Congress will be sending a bill to Pres. Bush that finally makes good on recommendations made by the 911 Commission. When signed, the law will institute requirements for screening plane and ship cargo, and it will allocate money to regions of the country that need to defend themselves the most against terror threats. The rub is that these laws won’t be in effect for another 3-5 years, or a good decade after 911. You have to wonder why it took a Democrat Congress for this ball to get rolling. Was it because Iraq was too much of a distraction for the previous GOP-led Congress to focus on these basic things? Or is it that they were elevating business interests over national security (ding, ding, ding, I think we have a winner.)? It’s pathetic, but I’m sure that the righter wingers here will have some good explanation for why screening cargo is a bad idea.
The press release makes it seem like this bill is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It has good and bad elements. Allocating more security money to NYC and less to Boise, ID sounds really good, but it was purchased at a price of lots of pork to get Congress critters to go along. So is this really an improvement? Maybe, maybe not. Time will tell though I am guessing not. Security funds are basically handed out on a pork barrel basis now, and pardon me if I am suspicious this bill will actually change that. We can hope.
Cargo coming into the country is pretty well screened now. Exactly zero problems have arisen from cargo screening shortcomings. Maybe you think we should have spent billions to prevent these zero problems. You can surely make that argument, but it is not a slam dunk by any means. The real purpose of this provision is to provide lots of union jobs. If you want to prevent a disaster from a nuclear weapon getting into the country, the place to do this is at the source of the problem like Iran or North Korea, not along our porous border. That is hard and it is a lot easier and more fun to hand out money, so that is what Congress did. The chance of cargo screening preventing a nuclear disaster approaches zero, since a terrorist wouldn’t likely use that delivery method. Consult drug runners for a more likely model.
The Republicans raised hell after the Democrats stripped the John Doe provision providing immunity to citizens reporting suspicious activities like the flying Imams. I am suspicious whether the resurrected language actually provides real immunity. Again, it will take a long time to tell.
If you actually want to secure the country you have to secure the border. I understand that this legislation makes a little headway on that, though those provisions were suspiciously absent from your PR release. Again, that makes me wonder. Did they vanish in the dead of the night?
Congress, of course, is happy to reform everyone but itself. Intelligence oversight remains a mess.
Does this bill do more good than harm? Probably, though we will have to see. No one suggests it is an example of cost effective, efficient government that best allocates scarce resources to efficiently secure our country.
Your ecstasy over this bill is naive. For the most part, it is just another pork barrel give away.
Not a problem. Run for office, and let us know how you do.
I asked in an earlier thread if bin Laden was right that the West wouldn’t fight to maintain its beliefs or way of life. For you at least, he is spot on.
In your case, you won’t even take intelligent defensive measures, much less go on offensive.
Fortunately there are others who don’t think as you think and will get out and pull the wagon so you don’t have to convert to Islam and live in a ninth century world. You sit in the wagon while they pull, so you get the best of both worlds, and you won’t even bother to say thank you.
Actually, I would be surprisingly willing to go on a massive nuke and pave mission in the arabic middle east, the likes of which even radical Israelis might find offensive.
We get to raise the average IQ of the earth, cut down on population, eliminate a particularly crappy religion, and I maybe get a few fundamentalist confirmed kills.
I’m ready to move on this.
I’m not however, ready to spend a bunch of money ‘securing the border’ and monitoring americans. defense does not work, ask the french.