JCC Explosions at Brussels Airport

Ugh, fast moving thread.

Jedi Ben - please don't say ISIS, it makes me want to lump you in the category of "imbecile" and you're clearly not.

solojones - how many times have dogs made you safer in an airport? How are they actually materially different from Men And Women With Guns And Uniforms?

They're not. Since there've been how many bombings as a percentage of all transport related activity.

I see the US' fear factory has found another loyal customer.

 

This is the 3rd terrorist attack this American teenager has survived (Boston & Paris were the other two)

https://gma.yahoo.com/american-morm...terrorism-210307474--abc-news-topstories.html#

 

You know what?

This is not ISIS. Or even Daesh. These attacks on Western soil are not perpetrated by Iraqis or Syrians. The attacks that shake up Western society happen from within. This is the reality we must face: that we have disenfranchised people roaming the streets. That's what we have to work on. Not bombing some strangers.

Saw a tweet from a girl on some high school around here. Said kids were cheering. This is what's wrong. You don't want no kids cheering for terrorist attacks in any part of your community. Why do they cheer? Because they resent.

 

I'm so aroused with patriotism I could **** the **** out of a bald eagle right now.

(OR WHO GIVES A ****?)

 

OK, there's no way I can resist that opening.... Ender at work on a bald eagle:

 

Surviving three attacks is kind of a big deal... doesn't matter where he/she is from. Ender, you're talking about Murica a hell of a lot more than others in this thread... lol.

 

Ender Sai: Angry that people are talking about America in this thread, proceeds to talk about nothing but.

 

Er.... I wasn't talking about the US. I didn't say a word about America in my post and it wasn't at all intended to be about America. I don't know where you got that from, other than from your own agenda. You're doing that thing again, Ender. Don't do that thing.

I was responding to Burt's post about people remaining calm in Europe and the UK. I agree with him that anyone's odds of dying in a terrorist attack are low, and that having to have armed police all over the place in Europe is sort of giving ISIS what they want. I simply stated that IMHO the only thing I might do as a reasonable deterrent against the very real possibility of further European attacks on the heels of this one (given that ISIS has shown a penchant for these coordinated mutli-target attacks within one nation, within a couple neighboring nations doesn't seem out of the question) is deploy more bomb-sniffing dogs.

More bombs were found in the Brussels airport after it was cleared, so it's not unreasonable to think there could be more planted elsewhere, given the multi-target attacks ISIS likes to use. Dogs in unsecured areas of other airports and train stations in Europe might find other bombs, but might also deter another stage of the attack somewhere else if spotted by terrorists. I think they're a pretty fair and low-key thing that can be deployed at other European soft targets at the moment, and are probably more useful than tons of police with guns.

That's all I was saying. Not remotely talking about America or trying to fear-monger. Just thinking of what actual useful police tactics could be to prevent further attacks in Belgium or nearby countries.

 

31 people are dead - 11 at Zaventem and 20 at the Maelbeek metro station.

230 are injured - 100 at Zaventem and 130 at Maelbeek.

The Maelbeek metro station is on Rue de la Loi, 2 blocks from la Berlaymont - the EU parliament. It's also 2 blocks from Gare de Bruxelles, the international train stop for Brussels.

The locations, the victims, the persistent question of Muslims in Europe - which one side wont' discuss, perpetuating false tolerance because of fear of being labelled racist vs one side that is too eager to discuss - the dangers of radicalisation. These are the important topics here. No other country, harps, is trying desperately to recalibrate the attacks so they understand them.

What many fail to understand about this is the complex psychological games at play. I can tell you what Rue de La Loi looks like. I know what it looks like to pull into Gare de Bruxelles by train, with the EU flags and a curiously large Tintin mural atop one of the buildings. As I said, the last time I was in Brussels was 2, 2.5 weeks after a terrorist was subdued on a Thalys train. I spent a few hours there... after getting off a Thalys train.

