jks wrote:
>
>> There is no question these guys are out there and are extremely dangerous,
>> though usually not to Americans and Australians.
>
> Agreed. I don't mean to minimize the real threat from this criminal gang.
They
> should be located, arrested, prosecuted subject to due process, and if
> convicted beyond a reasonable doubt of serious crimes, locked up for a long
> time. I realize that saying this puts me in the hopelessly nostalgic camp of
> classical political liberalism.
Well, it puts you in the camp of the radical Indonesian left, who are jsut about the only people around here who are worried about the real AQ, rather than some mythical refraction thereof. Few people in the state over there are seriously concerned about defusing lethal and in fact ethnocidal forms of 'Islam' , in fact they sponsor them. Few people in the Australia state are interested in helping out those few people in the Indonesian state, in fact, our government has reestablished military connections with KOPASSUS, the unit which trains goons to decapitate Dayaks and Papuans. At least in this case, our war on terror is actually making terror far worse, placing these people further and further away from the reach of any legality. Occasionally someone kills a bunch of westerners, and then we get a showtrial - what is happening now regarding Ja'ama Islamiya, the group responsible for the Bali bombing. It is awful: such spectacles make justice even harder to achieve, creating an illusory resolution which permits the state to continue on its merry complicit ways... Very depressing stuff, don't know if I'd call it nostalgia.
Thiago
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