GLOBAL GUERRILLAS IN THE UK

The spread of the open source war to the West isn't a matter of speculation or conjecture. It's real and tangible as new groups/networks emerge with increasing frequency (see this brief for more on the community dynamics of open source group formation). A measure of those networks we do know about in the UK, was provided on November 9th 2006 by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, director general of the MI5 (a person rarely given to hype). She provides us (see the original transcript) with the following:

• "What I can say is that today, my officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don't know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas."
  
  
• "We are aware of numerous plots to kill people and to damage our economy. What do I mean by numerous? Five? Ten? No, nearer thirty - that we know of. These plots often have links back to Al-Qaida in Pakistan and through those links Al-Qaida gives guidance and training to its largely British foot soldiers here on an extensive and growing scale. And it is not just the UK of course. Other countries also face a new terrorist threat: from Spain to France to Canada and Germany."
  
  
• "What we see at the extreme end of the spectrum are resilient networks, some directed from Al-Qaida in Pakistan, some more loosely inspired by it, planning attacks including mass casualty suicide attacks in the UK. Today we see the use of home-made improvised explosive devices; tomorrow's threat may include the use of chemicals, bacteriological agents, radioactive materials and even nuclear technology. More and more people are moving from passive sympathy towards active terrorism through being radicalised or indoctrinated by friends, families, in organised training events here and overseas, by images on television, through chat rooms and websites on the Internet."

In Context

The groups that Dame Eliza's MI5 has identified are clearly the tip the of the iceberg. The dynamics of this model of warfare dictate that for every group identified (almost all in the likely detection zone depicted by the red nodes in the graphic in the upper left), there are dozens more in formation or fully functional without direct connections to known sources of danger (without a direct connection to a known terrorist group or individual, it is nearly impossible to differentiate dangerous networks from benign ones). As my brief The Changing Face of War: Into the 5th Generation described, these groups will:

• Continue to form under their own steam. They are a product of the growing appeal of primary loyalties (a function of globalization) relative to those of the increasingly remote "interests of the state." Also, since the situation in both Iraq and Afghanistan show no sign of abating (in fact, quite the opposite), this dynamic will continue to intensify. Again, since there isn't any cohesive hierarchy associated with this community, gains in rolling up one network will not transfer to many other networks. They are relatively autonomous and this adds mightily to their resiliency.
• Increasingly move towards economic and social systems disruption. The ongoing pressure on groups from the MI5 will counter the development of complex plans that require large networks to accomplish. The natural outcome of this pressure is a move towards the simplicity and outsized returns generated by systems disruption (this has also been reflected in both statements from al Qaeda to the output of Internet media). Luckily, we are still a decade away from when fully functional weapons of mass destruction become viable for the productivity level of small networks of this type (Ikle's scenario). Our ability to deal with this effectively now, will predict our success then.
• Connection to transnational crime will continue. The connection between many of these groups and the smuggling networks of "black globalization" will continue to generate funding for ongoing operations (both in the UK and abroad). This connection also means that we will increasingly see "terrorism for hire" among disaffected and unemployed youth. This will radically expand the pool of potential participants.

Comments

[zenpundit]

The smartest thing to do from a security standpoint would be to roll this network up all at once, in an overnight raid and deport them "back home" (even if they are UK citizens) to the tender hands of local authorities. And listen to the resulting electronic chatter in the aftermath of the shock move.

Let the legal complaints regarding violations of procedure from legal allies of the Islamists percolate slowly through the courts with the de facto burden of proof being on the deportees to offer up enough information to convince a court to let them get back into Britain. Violating legal procedures was de rigeur with Northern Ireland terrorism issues and it can be done again.

[Duncan Kinder]

The existence of underground movements in England with an ideological and international bent yet also influenced by informal social networks is not new. It really is just about as English as steak and kidney pie.