Watto alluded to complacency before, and I was able to relate that back to actual incidents. No security measures adopted after the Thalys incident, which if you'll recall was on Amsterdam -> Paris, in Paris itself. None when I got off the train in Belgium. There's a certain openness about European life which a small segment of a wider, but equally less integrated/more resentful minority, that is seeking to dismantle this openness as part of a strategy I'm not sure even they understand.

So, yes, I'm annoyed that I read 3 pages of people talking about Trump, about how America needs to act. It's not about you, and if you guys travelled the world more you'd understand that better. Someone survived 3 attacks. Golly gee willickers. My uncle survived a few more than that working in London in the 1980s (thanks, IRA). It's only a big deal to Americans. Because you don't actually have to live with this frontline conflict. Sept 11 was an outlier, a statistical aberration.

In order to disrupt the way in which Europeans go about their day, attacks on elements that are so ordinary as to be considered a part of the everyday have to happen. Anywhere you go, the metro is an element of your daily life. As is walking a lot, and flying. If you want people to be afraid - terrorism is theatre, after all - you need to disrupt those ordinary aspects in order to induce fear. If I take for granted riding the Metro or going for a walk, and I feel unsafe now doing that, then I shan't.

A small victory ensues.

If you cannot grasp the psychological impact here, if you cannot picture the 'idyllic' ordinariness of daily life in a Western European city, then you shouldn't seek to recontextualise it so it works for you. Not being able to conceive of the ease with which people could get a bomb to hurt a lot of innocents in Brussels, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam... the tyranny of distance hyperbolically knows no bounds.

I don't understand what they hope to achieve and I'm not sure they do. I think in part they want Belgians to feel fear, but also they want anyone who considers coming to Belgium to feel fear. Like if I was flying into/out of Zaventem I would now be compelled to change my mind and my plans.

What that achieves, I don't know. But I also know that it's not going to work that way. Belgians are now congregating without fear of a secondary attack. Europeans are generally resisting the inescapable allure of xenophobia, though undoubtedly they have a Real Problem they need to address. But if any of what I've said wasn't already known with familiarity to you, then you're really going to add no value to the discussion. I get why people are tempted to make it about them and what they know, but it's wrong and they should feel bad.

 

solojones, I was more referring to how you're conditioned in the US to be "cautious", aka afraid.

The rest of my post was referring to Europe.

There's no point at which the dogs would enhance safety. Because the odds of it being an effective deterrent either in a passive or active capacity are so slim as to not bear thinking about.

There's no inherent benefit to people w/guns over dogs. Dogs cannot be everywhere. They cannot cover ever metro in Europe - you know Nord, right? Imagine trying to cover its international and domestic platforms with adequate coverage to stop someone getting in and going kaboom.

It's all about symbolism. It's not really going to stop a bomber.

 

I'm not conditioned to be cautious by being from the US. I'm conditioned to think there might be more bombing attempts in Europe because these are the second bombings in 6 months, because each of these bombings has targeted more than one site, and because even when they knew another attack was likely, Belgian officials were

You don't know for sure that bomb sniffing dogs would have deterred an attack like today's. But I didn't see any of them on any of the security footage, photos, or shared videos of these attacks in Brussels. The departures lounge at the airport held tons of people but had basically no deterrent to a bomb attack. The dogs don't necessarily have to be everywhere outside security in order to deter people. How about just having them at the entrances? Yes, I've been to Gare du Nord, and it's huge. But there are only so many entrances.

Again, I'm not saying it would be the perfect guard against such things by any means, but it would be better than literally doing nothing, even when you know a terrorist attack is likely because you've just arrested a major terrorist and are onto his cell. There's really very little excuse for the Brussels police to have not attempted to look for or deter bombs at a major airport and train station given that climate. And I don't think it's intrusive at all for them and other cities in Europe to think of doing the same for a while, given that there's likely an increased risk to such targets at the moment based on ISIS tactics.

