London asplode

[Dole]

So it would seem it was a suicide bomber on the bus. Had to be really..horrible. Its actually the bus my sis normally gets, but she was already at work. She was a barrister in a court case while all this was going on - an alert went off in the court, and they were all told to stay in court and carry on - no-one would tell them what had happened, only that it was a 'red alert'. The Judge asked to be told and the security people at the court said they weren't allowed to say?! One of the barristers sneaked out and found out what was going on, but they still all had to sit there and go through the motions for 3 hours until lunchtime! All of the barristers, my sis included had friends/partners/colleagues working in the city, so it was quite an unpleasant 3 hours while they waited to get out and check everyone was ok. Obviously a lot of people went through a hell of a lot worse yesterday, but still not very nice. Especially personally as it meant I couldnt get in touch with her to check she was ok.

The most frightening aspect to me about attacks like these is how easy they are to carry out, and how impossible they are to protect against. 'Al-Queada' is not some organised, pyramid shaped hierarchy that can be stopped by taking out its leaders - if Bin Laden was shot dead tomorrow, none of this would stop. Rather, its god-knows-how-many individual cells, that are probably for the most part self financing and autonomous. They get inspiration from people like Bin-laden and other hate-spouting fanatics, but there is no clear chain of command. If they find and prosecute all the people involved with yesterday, its not going to stop the 'terrorist threat'. Anyone can make a crude homemade bomb, walk into any crowded public place and do something similar. How the fuck do you prevent something like that?? And the fact that these people believe that doing such an act will propel them into heaven...they HOPE to die doing it!! Thats a fucking weapon of mass destruction right there. Going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan won't stop people like this. Tougher immigration policies won't stop it. What the fuck do we do?
I saw an interesting thing on the news late last night saying how the only way the intelligence services can hope to deal with this problem is to completely change the way they work - they just aren't equipped to deal with this kind of threat. They need to operate in a far more similar way to the terrorists themselves to be able to fight them.

'The war on terror' has never been more of a rather sick joke than it is at the moment - we are not winning it - I don't think we are even fighting it. They don't have a fucking clue.