Smugglers have a long and colorful history in England. They date to the medieval woolen trade, which in its time was as important as oil is today. Medieval and early modern England was the Saudi Arabia of wool exports. To raise money, the crown attempted to tax exports to Burgundy and to Florence, the cloth manufacturing centers of the time. Smugglers, called "owlers," sneaked wool out. This ties in to the rise of Florentine banking, which serviced the international wool trade of the time.

Smuggling further took off when, following the Gloroious Revolution and the beginning of the 18th Century struggles between Britain and France, the government attempted to tax not only wool exports but also luxury imports as well. This was the era of such colorful figures as Cornish smugglers and the smugglers of Romney Marsh: the England of _Jamaica Inn_.

Entire local communites became involved. Smuggling became associated with Jacobite Resistance to the Hanoverian and Whig establishment.

For more information, goto "Smugglers' Britain."
http://www.smuggling.co.uk/index.html

[adam]

I'm fascinated by a number of items in this.

a) Time: These groups are supposed to have grown up in less than 5 years. Each group has been growing independantly but with similar objectives. Thats very fast indeed compared to, say, the IRA. And they have a member of 1600 active terrorists; rather more field workers than the Labour party has.

b) Note that Manningham-Buller (MB) is saying that the first significant Al-Quaeda plot dates back to November 2000. She says thats before 9/11 (true), but its also the time period of the strike on the USS Cole. Does she mention the USS Cole? No. That is a fascinating omission as it occured in an area that British Intelligence very much thinks of as its backyard.

c) Oddly MB also forgets to mention the terrorism in Saudi Arabia (an anti-British car bombing) in November 2000 which would eventually see 6 British citizens tortured into confessing.

d) Even more oddly MB also forgets to mention that in November 2000 3 men are arrested after a "barrack buster" mortar bomb containing an 100 kilos of home-made explosives is found in a van intercepted by police.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/1021000.stm

So with b, c and d in play what does MB emphasise? The arrest of 2 (one was cleared by the jury) British citizens of Bangladeshi origin arrested in Birmingham on suspicion of preparing a large quantity of home made explosives. They became Al-Quaeda operatives because it was needed politically after the event - it wasn't mentioned at the time. Their defence was that they were making fireworks and even the judge admitted that there were no targets.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1845218.stm
http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/documents/7-july-report.pdf?view=Binary

So if this is the first Al-Quaeda UK operation its fascinating. First they're Bangladeshi - and not (say) Saudi or Pakistani, second they're complete and total amateurs, third there's only one person involved. Bear in mind that this is at the exact same time as the solidly professional USS Cole hit and the UK version is surprisingly poor by comparison.

Which brings us to e) Numbers. The IRA ran its operations with sometimes as few as 50 active members. MB is now claiming that organisations exist many times larger - with a hundred thousand sympathisers no less (!).
Yet strangely these terrorists appear to be largely ineffective. Certainly the IRA managed the occasional explosion in an area where the Brits had the advantage of a few centuries years head start. Are British intelligence that good, that quickly against Islamic terrorism? I doubt it. More likely is that no attack was planned.

Then we get to the stuff that Marcello will doubtless rightly shout at. Apparently people unable to do an explosion in the UK will suddenly develop their own Porton Down / Atomic Weapons Establishment. Cough sure right.

Taking a-e together with the rest of the speech it looks like another cry for an increased budget on a nicely balanced form of blackmail (give us the budget or its dead babies all over the place time - and maybe even if you do... Now *thats* job security: "pay us money or your kids die").

[ramsis]

i think this is a direct consequence of western cultures that tolerate the most intolerant cultures on earth. to prove our openess to diversity we have allowed many to establish treasoness groups that advocate violence and then hide behind our laws for protection, islamic fascists openly using the very system in wich they seek to destroy and all we can do is exscuse them as victims and ask what we did to provoke them. on one side of the coin is we could over react and start dumping tons of money in increasingly large budgets (as adam points out) and spend our way to feel secure and infringe the rights of good citizens all the while tred carfully not to offend the people we are trying to fight. the other side is to do nothing ignore the problem and wait for the inevitable attack that the enemy has been telling us about openly in our own society.i don't suggest that there are any easy solutions to the questions of whats a percieved threat and whats a real one but there must be some common sense used when someone tells you that they are going to kill you, you can't always wait to see if they mean it. Australia has taken the approach that if you don't love us then leave (as zenpundit suggests)and i have to say i agree. we are an open society and i wish to stay that way, i'm often a critic of our government but i would never advocate violence to change that much less organize groups whose soul porpose is to do so.is that so much to ask.