You're acting as if having any caution is ridiculous and pointless. And I'm sorry, but there is some level of security that's reasonable and even useful without having to become a totalitarian state.

 

Sure, dogs, sure.

But that's not really the thing we need to discuss.

We need to discuss the fact that we're all the same people and that we should all more or less face the same problems together.

 

I can't really add anything else to the conversation that has already been covered, apart to offer my own personal condolences for this terrible attack.

Unfortunately the response to these attacks will be predicable and, probably, partly unhelpful. Unfortunately the general public still want to pretend that this is a conventional war. Of course this isn't; there is no bombing campaign, declaration of war or military response which will solve the issue, and in many ways those responses will only compound it. This is an issue of education and disenfranchisement. It's about showing those who will do us harm that there ideology is morally bankrupt and that no act of terrorism will win them any goals. That the only way live in a society is to live with tolerance of others and that change, if you believe it should happen, should be done through debate, and not through violence. And we must also accept that it is the Muslim community at large that we must help, acknowledging that they have a problem however not falling into the prejudice that they are not solvable and that we must demonise them all.

Of course, this won't be the response from much of the world. We will declare that we must act militarily and without consideration of our better nature. This will only make things worse and leave an already demonised community even more angry and disenfranchised that no-one will actually help them with the issues they know they face.

 

How many bomb attacks went off in the last 365 days at any major European airport?

And how many passengers as a percentage of the total were killed?

Rachel you need to really understand the what of what we're dealing with here. The dogs, that sort of stuff, it's not really tied to reality.

You know that Abdelslam was arrested within the infamous borough of Molenbeek, right? The same part of Brussels he and his mates lived in and concocted their plans. How does a guy like that spend time hiding there?

Probably because there's an extensive network of sympathetic Muslims who hold radical beliefs but don't act on them. The 'gunmen' types who detonate the bombs or pull the trigger are always supported by a large network of supporters. A substantially large network.

They also tend to source targets, recruits, and arms locally.

Given the local aspect of it - it's very self contained - how easy do you think it would be to watch for the locations or patterns of patrol and go around it. You can access Zaventem by bus, car, and metro. Unless every platform is subject to sniffer dogs, you can't do more than give the illusion of coverage. It's like you think any form of enforcement will be an effective deterrent but some are more effective - their coverage is limited and not omnipresent, and even if you walk a suitcase bomb into a terminal all the dogs in the world can't stop that detonation.

It's symbolism. The appearance of something that leads to the illusion of safety. You say the Belgian police should have done more - do you, like Ghost, have a positive vetted clearance and access to information about what Europol and the Belgian authorities were actually doing?

 

I don't know what they were doing precisely in Molenbeek, no. And I completely understand that the bulk of intelligence work should be focused on that area, and it almost certainly is. The greater thing at issue is definitely that this community has grown within Beligum that essentially hates Belgium and Belgians, the entire concept of the thing. And that's a crazy situation, and I'm not quite sure how to deal with it. I wouldn't pretend to have a personal experience with that. I'm not denying that it's a grave problem or diminishing it at all... it's just not what I was talking about currently.

However, I can see plainly from what went on at the airport and Metro station what the Belgian police did and did not do as far as security is concerned. That's a completely different thing than intelligence. The bombings took places in areas with no security. Had there been security there, there's a good chance they wouldn't have taken place there. Perhaps they would have just gone elsewhere, but maybe those would have been less populated areas, like a sidewalk. Let's not pretend like there is no benefit to security.

Let me give you in fact a concrete example of how heightened security actually does help save lives, sometimes substantial numbers of lives: at the Stade de France, the suicide bombers approached a gate that would normally have had much less security than it presently did. There were extra security forces there because of the President's presence at the game. Their presence deterred the bombers. It stopped them from getting inside, into a stadium where they could easily have killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more. They blew themselves up outside instead, away from the crowds, killing only a few people instead. Heightened security made a difference. It's probably made a difference other times we don't know about.

