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Aussies LXIII - Fear Inc


Stubby

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I've been out of the loop for the last 8 hours or so.



However, my first post on the matter related to Sky News speculating on why the police snipers did not take the guy out when his face was first clearly in camera sight. Camera sight means in sniper sight. Back then I said it was irresponsible of the Aussie authorities to try and end this peacefully. And that by the time hostages started dying, it was too late to try and take the guy down.



Well, I was lambasted for that position. Turns out that if they had taken him out right at the start, a number of innocent hostage lives would have been saved.



So much for trying to do this the gentle way.


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Once again fuck off



How many innocent lives have been lost this year because US police seem to take the 'shoot first worry about assessing the situation later' policy that you are advocating?



More than two?



I'm just as proud of the actions of our police force this morning as I was yesterday afternoon. The vast majority of the country seems to feel the same way.


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Once again fuck off

How many innocent lives have been lost this year because US police seem to take the 'shoot first worry about assessing the situation later' policy that you are advocating?

More than two?

I'm just as proud of the actions of our police force this morning as I was yesterday afternoon. The vast majority of the country seems to feel the same way.

Well respectfully, you fuck off.

I'm right and you're wrong.

At least two innocent hostages are dead because police snipers did not kill the guy the moment he decided to take a large group of innocent people hostage.

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You really think we should be bending over backwards to praise your belief in just shooting people immediately? We have different values to you, thank fuck for that. Stop being such a vulture using tragedy to try push your mindset.

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Yeah I think I'll be staying here. It would be appreciated if ghouls who have never set foot in the Aussie thread at any other time did not though.


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I don't want to get drawn into this argument, but I would like to point out that it wasn't clear how many accomplices were involved when that man's face was visible through the window. We could've lost 17 people if our police opened fire the instant they saw a brown face. There's no doubt that the correct decision was made at the time.


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You really think we should be bending over backwards to praise your belief in just shooting people immediately? We have different values to you, thank fuck for that. Stop being such a vulture using tragedy to try push your mindset.

I'm pretty sure the next time the Aussie cops will be significantly quicker to take the aggressor down. Having learnt from their clear mistakes this time around.

Simply because that provides the highest probability of saving innocent lives, as opposed to the life of a terrorist.

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I'm not remotely sure of that because the reports of bombs and accomplices meant they didn't have enough information to make that choice. They will make the right choice again to stay the safest course instead of being gun happy cowboys.

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Just saw the news. My commiserations to our Australian borders.



As for Americans second guessing the actions of the Australian police: the top two BBC headlines at the moment are about an refugee of doubtful sanity murdering two innocent Australians today before being killed, and about a US citizen of doubtful sanity murdering six innocent people today and still being on the run. My commiserations to our US borders also, but perhaps they should not be too quick to judge other nations.

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Well respectfully, you fuck off.

I'm right and you're wrong.

At least two innocent hostages are dead because police snipers did not kill the guy the moment he decided to take a large group of innocent people hostage.

Free Northman,

I understand the desire to justify yourself after being attacked, but I don't think your message is going to get through, and your self-righteous tone isn't going to win you any backers. You may think that we're a bunch of naive pacifists, but it is one of the things that I wouldn't change about us for anything in the world. I'm convinced that this is one of those cultural differences that often gets overlooked between Australian and American society, which are often thought to be exactly the same.

And really - you can't claim that your way was best. It's still only hypothetical what would have happened if they took a shot. You're assuming everything would have gone completely smoothly if they took him out; so for that reason, I don't think you can claim being 100% right and others completely wrong. They could have taken your route and you could have been proven wrong by more deaths.

For the record, there were police snipers in position - one of the reporters said they won't shown on TV much because they didn't want the gunman to know about them. So they certainly weren't ruling out that option. But they must have had good reasons why they didn't do so. Again, I think cultural differences come in here - generally police have a huge amount of trust and goodwill from the community, something that I think is lacking in certain parts of the United States. If the police didn't take him out with a sniper, I start from the assumption that there must have been a good reason they didn't pull the trigger, rather than the assumption that the police made a mistake and stuffed the whole thing up. There are a few possible reasons I can think of.

Firstly, they may not have had enough information to begin with. If he wasn't acting alone, who knows what could have happened? They had reason to believe he had bombs planted inside (which is why they sent in a bomb squad immediately after). Perhaps they were rigged to blow if he died. Or he could have had bombs that could have been detonated remotely by one of his friends who was watching proceedings from the outside if police took any action, or more broadly he could have had friends who were told to act in some other capacity somewhere else. They were immensely wary of him getting information from the media and whether he was in contact with people from outside. So I totally understand why they did not "take him out right from the start".

Secondly, this isn't some video game where you press a button and a guy drops dead. If the sniper misses or otherwise fails to kill him instantly, there would have been immediate further loss of life as the gunman only needs a few seconds to take out a bunch of hostages if he knows he's about to die. For all the police training that goes into it, it is a risky move. You're essentially throwing the dice for a quick ending, but unless it goes 100% right, you could easily have forced a bad one. I think this is one of the reasons why sniping him is a last resort, rather than a first one. From that point of view, you can't automatically claim that your way was best. Had they done it your way, you still could have been proved wrong if they missed and he killed more people. The truth is that we'll never know.