[adam]

Ramsis,

A very fair point. I'm reminded that you don't have to go very far from Western Liberalism to find that Westerners aren't very liberal. Bin Ladens position has a lot to do with Western (well, US) foreign policy and very little to do with what happens in our own countries. He wants us out of Saudi and Palastine, to stop supporting repressive secular dictatorships like Egypt, and let people get on with being Islamic. Put that way its quite reasonable, but we cannot do it as that would be surrendering to terrorism!

The fun question for Western Democracies is: for how long can such a democracy continue to exist if it uses methods that run fundamentally counter to its basic beliefs in attempting to defend those beliefs? More to the point, isn't the warping of the basic beliefs of a political system the sign that the terrorists have achieved a goal?

[Valdis]

Here is another view of the community map from above... this time I included the 'isolates' -- a.k.a. lurkers -- who are attracted to the group, have signed up for membership, but have not participated yet. Note that the lurkers [the blue nodes] make up about 40% of this group. On-line groups that do not requre a 'sign-up' probably have larger lurker populations.

http://www.orgnet.com/emergent_community2.png

[zenpundit]

"A very fair point. I'm reminded that you don't have to go very far from Western Liberalism to find that Westerners aren't very liberal"

Actually it has less to do with liberalism than calculating a cost-benefit ratio.

The overwhelming majority of Arab and Muslims in the West, immigrant and native born, are not supporters of jihadism or are active terrorists. Nonetheless, the small percentage who are have been causing enough headaches (i.e. substantial costs) for Western states that the most economical policy switch will be to reduce Muslim immigration and favor some other foreign demographic.

So many people would like to immigrate to the United States and Western Europe that these nations could simply opt to favor Chinese, Indians, Latin Americans, Eastern Europeans, Subsaharan Africans -whomever - and close the door to the MENA. We'd just be opting for immigrants with fewer spillover costs.

Neither the U.S. nor Europe are at this point yet today but it is at any given moment, one catastrophic act of terrorism away.

[John Robb]

Thanks Valdis!

Zen, one event like that and the spillover will be that all immigration will become suspect and subject to harsh measures.

[shloky]

The new BBC show "A State Within" does a pretty good job addressing these issues in a UK/US context.

[Isaac]

Regarding immigration implications: Shloky recently posted "Automated Targeting System" (I recall Robocop's "...you have 10 seconds to comply..." scene from the boardroom, nice) about crossing borders. Couple this with the fact that starting this January, I'm pretty sure, we'll need actual passports to go anywhere - even Mexico for the day - and crossing the border *period* has already become more suspect.
Also, rolling them up an deporting them would have hit the 100% mark or this action itself could provide the final motivation for any left behind. Sticky.

[Jack Boot]

Dame Buller's comments show why England and Europe will lose our 21st century war. She states that everyone believes in "Equality, Freedom, Justice and Tolerance", in other words we are all equal under the skin. The west is captive to an ideology.
I bet the Dame herself lives as far away as possible from those whom she calls "our youths", and maybe she is a little worried as she steps out of her amoured car that one of "our youths" is waiting to blow her to kingdom come.

[zenpundit]

"Also, rolling them up an deporting them would have hit the 100% mark or this action itself could provide the final motivation for any left behind. Sticky"

It might also be a deterrent for some of those terrorist sympathizers, on the margin, who were toying with being more active. Right now the penalties for engaging in sedition are comparatively mild, if you are even caught.

Actually, it might be more producive to "overlook" a few for the purpose of watching what they do in a moment of crisis.

