vegetable patches Americans planted to help ease food rationing during World War II. "It lets people be part of the solution." USHomeGuard is a twist on distributed computing, an idea that captured imaginations in the 1990s, when thousands plugged their PCs into the SETI project to scour radio telescope signals for extraterrestrial communications. Walker wants to distribute surveillance across thousands of computers and the people who use them. He says spotters could register online and get paid for clicking through photos and sending data back to USHomeGuard's central database. The spotters answer a simple question about each image: Does it contain a person or vehicle? If yes, local authorities could be notified in as little as 30 seconds. Walker said it's possible to guard against errors and attempts to foil the system. For example, as many as one in 10 photos may be traps. If a spotter clicks "no" on a photo of a masked man airbrushed into a reservoir photo, the software suspends him for three minutes -- without pay. He must requalify by clicking correctly through several test photos. If a spotter clicks "yes" on an unstaged photo, he triggers a first-stage alert. Software automatically routes the same photo to other spotters, and Web cams mounted near the site of the potential attack site beam more photos to more spotters. When many spotters click "yes," they trigger a second-stage alert. Security supervisors at a data center review photos from all the Web cams and analyze video from the site. Supervisors who see a suspicious person can speak to him through the Web cam: "Why are you approaching the reservoir?" If the trespasser is toting a rod and says he's going fishing, the agent might simply ask him to depart. If he doesn't, the security agent may alert local authorities, who could arrive within minutes, depending on the location. Walker, who has so far funded USHomeGuard with his own money, says he could quickly muster the volunteers needed to guard as many as 3,000 sites by the end of the year. But it's unclear whether airports, chemical plants and other sites would buy it. Security experts say recognition software can spot potential attacks more economically and with more accuracy than thousands of Americans getting paid $10 per hour. "Asking people to make a determination of human or not human based on static images is going to be extremely difficult," said Gary M. Lauder of Atherton, Calif.-based Lauder Partners, who heard Walker's business pitch in February. "A computer could probably do a better job." Bruce Schneier, co-founder of Counterpane Internet Security Inc., praised Walker's fresh approach. But he noted that USHomeGuard could not have prevented the World Trade Center attacks or the recent spate of overseas bombings. "Like every security product, it would do some good against some evil," Schneier said. "This has nothing to do with suicide bombers in crowded markets or airplane terrorists. This would work in no man's land but nowhere else." Firefighters, police officers and others who investigate scenes worry that such a system would generate too many false alarms and require computer upgrades and extra employees. Capt. Joe Carrillo of the San Jose Fire Department, which protects dozens of technology and defense laboratories in Silicon Valley is bothered by the expense. He said California's worst budget crisis in a generation will doom the idea. "People get suspicious easily, and this could quadruple our call volume," Carrillo said. "The idea is really good. But the timing is really bad." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- On the Net: www.ushomeguard.org/