UK 'Al-Qaeda' plotter: so what's his crime then?

[zoltan]

getting the hard stuff may not be as difficult as you think



"Awash with uranium
Once Bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, getting hold of uranium and other nuclear material did not present a serious problem. The black market in Afghanistan is awash with it. Robert Puffer, an American antiquities dealer in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, said he was frequently offered enriched uranium.

"It was in lead containers with cyrillic writing on it," Mr Puffer told the Guardian. "They would carry yellow cake [Uranium] in matchboxes in their breast pockets. They would have rashes and they would ask me why. And I said: "You're stupid - that stuff is dangerous."

Mr Puffer said he was once taken to a warehouse in Peshawar where canisters of nuclear material from the former Soviet Union, wrapped in sacking, were stored under the floor. The radioactivity sent a geiger counter buzzing from outside the building"


http://www.guardian.co.uk/waronterror/story/0,,589185,00.html

 

[Fullyplumped]

Apols - it's my (well not quite) term that does away with terrorist/freedom fighter - means 'Non Linear Combatants'. Based on an interview that some CIA spook gave to Paxman on Newsnight; he described such persons as 'Issue Based Non-Linear Combatants', their actions as 'Issue Based Non-linear combat' etc etc

An army soldier, OTOH, would be described as a 'Linear Combatant' in this frame of reference, altho the main reason forusing the term is to take the emotive content out of the discussion (and get rid of the 'one mans terrorist is another man's freedom fighter' stuff)

Thanks for that. What odd people! More interesting, why did people engage with you when you used that expression and not challenge you on it?

 

[TAE]

In a contested case, yes.

The contested scenario is what we are discussing:
Posts #96 #102 #113

 

[detective-boy]

The contested scenario is what we are discussing:
Posts #96 #102 #113

I'm confused now. All I was trying to do was distinguish between:

(a) a contested case where the evidence looks thin and, because the defendant is denying guilt, it is perfectly reasonable for people to go "Oh, look, there's not much evidence there" and

(b) a plea of guilty (like this) where the evidence looks just as thin to start with but, because the defendant admits guilt, it is totally irrational (in the absence of any exceptional factor undermining the reliability of the plea) for people to go "Oh look, there's not much evidence there".

And, having distinguished between them, suggest we may like to remember this example of (b) next time an example of (a) comes up, so that we realise that even though it may look thin, it may actually have happened after all.

 

[TAE]

As long as we (a) don't just assume that there is more evidence we don't know about and (b) also remember the cases where someone confessed even though they did not do it.