I don't know what the Belgians are doing for intelligence, but I don't think it's crazy to think that they and other European countries could do a little more for security without disposing of civil liberties. And having just some extra bodies (no guns needed) with some dogs that terrorists know could smell bombs around key soft targets would not be an undo breach of civil liberties. And might saves some lives, just like at Stade de France.

I'm not afraid of terrorist attacks everywhere I go. I just think it's kind of silly not to protect targets you know are likely to be hit at a time when you know a terrorist cell is probably going to try to hit them. It doesn't take a security clearance anywhere to know that Belgium was at an increased risk after the arrest of Abdeslam. Just like it didn't take a genius to say "let's put more security on this stadium while the President is watching the match."

 

Don't be stubborn. She has a point. Move on. Now, please; no more talk about dogs.

 

My condolences to the victims.

As far as security, perhaps the Israeli model of airport security would be best? They train their security, both plainclothes and uniformed, to monitor behavior. Despite being a hugely symbolic target for any number of terrorist groups, they've had very few successful attacks. They're also unobtrusive and don't increase wait times at the airport, so your convenience is not affected. Dogs are good, but they can be spoofed, and a trained dog is more obtrusive, more expensive and has a shorter service life than a human.

We also need to remember that the people doing this are not Muslims, they are not Arabs, they are just thugs who have picked up the flavor-of-the-month cause to legitimize themselves. The refugees are as much a victim of the thugs as the Belgians are.

 

Not really, VVM, no.

There's a number of issues with your post here sj.

Firstly; the nature of a deterrent. You make my point for me; the bombers weren't deterred. They were incapable of hitting their primary target so... they still killed people.

To help illustrate this; imagine their target was in fact la Berlaymont, and the security there prompted them to hit the airport and metro.

They aren't deterred. They are at best disrupted, but more ordinarily they were probably just redirected. They're going to attack, and so all you're doing is making some targets more/less attractive than others.

What you may not know, or simply it never occurred to you because the image you and many others have thanks to TV/film, is that when an act of politically motivated violence is disrupted by law enforcement officials it is still in the operational planning stages. Cops are not heroically putting a judicious .40S&W round into the back of a suicide bomber before they can use their detonator. And we know in at least a half dozen actual attacks that the quantum of people who know about these attacks beforehand is surprisingly high. There's just a very low portion of these people who know of an imminent attack who disclose anything to police.

So at the point at which a suicide bomber or car bomber has primed explosives and set off do to their deed (and I'm using this as an example; France shows it could also be gunmen) the effect of any deterrent is minimal. There is little fear about dying in realisation of their outcomes, so an armed cop with a dog at the Metro isn't going to stop them. It may at best limit the scope of damage.

By the time someone's made that call it's very rare - possible, but rare - for them to be deterred from their goal.

But this conversation is showing me what I feared the entertainment industry has done; it's given people what they feel is a realistic depiction of counterterrorism. It's false.

You state that the bombings happened in areas where there's no security. Have you seen the suspects as captured on CCTV? How reasonably would security have known to inderdict these targets?

We're using hindsight to judge a situation for which we have no facts. I can tell you without going into specifics you would be utterly surprised the level of coverage airports actually get. You might say "oh I think I can guess" but can you? Military, police, customs, security services, intelligence services, all of them are lurking around in non-obvious ways. For you to say "The bombings took places in areas with no security. Had there been security there, there's a good chance they wouldn't have taken place there" is for you to make a confident and prescriptive judgement in possession of precisely fractional facts and without any actual practical knowledge of how security functions. I've seen films, SJ, but I've also been in all the official off limits areas of airports before, in Australia and abroad. What you and others don't know about this could fill pages of a book.

You just cannot make that statement and assume it's true credibly. You can make it, and assume it's true, but there's a credibility chasm here.

