Originally posted by The Dr. who fixed Lucy: Sure you'd watch him ... anyone would, it's only sensible. But would you shoot him? That's the point.
No-one's saying that the police shouldn't react at all to suspicious individuals, but only that they act proportionately and rationally. We need a policy of, and the means for, incapacitation and capture so that potential terrorists can be interrogated, yielding information.
Two days after major terrorist bombings, a man already under surveillance ignores police warnings to stop, and proceeds to dash towards a subway car, which is where one of the suicide bombings have occured.
Proportionally and rationally, what the hell is that supposed to mean? Should they have sat him down and invited him for tea? You talk about incapacitation, how do you know it would've worked, had he been a terrorist? What if he had detonated his payload?
You wanted the police to react in a situation that defied convention and rationality, where the split-second decision could've meant the death of a potential terrorist or the death of hundreds.
I want the members in this thread to explain to me what the police should've done when the man didn't stop running, went through thee subway checkpoints, and dove onto a subway car? What should they have done, proportionally and rationally?
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Wars are won by intelligence, not by tit-for-tat shootings.
Please, this isn't a vendetta killing. The London police didn't just round up some random man and killed him, they shot him because there was a legitimate chance he could've been a suicide bomber.
For that matter, incarceration is not good enough for these terrorists. I read an article the other day quoting one of the Guantanamo detainees who said that "as soon as he got out, I'd kill more Americans the first chance I could."
In fact, from the Washington Post:
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At least seven former prisoners of the United States at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have returned to terrorism, despite gaining their freedom by signing pledges to renounce violence.
One of the two former prisoners killed is Maulvi Abdul Ghaffar, a senior Taliban commander in northern Afghanistan who was arrested about two months after a U.S.-led coalition drove the militia from power in late 2001.
He was held at Guantanamo for eight months, then released, and was killed on Sept. 26 by Afghan security forces during a raid in Uruzgan province. Afghan leaders said they believed he was leading Taliban forces in the southern province.
Or from the AP...
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In the face of criticism of its prisoner policy, a senior official at the Pentagon in the past described the juveniles as enemy combatants who despite their age were "very, very dangerous people" who "have stated they have killed and will kill again."
But the Pentagon said on Thursday that senior officials had decided to free the three because they were no longer a seen as enemies in the U.S. "war on terror."