[adam]

Zenpundit,

If we're talking about exiling people for sedition we're a long way away from the Wests conception of human rights post 1945, and heading towards Stalins. That'd be another win for the terrorists. I'd note that most of the people that you're suggesting deporting are citizens of Britain, not some other nation. Deporting citizens for disagreeing with the government isn't something we did to the Irish, so what makes the current situation worse?

Far more to the point do you want to drop hundreds of thousands of potential trainers of terrorists into the 3rd world? Such a move didn't work well in the 1500s with the deportation of the Jews from Spain.

It occurs to me that people with good working knowledges of how to live in the West would be invaluable to extremists. Certainly prior to 9/11 Bin Laden went out of his way to meet everyone with a Western passport and a pulse because of their rare and invaluable abilities.

99% of the people involved, even by MB's standards, are merely saying that they have major problems with current government foreign policy. So does any rational person, heck two million people marched in London against the war before it happened - if we're into criminalising around 1 in 30 of our population we might as well give up now.

[Duncan Kinder]

Two points:

1) British global guerrilla activity is not a subset of British Muslim activity. There is also non-Muslim British global guerrilla activity. For example, the City of London long has been associated with art crime and with money laundering.

2) As John Robb has noted elsewhere, even the resources of even such an authoritarian government as China are being challenged by global guerrillas. Therefore, it is likely that any British government's attempt to harshly crack down on global guerrillas ultimately would overtax its resources.

[John Robb]

Dehumanizing a large subgroup in an age of superempowerment may produce exactly the result it was meant to avoid.

[zenpundit]

Adam,

From your comments, I gather that you have it backwards. Allow me to clarify.

I am *not* redefining " criticism" as sedition - engaging in criminal acts to further the violent overthrow of the state.

You however are redefining sedition and terrorism as " criticism". It's not really kosher to lump penning op-ed articles and normal political activity in opposition to an elected democratic government with participating in a terrorist act. Planning to plant bombs or murder people is not a free speech issue but a conspiracy to commit acts of multiple homicide.

(Democracies BTW do in fact de-naturalize and deport/"exile" citizens. We've been doing it to former Nazis and members of organized crime for decades. Why exactly should we treat members of al Qaida cells, even if they are homegrown, with less severity than a mob boss or an ex-SS man ?)

There are peaceful avenues available in democratic states to lobby for the change of government policy. If proponents of change cannot persuade their fellow citizens to do so, that does not legitimize terrorism.

[zenpundit]

"Dehumanizing a large subgroup in an age of superempowerment may produce exactly the result it was meant to avoid"

Agreed. Nowhere that I'm aware of have I ever said " Round up the Muslims" -in fact, I was at pains to point out the opposite and always have.

How about rolling up the few hundred guys in the terror network ?

[enigma_foundry]

"The fun question for Western Democracies is: for how long can such a democracy continue to exist if it uses methods that run fundamentally counter to its basic beliefs in attempting to defend those beliefs? More to the point, isn't the warping of the basic beliefs of a political system the sign that the terrorists have achieved a goal?

Well,there are those who exist within democratic open western societies who really don't believe they should be as free and as open as they are. They can't espouse their opions opeenly, as they would be denounced.

But they can, in the name of security, propose new rules that suppress the opposition, and make us less free. But that is the small stuff.

What they can do to really do to damage to Western freedoms is: wage an unjust war against our supposed enemies, killing many hundreds of thousands of those innocent civilians so that those which remain will hate the West with a passion for the rest of their lives. Make sure that they leave a written description of their justifactions for not affording those captured any of the protections afforded by international conventions, so the basic racism and anti-Islamic nature of those leaders of the West is crystal clear. Sow permanant hatred of the USA in all countries of the Middle East to ensure a steady stream of recruits for the terrorist organizations, so that there will be plenty of terrorist atrocities, so as to justify ever more restrictions on freedoms.

In other words: if Emmanual Goldstein doesn't exist the Party will have to create him.

