Terrorism

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Let the terrorists among us be warned: If you overstay your visa - even by one day - we will arrest you.

You really think people who couldn't see a hurricane coming are going to stop a terrorist attack? Do you really think they've gotten that much better at it since 9/11? Dream on.

The US government cannot estimate to the nearest million how many illegal aliens are in this country right now. Major events like the fall of the Soviet Union, the open ended war in Iraq, and the landslide victory of Hamas take them completely by surprise. An average of 10,000 bags per day are sent to the wrong airport. A number of the 9/11 hijackers were mailed visa renewal applications after their deaths.

It's not a pretty picture.

Our country is, and for the foreseeable future will remain, essentially naked to terrorism. I've been a number of places subsequently struck by terrorist attack, I've dealt with Israeli and Egyptian and Russian security, I've crossed a few borders, and not with a diplomatic passport or necessarily in an entirely legal fashion. The truth is that anybody with two good legs can get into this country, and once inside they can within wide limits go anywhere they want and strike more or less at will. Do not believe otherwise. Politicians can ladle all the money they like into the "war on terror"- our country is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, essentially naked to terrorism.

So what's to be done about this? America got its best anti-terrorism advice from its first President and greatest citizen 210 years ago-

"Observe good faith and justice toward all nations. ... In the execution of such a plan nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others should be excluded, and that in place of them just and amicable feelings toward all should be cultivated. ... The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is, in extending our commercial relations to have with them as little political connection as possible."

Regrettably, this advice has since been swept aside.

Let us be clear- the attacks of 9/11 were not motivated by "hatred of our freedom", as the current President prattles, but by US foreign policy, most particularly US military support of the Saudi monarchy. Osama bin Ladin's fatwas beforehand made it absolutely clear that the principal objective of the 9/11 attacks was to drive the US military from Saudi Arabia, and in fact the attacks succeeded in this. President Bush subsequently withdrew American forces from that country. Unfortunately, he was 3000 lives too late.

Beyond this, George Washington would spin in his grave at the idea of sending American soldiers halfway around the world to prop up an unelected theocratic dictator, no matter how beneficial it was to Israel or how much oil was involved. And let me just add my own futile stick over the head for anyone who still doesn't get that the 9/11 attacks were committed by SAUDIS and YEMINIS, not Iraqis. Long and exhaustive official investigation conclusively established what always appeared to be the case- THE IRAQIS HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH IT. They also didn't burn down the Reichstag, but that's another subject.

Bush may have been blind sided by it, but I wrote my congressman the year before 9/11 expressing my concern about American foreign policy provoking a terrorist attack on US soil. And as I emailed a few friends shortly after 9/11-

"Here are a few of the facts, tell your friends:

1.    Most Middle Eastern governments are not democratically elected and thus can only be changed by violence or the threat of violence. Politics in the Middle East is in consequence an inherently dangerous game. We have played and continue to play it at our peril. Period.

2.    They are over here because we are over there. Our government remains at war with Iraq, actively helps maintain the Saudi, Kuwaiti, Omani, etc. autocracies in power, and materially supports the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine. Part of the price we pay for this foreign policy is some measure of our individual safety, and if it turns out that an additional price of this foreign policy also happens by whatever rationale to be a substantial measure of our individual freedom then do not for a moment suppose that everyone within our government considers such a price unacceptable.

3.    Our government can't even protect us from illegal immigration, much less terrorism. The Israeli government has never especially managed to protect its citizens from terrorist attack and believe me, if the Israeli government can't do it ours can't either. And regardless of what fantasies the secretary of Health and Human Services et al may claim to entertain, our country is and will for the foreseeable future remain as near as makes any difference hopelessly vulnerable to nuclear and biological attack, and the death toll from such an attack, particularly a worst case engineered biological attack, will make the deaths of Sept.11 pale in comparison. And in the long run the inexorable advance of technology is all but guaranteed to exacerbate this no matter what we do.

4.    Terrorism is the use of violence to instill terror in a civilian population in order to achieve a political objective, and to put things in perspective before we throw our first stone we should realize that by this commonly accepted definition our country has undeniably committed acts of terrorism which dwarf those perpetrated on Sept.11. Indeed during WW 2 American airplanes occasionally and quite deliberately killed so many civilians in a single attack that the total in a number of instances has never even been reliably estimated to within the five thousand killed in our country on Sept.11. The reality is that the world has often over the past several decades been a seriously dangerous place for civilians, and our country has within living memory and as a matter of stated policy methodically killed more than a few of them in pursuit of a political objective. In fact the number of women and children killed by various proper legitimate clean cut uniformed and salaried government forces last century exceeded the number killed by unkempt and smelly terrorist organizations by I would guess somewhere between a hundred and a thousand to one, and it would be naive to suppose there exists today any military force in the world so enlightened as to have risen unsinkably above such wholesale indiscriminate on command slaughter.

5.    In much the same way 19 men didn't use anything more sophisticated than box cutters and plastic knives to kill 5000 people and cause some fraction of a trillion dollars damage, and in much the same way that a quick and dirty nuclear bomb isn't going to arrive in our country in the nose cone of a missile so it can be intercepted and destroyed by our impending godzillion dollar missile wondershield, terrorists are not going to hijack a crop duster in podunk somewhere and fly it to some city and use it to spray anthrax or some other dreadful stuff in the air over the hapless population. No, more likely 19 guys will quietly drive 19 cars around 19 cities quietly dispersing anthrax or small pox or perhaps some far worse engineered viral agent up and down every street and alley at ground level. Like as not no one will even know this has happened until some days later when the first 19 hospitals report the first infections more or less simultaneously to the CDC. And lest anyone suppose such an undertaking especially difficult I think it's instructive to recall that spreading dreadful diseases is something people have historically and without a smidgen of knowledge proven quite adept at doing by accident. Taking a long hard dispassionate look at the thing one is led to conclude that the USAF and the USMC and the FBI and the CIA and the DIA and the NRO are not going to be enough. No, we are going to have to learn to

6.    GET THE (HECK) ALONG WITH EACH OTHER. No doubt we all have different notions of what this might entail, but most reasonable people would I think upon thoughtful reflection agree that it doesn't generally involve having your soldiers on someone else's land, or bombs smarter than your elected officials, or exporting more weapons and soldiers than food and doctors, or giving active support to foreign governments that treat their people not too far different from farm animals, and it would no doubt grease the getting along with each other rails if everybody, particularly those of us who lead governments or crash airplanes into buildings, applied this curious "sacred" concept less to flags, holy texts, lines on maps, religious symbols, pokemon trading cards, etc., and more to life and liberty, our own and someone else's. This getting along with each other notion may sound difficult to achieve, and indeed it may even be impossible, but the simple reality is that we will either succeed in getting along with each other or who knows but that we will in the not too distant future succeed in not getting along with each other to the point of extinction."


addendum:
(10/20/07) Turns out most of the fake bombs slide past airport security. Which is something to chew on. In an environment specifically designed to find bombs, a very small and very tightly controlled environment established and maintained at a cost of billions of dollars every year, and in which the Constitution needn't even bother to apply, most bombs go undetected. Extrapolate from there to thousands of miles of border and coastline, thousands upon thousands of shopping malls and schools and stadiums, millions of miles of roads and train tracks, all out in a vast country we still ostensibly regard as free. Do the math. Politicians can promise the great taste of empire without the calories of terrorism, but it isn't going to happen.