white terrorists and bad terrorists

* "In the meantime, speculation about a possible mastermind has fastened on a number of figures. Most attention has been devoted to Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British-born militant arrested in Zambia after he was incorrectly reported to have been held in Pakistan. He is now said to be telling his captors that he was once a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden." (link)
the bamboozlement continues.

* "It is striking that suspects in both the 7 and 21 July attacks were bonded by a common interest in sport. Members of both groups are alleged to have met in gyms, and physical activity is a useful cover for terrorist training." (link)
can someone please explain this nonsense to me? both the independent and the guardian stopped making sense 24 days ago.

* similarly, this: "Another target of the investigation is the bomb-makers or chemists. Even if there was no overall mastermind, there may have been a figure with some expert knowledge, probably stemming from a degree in chemistry or a related subject. " (link)

* and this: "In blowing themselves up, Mohammed Sidique Khan and his friends deprived the British public of the answer to a chilling question. What drives four young men, who grew up in Britain, to one day pack rucksacks full of explosives and destroy the lives of 52 innocent people and their own, in the name of religion?" (link)
nobody said a thing about religion. in dact, the 2nd sentence completely contradicts the first.

* or this: "Peter Herbert, a leading barrister, spent many hours interviewing Richard Reid, the Briton jailed for attempting to blow up a plane using bombs hidden in his shoes. His impression was that Reid was very normal. "His view of world politics was no different from people who turn to extremism,"" (link)
the extremist was no different to extremists. wtf?

* ant this: "And when they found them, these men did not have the air of satanic glamour lent to them by those fuzzy, chilling CCTV grabs. They were ordinary looking" (link)

* and so on: "The would-be bombers watched films, "especially those in which you saw women and children killed and exterminated by the English and American soldiers, or widows, mothers and daughters who were crying".
The propaganda helped to foster the group's "political conviction that it is necessary to give a signal, to do something", Hussain was quoted by La Repubblica as saying." (link)
why is this 'propaganda' any more than the daily news? the use of the word is so unnecessary. i expect better, much better, from the independent. (ftr, i think that we have to take these leaks from the interrogations with a grain of salt)

* right on cue, heres this from the guardian: "But some of the Italian media reports told a conflicting story. Some reports quoted Osman as saying: 'I hardly know anything. They only gave me a rucksack to carry on the tube in London. We wanted to stage an attack, but only as a show. Who gave me the explosive? I don't know. I didn't know him. I don't remember. We didn't want to kill, we just wanted to scare people.'" (link)

* but then we get more nonsense from the guardian: "Senior officers are particularly concerned there could be a third attack on Thursday, two weeks after the last attempt. One officer said: 'When you look at the history of terrorist attacks and of al-Qaeda in particular, there is a pattern of repeated attacks on the same targets. They hit the World Trade Centre twice. They attacked the embassies in Egypt twice. If anything the level of security around public transport on Thursday will be even higher than last.'" (link)

* back to some creeping sanity from the guardian: "With one tabloid blaring 'Got the Bastards' and another headlining the arrest of 'the cowardly suicide bombers', civil rights lawyers called yesterday for tightened guidelines on coverage of the suspects held in connection with the 21 July attacks... She said she had found much of the coverage of Friday's arrests 'very worrying', since it seemed based on the assumption that the police had correctly identified the alleged bombers." (link)


* and ill just round out this post with the guardian giving column inches to bliar and white terrorists and bad terrorists: "Ever since he became Prime Minister and began cutting a deal with the IRA, but still more since the 11 September attacks nearly four years ago, Tony Blair has tried to answer a conundrum: how can terrorism be utterly and unforgivably wrong in one case, but tolerable and negotiable in another? Why is murderous Islamic militancy so different from murderous Irish republicanism?" (link)