[adam]

Zenpundit,

You did note that people should be deported for sedition, which as the subject covered around a million Muslims (or merely 1,600) would tend to indicate thats what you thought.

Sedition is saying things that are critical of the government, as conveniently defined by the government. Certainly every anti-Iraq war campaigner would fall under that banner. Currently if I recall correctly there are US citizens that have committed the villainous crime of Sedition by writing to their local newspaper (they're simply savages!). You're taking that... interesting ... position one step further to deportation.

Also just because your parents are from a place, doesn't mean you've ever been there. Just a thought.

Next of course you compare these people to the SS and Mob Bosses. Whilst I understand that this is hyperbole intended to strengthen an argument that is critically weak (so people that think that the Iraq war was a mistake are actually Concentration Camp Guard Nazis? Really?).

I'd start by simply noting that in the case of the SS the crime did actually occur and evidence is available to show that it did. I'd then note that it was vanishingly rare that a guard was arrested, never mind charged - whereas your position appears to be that this should be more common. In this current case the crime might occur (or may not) based on the suspicions of a group of civil servants who have a vested personal financial interest and job security based on suspecting people. As I noted earlier, they also have the ability to remove an awful lot of contextual information from their public utterances.

Enigma Foundry,

Nice way of putting it :-D Daily Hate anyone? Sadly, I can't say you're wrong - Western Democracy does seem to be run by people who don't like democracy.

[zenpundit]

Adam,

Ah,I see I am dealing with an executor of stolen concepts as a line of argument. Fine, though anyone invoking "Stalin" to quash opposition to Islamist terrorist cells really has little call to accuse anyone of hyperbole.

To reiterate, sedition is not defined as "criticism" of government policies. (Or as anti-war activism - another attempt on your part to set up a staw man). Your repeating the opposite will not make it so, no matter how many times you return to the keyboad.

I'm in favor of deporting a million Muslims Adam ? Good fucking Lord. I can't believe your reading comprehension skills are actually that poor, so I'll attribute that to a habitual employment of logical fallacies on your part for polemical effect.

If you want to have a serious discussion about actual issues, great. If not, let's stop wasting our time.

[Isaac]

Zen,
Good point. Hitting the 100% mark "when it comes to the most zealous offenders" would have been a better way to put it. Your proposed action would most likely even flush out others heretofore unknown - another nice byproduct. I guess it would come down to the monitoring as to how prudent it would be operationally. With the UK's camera systems and its, literally, millions of good 'looks' per day, there may be no better venue for employing this tactic.
Isaac

[adam]

Zenpundit,

"Ah,I see I am dealing with an executor of stolen concepts as a line of argument."

WTF? I'm stunned. Its Ayn Rand. Great, an Objectivist, there went the neighbourhood. I was tempted to reply in the Style of the Great Woman but frankly her mad philosophy appalls me ("John Gault strutted like a peacock suffering from brutal rectal surgery "). As you'll note from my love of evidence and reality I'm firmly in the Kantian-Popplerian analysis-synthesis world, not Rands objectivist romantic world.

Of course being catty I'd note that I'm able to show with clear examples what my point is, and you haven't. As that is the basis of the theory of context-dropping, and its your personal philosophy, I'd say that its an interesting omission. Or "Evasion!" as the Great Woman would cry,

My only fault - in Objectivist terms - was to assume a basic level of knowledge, an error of neither ethical or moral significance in Objectivism.

"Fine, though anyone invoking "Stalin" to quash opposition to Islamist terrorist cells really has little call to accuse anyone of hyperbole."

Sigh... First I pointed out that you were moving along a line which could be drawn from the post 1945 Western view of the world towards one that Stalin would support in 1945. I didn't note how far along the line you'd wandered, but if you think your methods are Stalinist then you might want to wonder about yourself.

Now, a basic history lesson. Stalin in 1928, and for quite a number of years afterwards, exiled large groups that he disliked and distrusted. Does this sound in some way familiar? Among these untrusted groups were Muslims, for example the million strong Chechen population (deported in 1944). That'd be a million Muslim people deported. By Stalin.

