Related to the last post, consider this construction from the Weekly Standard, dismissing the capture of Faisal Shahzad:
But success in the war on terror is not apprehending terrorists after their attacks fail. Success is preventing them from attempting the attack in the first place.
This is lazy and deceptive thinking. By that standard, the only way to be successful in combating terrorism is for terrorism to never occur. That’s not wisdom. You want wisdom?
“People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.”
How could our government possibly prevent someone from ever putting some gasoline, fireworks, and propane tanks in their car and driving it into a crowded place? I’ve had all three of those things in my car at some point in the last nine months.
It’s important to do everything we can to prevent people from carrying out mass casualty attacks, but we can’t call it a failure when some idiot gets depressed about his mortgage and career and decides to kill somebody. We did an excellent job apprehending this fool and now we will put him in jail for a very long time. But the reason we shouldn’t make a big deal about it is because that is giving terrorists a success even when they fail.
So when the party of hell no is finally able to cull all logic from every argument will they be left with nothing but drool?
Listening to Anderson Cooper attempt to interview the Lt. Col who is refusing to obey Obama’s orders because he wants to see his original birth certificate last night, I think drool might be incorrect and I’ll revert to spittle instead.
Booman, you’re suggesting we don’t allow the authorities to nakedly manipulate our animal instincts. But lord knows what an un-instructed people might do!
When you get to the level of the Times Square wanna-bomber, what is terrorism and what is just an ordinary crime. And what is the difference?
It is the political motivation apparently that has the folks at the Weekly Standard quaking in their sneakers. And they are pressing the Clausewitz notion that war is politics by other means.
And your response is on target. How do you defeat terrorism? By not being scared and by making the cost of terrorist action very high. There is so much intense intelligence work going on that the difficulty of mounting a terror attack means that it can only be done by units of one person, maybe with another person getting materials (a result of the beauty products terrorist bust maybe). And still there needs to be overseas coordination just to make sure that the agent actually goes through with the attack and doesn’t go native. If this guy was a financial analyst he was set up for a pretty good life in the US.
It is interesting times. It is so clear that nuclear threats don’t work that most countries want to give up nuclear weapons entirely. The exceptions are allowing emotion to guide their foreign policy.
And conventional wars don’t work so well either when guerilla and insurgency tactics by the defenders eventually raise the cost of war too high. But guerilla and insurgent tactics themselves can be high cost tactics in collateral damage to civilians. And protracted wars.
And now, terrorism has been reduced to law enforcement.
What is a chickenhawk to do? War is becoming an obsolete human activity.
Do we even know what his motivations are? It’s interesting that we have one guy facing foreclosure and another guy facing tax troubles. One makes a pathetic attempt to bomb a NY area and the other successfully turns his plane into a suicide bomb, injuring a dozen people. Both acted alone as far as anybody knows. Both are American citizens.
The first guy is immediately called a terrorist, part of a foreign plot. The other is just a crazy guy. The most striking difference between them? The “terrorist” is a Muslim and visited Pakistan. The “crazy guy” is a standard white American. I’m not trying to express the slightest sympathy for, or make the least excuses for Shahzad. Point is, the wingnuts for whom the Standard speaks display a giant double standard that attempts to distinguish between crime and terrorism on the basis of ethnicity — a direct line from Bush’s deplorable decision to respond to Sept 11 as war instead of the crime it was. I wonder how the reporting would differ it if had turned out to be the “white guy” in the early videos? I suspect the Standard would have found a way to sympathize with this latest victim of Obama’s taking his country away.
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“… some idiot gets depressed about his mortgage and career and decides to kill somebody.”
Of course the Weekly Standard is just a political organ supportive of the party of NO, what do they expect, Homeland Security publishing all evidence, domestic and foreign contacts in the media? The dots in this article were already connected days ago, see one of my diaries with updates – Trial of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui Linked to Mehsud and Faisal Shahzad. No, Shaszad was not depressed about money. He declared himself to be Kashmiri and is connected to the JEM and TTP terror groups. Pakistan has quite some terror groups, when they are under siege they seek to pull their assets together and join forces.
TIME DILEMMA – CATCHING SHASZAD
It was quite extraordinary to lock-in on the cell phone of Shaszad at the moment he nearly got away via JFK.
Investigators were able to track wannabe terrorist Faisal Shahzad through his anonymous, pre-paid cell phone — exactly how, they won’t say. But there was a tantalizing explanation posted — and then quickly yanked — from the website of WCBS TV. “In the end, it was secret Army intelligence planes that did him in. Armed with his cell phone number, they circled the skies over the New York area, intercepting a call to Emirates Airlines reservations, before scrambling to catch him at John F. Kennedy International Airport.”
Jeremy Scahill, relying on a source in U.S. Special Operations, says those planes were likely RC-12s, equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
They forgot about Bush/9/11. Speaking of failure to prevent.