Thirdly, he was already known to authorities. I think that may have given negotiators hope (tragically false hope in this case) that they could have resolved this peacefully. Police knew about him, they knew his background, and they knew that he was not a diehard extremist. He clearly had a screw loose but he didn't fit the type of religious fanatic who would die for the cause to complete his mission. By knowing more about him, I think the police felt they could resolve things by talking to him. Unfortunately that wasn't to be the case.

Anyway, you've made your point with your "I told you so". I don't think you'll have changed the mind of anyone else in this thread, and you've only made yourself look like a...well, I won't say the word, but it's pretty clear that while you think us naive pacifists, many of us think of you as, well, the opposite, and not in a good way.

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Ah man. I was actually optimistic last night when it gone so long and no one had been hurt. It seemed that if he were inclined to kill people he probably would have done it already. It's terribly sad for everyone involved. Especially those close to the people who died.





I've been out of the loop for the last 8 hours or so.



However, my first post on the matter related to Sky News speculating on why the police snipers did not take the guy out when his face was first clearly in camera sight. Camera sight means in sniper sight. Back then I said it was irresponsible of the Aussie authorities to try and end this peacefully. And that by the time hostages started dying, it was too late to try and take the guy down.



Well, I was lambasted for that position. Turns out that if they had taken him out right at the start, a number of innocent hostage lives would have been saved.



So much for trying to do this the gentle way.





You evidently remain confused about the massive volume of training and information that cannot be imparted during a two second shot on Sky News. Better trained people than you made better decisions based on better information during a highly volatile situation. Had they shot the guy and then a bomb went off, or a second gunmen had started shooting people, or a bystander been hit then you'd hardly be quite as smug now. The point being that you don't actually know why they chose not to shoot him, or even if they had an opportunity. There was a television studio across the street; that there was a moment when a camera had a clear view and sniper did not is not that improbable.



ETA: Or what Jeor said.



ETA2: That the next thing into the cafe after police and paramedics was a bomb disposal robot suggests that there were still credible concerns of explosives. So there's that too.


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I've been out of the loop for the last 8 hours or so.

However, my first post on the matter related to Sky News speculating on why the police snipers did not take the guy out when his face was first clearly in camera sight. Camera sight means in sniper sight. Back then I said it was irresponsible of the Aussie authorities to try and end this peacefully. And that by the time hostages started dying, it was too late to try and take the guy down.

Well, I was lambasted for that position. Turns out that if they had taken him out right at the start, a number of innocent hostage lives would have been saved.

So much for trying to do this the gentle way.

Get your hand off it.

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I'm right and you're wrong.

That's hardly the most important thing right now, even if you honestly believe it to be true. A bit of a think about tact and decorum might be in order.

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We must be pretty fucking easy to change if this fundamentally changes the entire country. Advertising that would probably invite more terrorism to change us even more!

Or the media could actually do their fucking job instead of whatever the hell they are doing right now.

Of course if the way "we change" is taking men's violence against women more seriously I'm all for that.

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Some of the Fairfax crew are quite critical

Hartcher:

Why do political activists turn to terrorism? Australia gave the world a lesson today.

They turn to terrorism to win attention, to cause fear, and to use that fear to produce an overreaction. That overreaction is the measure of their success.

Terrorism is a tool of the weak against the strong. It is designed to turn the enemy's strength against itself. One man showed how to get extraordinary attention and inflict serious disruption using only a gun and a Muslim prayer banner.

Successful terrorism is so rare in Australia that the overreaction is perhaps understandable. The police response seemed exactly right. But our political and media systems need to get better at measured reaction.

Birmingham:

The special edition of yesterday's Daily Telegraph was probably the low point in the unnecessary and counter-productive full spectrum media coverage of Monis's crime. It was wrong on every count. It made a bad situation worse. But they put it out and they sold some ads, so I guess there's that.

If that was the definitive low point, there were many contenders. Some driven by malice. Most caused by the need to fill up dead air space or to beat the competition in the race for clicks and eyeballs. We at Fairfax were not immune. The ABC allowed one idiot talking-head after another to sprout dangerous garbage all over their 24 hour news service while many media outlets updated police tactical movements around the site of the siege. It took pleas by the police, the establishment of the exclusion zone and some determined social media shaming to cut off that information flow to Monis.

And all that was needed was a news flash. Even a two minute update every hour would have exhausted the news content of this slow moving story. Admittedly this would have given Monis some of the exposure he craved, but much less than he actually received. It might also have taken the heat out of the worst of the social media reaction, which at times seemed like a megaphone specifically designed for morons.

Rory Medcalf at the Lowy Institute makes a similar point about media coverage:

Still, it is hard to see who benefits from saturation media coverage of an event like this other than the criminal himself and those violent extremists whose agenda has been associated with his actions. The more attention a one-man outrage like this generates, the greater may be the incentive for someone else to try something similar.

Let's not pretend that the rest of us are not complicit. Social media has helped magnify and at times distort the picture. Early on, for instance, I saw one irresponsible tweet claiming the attacker had planted devices all over the city. Meanwhile, those random members of the public who had nothing better to do but stand at police cordons waiting and watching can only have complicated things needlessly for the security forces.

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