No comparison to be made there to your comments.

Yes, I am being sarcastic but having to spell this out is an appalling commentary on the failure of our schools - I know that I'd covered this by 14 years old. I more or less assumed that everyone knew some basic history, so I guess I was wrong.

"To reiterate, sedition is not defined as "criticism" of government policies."

Sedition is defined as anything the government chooses to define it. As you should know the American 1798 Sedition Act defines Sedition as "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government and its officials. I'd say that any criticism of a government falls under that, when the government itself is deciding whether its malicious. I guess its just that I'm an old cynical 30-something, I'm sure that when I was younger I'd have trusted the government to be upright and honest.

Actually I'm lying - I'd never trust a British government to be upright and honest. I've met too many UK politicians for that to occur. Its a pretty English thing to do that - in the UK we don't create the West Wing, we create Yes Prime Minister. Of course you're an Objectivist so any form of collective organisation should assumed to be inherently immoral.

"(Or as anti-war activism - another attempt on your part to set up a staw man)."

http://www.alibi.com/index.php?story=14092

Straw men rely on me setting up a false representation of your argument. In this case I'm able to show examples - which under normal philosophy has to be sufficient for at least a starting position. Its also not unreasonable to point out that if the Muslims who are critising Western foreign policy should be exiled (your original position, but who knows what your current one is) then it has to follow that all of the other 2-million anti-War protestors, who also were against Western foreign policy, should be. A leads to B.

The alternative to that would be to say that anti-war protestors are in some way different to Muslim protestors. As they're doing the same basic action this would have to be defined by something they are, not something they do. Which brings us back to Stalin again because he exiled people based on what they were, not did.

"Your repeating the opposite will not make it so, no matter how many times you return to the keyboad."

Really? I can back my comments up by facts, examples and direct quotes. You haven't. I assume that you're unable to. In Objectivist terms I'm the good boy who gets given the sweeties and your the naughty evader - nanner nanner with Cherrys on Top. Still, fair play to Rand, no one ever got poorer by telling a rich man he morally deserved to be rich.

"I'm in favor of deporting a million Muslims Adam ? Good fucking Lord. I can't believe your reading comprehension skills are actually that poor, so I'll attribute that to a habitual employment of logical fallacies on your part for polemical effect."

Go back and re-read what you said. Or better yet read what you said. From your comments its clearly a number between 1600 and a million. This is a thing I myself noted in my second post. But who knows? I'm not even sure if even you know what you think. Certainly I note that you aren't able clarify what you actually think, as you're resorting to complaining that I haven't managed to read your mind.

"If you want to have a serious discussion about actual issues, great. If not, let's stop wasting our time."

Fair enough. Go away and learn some history, how to construct a coherent thought, and some facts. I'm on email to you.

[zenpundit]

Adam,

Amusing.

First, as I do know a little something about history and proper methodology: To be a historical example of a phenomenon the example actually needs to be relevant to the phenomena. Without that salience, it is simply noise. MI6 is not run by Abakumov, Tony Blair ain't Stalin, al Qaida terrorists bombing the tube in 2006 aren't Chechen villagers in 1944.

Secondly,I'm not an objectivist. I'm sure actual objectivists would be the first to agree. I simply found in Ayn Rand in this instance, an apt descriptor of your style of argumentation, which continues to be riddled with logical errors, completely irrelevant tangents and flat out distortions of my position.

"The smartest thing to do from a security standpoint would be to roll this network up all at once, in an overnight raid "

"How about rolling up the few hundred guys in the terror network "

I certainly see how you can extrapolate from that into " millions" and specious analogies of NKVD ethnic cleansing in Transcaucasia.

All that was really required here Adam was basic reading skills and a commitment to intellectual honesty. But you are so jacked up to pose as the lonely defender against a malevolent Islamophobic crypto-fascist conspiracy that you plow ahead without regard to what has actually been said.

[adam]

Zenpundit,

Fair play. Evidently not email but hey. At least we're in agreement now that you do accept that deporting people is plain silly, and that sedition is highly arguable. Phew.

