>>>>>>>>Imad Mughniyeh has passed away. He died peacefully in a car bomb explosion in Damascus. Fitting. I don't know if Mossad did it, but I wish I had.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>It has been traditional to send the Vice President to funerals. Some of the nastiest scum in the terrorist world will be at this one. I think we should send Cheney - with a fleet of helicopter gunships.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>When you read connected news about all these various bombings and assasinations, it looks little bit like Italian mob or Albanian vendetta.
>>>>>>>...then he looses brother then bombs something, then someone else gets assasinated, then something else blows up and so for.
>>>>>>>After a while it is impossible to determine order and interlinking of events and what caused what.
>>>>>>>One thing is for sure; Every new bomb that kills innocent or bad people produces nothing else but grief and strong motivation for more violence.
>>>>>>>Sad thing is that unlike ordinary tribal vendettas, all this had obviosely very bad impact on world politics.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Imho, unless it is unilaterally stopped, it will never decline.
>>>>>>>There will be always mad people on this planet, but will wisdom prevail depend only on wise people.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>Peace
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Yes
>>>>>>
>>>>>>I read about William Buckley who Charles mentioned. Involved with CIA assassination squads .
>>>>>
>>>>>William Buckley was Beirut station chief. He was kidnapped by Hezbollah, tortured and murdered. If by 'assassination squads' you mean he was a station chief for an agency that sometimes went after people killing us and our friends - yes. Kind of like those nasty RAF pilots who assassinated Germans.
>>>>>
>>>>>Look on the bright side, some of those people would probably have put bombs in the Tube by now.
>>>>
>>>>I'm not defending Hezbollah at all or what happened to Buckley but Buckley and others associated with a him had a long and not very glorious history of covert destabilisation of countries. How many dead in Chile as a result of their actions.
>>>>Where the CIA's actions a response to terror or a cause.
>>>>
>>>>And by the way Churchill disassociated himself from area bombing after Dresden. Wrongly in my view.
>>>
>>>Not talking about Dresden but the Battle of Britain. Our actions in Lebanon were hardly 'destabilizing'. What Syria, Iran, the Palestinians and the Hezbolloh did to Lebanon was one of the great crimes of the post WWII period.
>>>
>>>I'm certainly not a fan of every action our government, military or intelligence agency have taken over the last 60 years. The few that I got to see up close were evidence enough that choices are made for a lot of reasons by a very wide range of personalities and are always complex.
>>>
>>>I guess my point was that while our society sets a standard for behavior which is quite admirable, it has to be recognized that nasty covert wars (or for that matter overt ones) often require behavior that is outside of that norm. I agree it is troubling but the alternative is often a lot more troubling. I think sometimes it takes a certain kind of moral courage to make complex choices rather than take the 'I need to feel good about myself' easy way out that may have far more negative consequences. ( and yes I do understand that to supporters of Mughniyeh this arguement would be applied to him - I just think it okay to have a definite point of view on who was right and who was wrong and that it does not have to be sucked into the nihilism that comes from moral relativism )
>>>
>>>But I do agree that a lot this is very grey and I still am pleased our society at least finds it troubling that sometimes those choices have to be made.
>>
>>I don't feel it as a "I need to feel good about myself" thing. I feel it as a "they made wrong decisions and did bad things" thing. Did they make the world a safer better place by running amok as they did. No. They made the world a more dangerous place. We almost had it here when the security services contemplated removing Wilson.
>
>
>The CIA's reputation is far from pristine here in the U.S. The National Book Award for nonfiction last year went to a history of the CIA, presented as a mostly uninterrupted series of bungled operations and missed threats. The missed signals before 9/11 have been well chronicled, as has the parochial secrecy with which they have kept information from other U.S. agencies.

Your security agencies incompetence is probably only surpassed by ours Mike. The tube bombings cam as a complete surprise, then we saw all the surveillance that had taken place of these people. Maybe there should be a rule that if you want to work for a security service you're automatically disqualified.