Wait - how many suicide bombers have there been in the USA over the weekend? I've not read the papers or watched tee vee since last Friday. Geez, what pests those suicide bombers are!

They fundraise from America, have schools and training centers in America, collaborate on PR projects, planning, etc... I could really go on and on here....

Very frankly, I find the "schools and training centers" a bit much. I mean, the DHS has disseminated weird posters about how to spot a terrorist in hobby shops and stuff like that. Nobody is going to mind their own bidness if they get wind of a suicide bomber school and/or training center.

I'm going to need a couple cites from a reputable, mainstream media web site: you said "schools" not "school", and "centers" not "center". Not to belittle your viewpoint, I just haven't seen any such news reports.

Do I need to say any more on this, or is it ok if it just goes ahead and speaks for itself?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

Interesting, but are you sure of that one? The only references to Jihadi training camps or schools look vague:

A key American aide of hate preacher Abu Hamza suggested setting up a terrorist training camp in the United States so British Muslims could learn to fire guns and practise warfare tactics

Ujaama drove nine hours from his home in Seattle to tiny Bly, Oregon, to check out a potential camp where he said the arid mountainous terrain was similar to parts of Afghanistan.

Other articles (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/19/abu-hamza-found...) are equally or more vague about whether this training camp actually existed or not. Politco.com explores this issue: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/the-terror-ca... Again, the article doesn't come right out and say "Here's the training camp".

I'm not sure it speaks for itself, I'm sorry.

Also....

http://www.foxnews.com/story/2009/02/17/frightening-film-on-...

Sorry, this one just doesn't count. It's a transcript from Sean Hannity's Fox show. Even Hannity can't quite pin down whether there's a terror training camp or not:

HANNITY: You're saying without a doubt you can look in these cameras tonight and tell the American people that there are terrorist training camps on our soil, we're not doing anything about it, and they're planning, and they will hit America?

MAWYER: I would say without a doubt al Qaeda would love to have such compounds that range from 25 acres to 300 acres sitting on American soil in order to hide terrorists, hide weapons, and train future jihadists for the United States. It's shocking.

Mawyer's answer seems like a dodge to me. I even get the feeling from reading the transcript that Hannity didn't quite believe him.

To sum up, I'm pretty sure there were never any jihadi or training camps or schools in the USA. Your articles are vague at best.

Errr... well, if you insist.

Unfortunately, yes. I'm a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces, and I've made 10's of arrests of terrorists. Most of them were attempting to hit populated centers with no military connection. If we didn't have the intel on them, we never would have been able to stop them. There is a big difference between that type of domestic surveillance and what the NSA carries out on the citizens of its own country - namely that things aren't blowing up in the USA every single day.

Most every democracy with serious and continuing problems with terrorism throw out the law book and human rights.

Afaik, this goes for USA, Britain, Israel, Germany, Spain and Italy. And probably more cases. (Note "continuing problems". e.g. Breivik was a lone crazy.)

The reason is shown by the grandparent comment; terrorism is optimized to scare voters. And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to fix that to keep their jobs.

> Most every democracy with serious and continuing problems with terrorism throw out the law book and human rights.

Most every government (whether or not it is a democracy, and whether or not it actually has serious and continuing problems with terrorism) latches on to terrorism as an excuse (though rarely the only excuse) to throw off legal (and/or traditional, depending on the nature of the--note the small "c"--constitution) constraints on the powers and activities of government.

> The reason is that terrorism is optimized to scare voters.

True.

> And politicians are scared of hysterical voters, they need to fix that.

Less true; politicians have a often want hysterical voters -- hysterical voters that can have a prepackaged solution (even if the conception has little to do with the problem that has made the voters hysterical) are very popular with politicians, because its how they get approval to do things that they want to do that would, aside from the hysteria, never be acceptable. Note how many of the measures adopted in the US in response to terrorism were things which had either been tried previously under other pretexts (most recently, in many cases, in the Drug War) -- either proposed as legislation and failed, attempted without legislation but ruled illegal without supporting legislation, or had legislation passed but ruled unconstitutional when adopted for domestic law enforcement purposes.

Yes, it is a common excuse in e.g. non-democracies to call democracy activists for terrorists (often combined with claims that all the democratic countries are in a conspiracy against them, because we hate Russia/Pakistan/Iran/etc.)

And no, if there is a terrorism problem scaring voters the politicians are empirically motivated to fix it -- see my examples of throwing out the law book -- or it isn't a democracy. [Edit: To be clear, I think the Drug War etc are different; propaganda -- not really about scared voters.]

I've went through 9 terrorist attacks in Israel before I joined the military - I lived in downtown Jerusalem during the Second Intifada. In the other countries, you're right - there is no excuse for getting rid of personal rights and freedoms, but in Israel the sheer number of terrorist attacks cause the reality to be different. If we didn't have the intel, we could never stop the terrorists, and that is simply unacceptable.

Israel do have everything on a different scale; multiples of times more terror against its civilians than what the rest of the western world have -- combined.

Afaik, despite this the courts in Israel seems to better keep up rule of law than the US ones, re terrorism... Which is sad.

But I think that without terror problems, the situation would be very different in Israel. And you probably agree.

Edit: I think you missed my point a little. I didn't discuss if it is right to throw out freedoms or not, I noted that empirically democracies seems to be very likely to do that in a certain situation.