As for calling you an Objectivist I do apologise. You merely using Ayn Rand was unfortunate evidence of such a calling. As for the rest: agreeing with you ain't a sign of intellectual honesty. Neither have I included you in any conspiracy.

Now if you're into your own quotations lets look at: "(Democracies BTW do in fact de-naturalize and deport/"exile" citizens. We've been doing it to former Nazis and members of organized crime for decades."

Ring any bells? Sound familiar? Its you. On Sunday 12th November. You said it, I called you on it. I've just realised why you're having a problem with the million - its a rough estimate of the number of Muslims in the UK. Sorry something else I assumed that you'd know.

"the most economical policy switch will be to reduce Muslim immigration and favor some other foreign demographic."

As they're already here, and have lived here for two or three generations and you are talking about deportation.... Well.

"riddled with logical errors, completely irrelevant tangents and flat out distortions of my position."

And these are? Evidence, man! I've called you on that once already. The Blessed Ayn demands evidence not "Evasion". I can see why Objectivists deny that you're with them.

"All that was really required here Adam was basic reading skills and a commitment to intellectual honesty."

Yeah. I notice you quoted yourself and strangely missed a few other choicer quotations of yours. And then deny the basis of the philosophy that you started to espouse.

"But you are so jacked up to pose as the lonely defender against a malevolent Islamophobic crypto-fascist conspiracy that you plow ahead without regard to what has actually been said."

Um yeah. Other than the things that, you know, you said. But other than that. As for the rest, nothing to do with Islam - I just like winding up people that don't know anything.

As for lonely there's four of us at the pub (I love Wifi) - and two are Muslims. Both are drinking. And so, in a mo, am I.

[zenpundit]

Well, cheers to you and your mates then.

Fair enough. Regarding evidence of distortion, illogical reason etc. etc.:

Adam wrote:

"Far more to the point do you want to drop hundreds of thousands of potential trainers of terrorists into the 3rd world? Such a move didn't work well in the 1500s with the deportation of the Jews from Spain."

"Go back and re-read what you said. Or better yet read what you said. From your comments its clearly a number between 1600 and a million"

Your figures, not mine. Here you try to switch meanings to justify your characterization of my position for which you have no actual evidence.

"As they're already here, and have lived here for two or three generations and you are talking about deportation.... Well"

Except that I wasn't. I was speaking of a small network; I said " hundreds" not a demographic class of " hundreds of thousands". Most reasonable people would line up the logic of my subsequent example of former SS men and mobsters, a tiny handful by your own admission.

Or you chose to ignore it and proceed with:

" I've just realised why you're having a problem with the million - its a rough estimate of the number of Muslims in the UK. Sorry something else I assumed that you'd know"

I did. It's simply not relevant to my argument. Much like the rest of your ad hominem, reductio ad absurdum diatribe.

Enjoy your beer, gentlemen.

[Marcello]

The key word in this matter is precedent.
If I have understood correctly some people here are arguing that the Government should be able to deport a group of citizens to a foreign country on a discretionary basis.The implications of such concept seems to be buried under the fact that it is supposed to be limited to a small group of "indesiderables".But if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds it should become obvious that you are handing an awful lot of power in the hands of the executive, with an almost unlimited potential for abuse.Of course Tony Blair will not rush to exile his opponents. And in the past worse abuses were carried out in wartime in the USA during the Civil war and WW2.The difference here is that the enemy will not surrender after few years of war in Appomattox Court or in Tokio bay.This war could go on for decades without closure and being able to go back to something resembling the status quo ante.In the long run the chances for it being used as a tool to quash dissent become greater and greater.

"i'm often a critic of our government but i would never advocate violence to change that"

It doesn't matter.For a lot of people (at least in the USA) you would still be "an escrement to be scraped off the wall".Not a majority for the moment but who knows what the future has in store.
A few terrorist attacks, an economic depression, things can get ugly fairly quickly.