First of all, to all would-be Presidential yahoos (read: Gov. Dean), unless you're willing to move to New York or Washington, you have no right to sling libelous nonsense such as today's claim that the Bush Administration is politically motivated when it raises the terror alert, as it did today.
We have no idea, as the public citizenry, how often this heightened awareness has saved lives. If it saves lives or even minimizes the loss of life at any point going forward then thank God for Secretary Ridge and the entire DHS for risking humiliation when advising the public to be more aware. They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they don't warn us then there will be hell to pay after another attack.
The warnings at hand are so specific that they have documented (and corroborated) references to pedestrian and vehicular traffic patterns, the slope of parking garage ramps, the particular arms (or lack of) of building security. How can this be politically motivated, Dr. Dean? DHS has been helpful enough to specify 6 specific buildings. How does this affect you, Dr. Dean? For me it means passing physically beneath one of the sites two times a day. And I for one am thankful for the heightened awareness.
Regarding the arrest last week of a Pakistani operative crossing the vast and open Mexican-American border , this event reemphasizes the necessity of securing our borders (north, south, east and west) to cease preventable breaches of security.
Oh, and while we're at it, why don't we demand that our Intel agencies communicate--efficiently and effectively.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Whether out of a dislike of anything that the Right stands for, or because they simply lapse very quickly into a state of denial, I have found that many people on the Left simply don't believe that there will be another strike against the US. For them, all warnings and wahtnot are Right-wing attempts to secure power through whatever means necessary. Even confronted with credible evidence or reasonable conjecture, they will have none of it (cf V's MPA friend).
I am bothered by this attitude, but not in the way that you would expect. The most serious implication of their denial will only become manifest after the next strike. At that time a mixture of fear, guilt and hatred toward Bush will congeal into something almost French in essence, but self-loathing in practice. I will be very surprised if many (most?) of those on the Left don't speak in hushed tones of how we deserved another hit, or how it came about only because Bush is such an ass, etc.
I don't want to sound like a victimization whore, but enough conversations with the fervently anti-Bush crowd have made me aware of this feeling, a feeling that might not have existed in them before, but now is born out of a frustration that someone thry trust is not in the WH and that their voices seem to be dominant in all of the people that they meet (no wonder they think the rest of America is full of idiots).
Oh, and the CIA had a rare press conference (look it up) recently in which it described having people inside al-Qaeda, having broken up a few other attempted plots nearing completion, and some other operational details.
If anyone is playing politics with security, it is dem Dems (I don't like playing games about who did what to whom, but in this case, someone must state the obvious.).
It does indeed seem to me that civil libertarians are reacting reflexively, and not going through the mental exercise of what liberties are so essential that we would prefer to absorb another strike rather than lose them.
For instance, during the Democratic Convention, there were random searches of bags on mass transportation in Boston, something which the ACLU opposed. The logic of these searches was to avoid something like the train bombings in Madrid. What if there had been no searches, and there had been a train bombing with fatalities? Would we feel that the proper balance had been struck, that it was worth absorbing a bombing to preserve our liberty from backpack searches? I think not. Opposition to the search policy is mostly coming from a place of denial, where the threat is assumed to be unreal.
What violations of liberty would I consider so grave that I would prefer to allow some of my fellow Americans or even myself die in a terrorist bombing rather than endure them? Here's what comes to mind. The government could issue national ID's including wireless chips that would allow it to track the movements of everyone in the country at all times. People would be requires to carry this ID at all times. That's a scary proposal. I'd rather take the real risk of train bombing than have such an intrusive state.
It's good to see intelligent writing in the blogosphere. I've linked to your post here:
http://www.centristcoalition.com/blog/archives/000958.html
Post a Comment