rvg, some couple of years later?

[rvg]

No, the terrorists.

If you're talking about the IRA, then no, they aren't nastier.

Then America deserves to be destroyed.

And yet she stands.

I got it from two sources, the most recent being General Sir Rupert Smith when he was kind enough to lecture us on Counter-Terrorism a few years ago.

So, then at least full 10% of the British society supported the 7/7 bombers, right?

You would say that, given that you are incapable of learning from history, and unwilling to try.

Says the "do-nothing" guy. No, Neville, it is you who can't learn from history.

Stopping IRA bombers was harder - prior to 9/11 and 7/7 security was lax in the respective countries.

Because the scale of the terrorist acts was much lower.

People die because you are fighting - you have to stop the fighting.

I have to stop fighting? Why don't they have to stop fighting? After all, we're more adept at killing them than vice versa.

If you were a law-abiding citizen and your brother was tortured, what would you do? Torturing people creates terrorists, more terrorists means more attacks.

If your brother was a terrorist and you follow in his footsteps, then something's wrong with your family.

Again - look at how this worked in the past.

Yeah, both Abu Zubeidah and Khaleed Sheikh Mohammed provided a treasure trove of intel that eventually led to us offing Osama. That's what I call critical success.

I didn't say it did - Bin Laden was obviously very clever but a movement which lauds suicide is liable to either get clever people killed or start ignoring them if they live too long, as happened with Bin Laden.

But guess what, clever people don't just drop dead, most of them get killed by drone attacks. And drones aren't nice, you see. Perhaps we should kill them with love. Maybe bomb them with ponies and unicorns?

The net gain from torture is negative - and it has a tendency to be abused, and it doesn't even extract useful information.

So far the net gain has been very much in the positive.