Sorry. Why mentioned civil liberties? It's an American concept and American conceit. I'm not worried about extra security - I held a positive vetted clearance, sj. I don't have any secrets from the government. They went through everything. They know my life pretty thoroughly. No, sorry, nobody mentioned that.

The concern is that in responding as the imbeciles in the US did, with additional men with impressive Colt M4 carbines and body armour and sniffer dogs, you cede a philosophical high ground. We are not interested in Islam. We do not want to convert to it, and especially not convert to an extreme right wing version of it. Intimidating people to agitate for a fevered dream of a caliphate is their goal; allowed them to succeed is my prerogative. As it is anyone in a country where this risk exists.

The extra security you speak of in a poorly cited and ineffectual example is window dressing. It will not be involved in operations. It will not stop the men who plan this in their apartments or houses. It will not give an explosives laden bloke cause to think "I ought not". A dog sniffing out an accelerant and barking wildly will not make him turn and flee. If they've made a decision to ****ing die for a cause do you think they care if a dog spots them?

I mean, you need to relate terrorism to reality and not to films and TV.

So how do you know that their target wasn't La Berlaymont and they thought 'we're going to kill people, can't do it here, let's go elsewhere?"

And like with critics of Clinton and Bush with 11 September - if your foresight was so advanced that you could tell exactly where and when this would happen, why did you not speak up?

Please sj, this is not doing you any favours at all.

 

This reference to the Israeli model of airport 'security' actually feeds back to the excellent point which SuperWatto made earlier. The analogy is that if Israel actually focused on addressing the underlying causes of it being a 'target' in the first place, rather than just accepting that it is a target and doing nothing about that other than implement steroidal security measures, the fundamental need for security may disappear. The same is true for the rest of the world. If you throw dog*** over your neighbour's fence and this creates an irritable and hostile neighbour who steals your newspaper, consider whether it may be more sensible to cease throwing dog**** over the fence rather than spending time, money and angst on building a barbed wire fence around your mailbox to protect your family.

 

The King is clearly not a tough guy. He said:

"We are faced with a threat, but we will continue to work together calmly, surely and with dignity. We must continue to trust ourselves. This is our strength.”

Erm, I'd be happier trusting my fear, xenophobia oh and yes, I would like to purchase and additional firearm or three, thank you sir.

 

Well Ender his name is Philippe, so clearly he is a lavender loving pacifist weakling pansy boy.

 

I did point out an example from reality: the Stade de France, where extra security really did save people's real lives. It really did stop people from blowing themselves up inside a crowded stadium. It forced them to kill themselves for almost nothing. This is a real example that I based my entire post around, and you conveniently ignored it because you'd rather bluster about how there's apparently a difference between your "philosophical high ground" and "invading civil liberties", even though they are literally the exact same thing with different words, and just mean "letting the terrorists win by forcing us to react in an undue fashion".

The only difference is that I'm not so stubborn that I think you shouldn't at least protect obvious targets right after you've captured a major terrorist. You don't have to keep security heightened forever. It's contextual for certain places at certain times. Like when the President is at the match. And it works.

 

I'm soooo confused, is this a Ender Sai hates on the United States of America thread, or a thread on The bombings in Belgium? It's really hard to tell.

 

I didn't though Rachel. They were determined to blow themselves up, hurt people, and make people afraid.

They were still able to strike to achieve those goals. Just because their primary target was inaccessible to them doesn't mean they were deterred.

If I say "I'm going to kill someone! In fact I'll kill that pesky solojones" and you go "oh pants, I'd best hide!" and I decide then to shoot gersh even though it's a massive step down because you're behind a locked door... how was your hiding a deterrent to me? I wanted to kill; I decided on you before changing. I killed. I mean, how is this a struggle for you?

I'm serious, how is this an issue? Is it because you don't want to divorce reality from counterterrorism movies and shows?