Raven's View

Not likely to be as infamous a date as "nine eleven", but still horrific events in London today. I had just woken up and turned on the radio to hear someone describing a scene with emergency vehicles, smoke, confused and injured people walking around. I thought maybe it was someone reading from an account of the Sept 11 attack in New York, or perhaps an excerpt from the War of the Worlds movie. Then I realized this was a live report. It has been a while since Londoners had to worry about bombs in their city - and for us here in Ottawa it seems even more unlikely. But only a matter of time I suppose.

We are supposedly on a Al Qaeda "list" of 5 countries, and the only one not hit so far. Not sure why - we don't have troops in Iraq, our foreign policy is not "walk softly and carry a big stick and use it often" but we didn't specifically oppose the "war" against terror(ism). We did send some troops to Afghanistan, maybe that's enough. We had a G8 summit here in 2002, and no real violence happened, but I suppose someone could try to blow up our Parliament this coming November 5th. The TTC in Toronto has heightened their security level, especially for the subway. Similarly for other transportation systems across Canada. The group claiming responsibility, called "The (formerly) Secret Organisation Group of Al-Qaeda of Jihad organization in Europe" says Denmark and Italy are next, unless they pull troops out of Vietnam Iraq.

CBC Newsworld has a rerun on of a program they did last year after the March 11 2004 train bombings in Spain (3-11). The program was done with the New York Times, and PBS. It discusses how Al Qaeda is not a classic hierarchical organization you can cripple with the loss of a central leadership, but a web of terrorist cells. They show that Europe was indeed a serious target, while we listened to Bush's assurances of thousands of terrorist arrests, that Al Qaeda was in disarray and running scared.

And if you do a Google on "911 numerology" you'll see that the people in the tin-foil hats found all sorts of links between that event in 2001and those numbers, I suspect only a matter of time before 77 gets analyzed to death. Forgetting that the significance of the date was just that the G-8 conference was on in Great Britain.