Radical Islam has been on a roll lately. First there was the Ft. Hood shootings, and then on Christmas, an attempted airplane bombing in Detroit.
What does this tell you? I mean, besides that Obama sucks, Napolitano sucks, and that Democrats can't "keep you safe?"
What you should have learned from all this is, that government and its politicians cannot and will not "save" you from anything!
What brought the Ft. Hood shootings to an end? An individual with a gun. What stopped Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on Flight 253? An individual who took action. What stopped Flight 93 from crashing into another building? If you said individuals, please move to the head of the class.
Even David Brooks of all people is starting to grasp this fact (a little).
[W]e seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents — who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can’t.
After Sept. 11, we Americans indulged our faith in the god of technocracy. We expanded the country’s information-gathering capacities so that the National Security Agency alone now gathers four times more data each day than is contained in the Library of Congress.
We set up protocols to convert that information into a form that can be processed by computers and bureaucracies. We linked agencies and created new offices. We set up a centralized focal point, the National Counterterrorism Center.
Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.
Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.
Yep. Trillions of dollars spent, thousands of American lives lost overseas, liberties lost, and what do we have to show for it? Typical, should be expected, failure.
So I ask, why do my conservative brothers and sisters continue to put so much faith in the State - The God that Failed?
Have the terrorists found a simple way to have a profoundly negative effect on the aviation industry?
And yet we hear bickering about the TSA intrusions, we see President Obama is busy working on his golf game, and we are insulted by a lame effort from the Secretary of Homeland Security to persuade us not to worry.
That's a good question. They could have in more ways than one.
Airplane Security: Inconvenience the Many or the Few?
I've opined before that maybe what Al Qaeda really wants is to screw up our transportation system:
Has TSA ever considered the possibility that maybe the terrorists aren't really interested in blowing up a plane. Maybe the terrorists figure they win everytime we in the West spend millions of man-hours being hassled, inconvenienced, and generally put upon by a myriad of stupid security measures.
If I'm right, a liberal use of intelligence data to screen passengers is precisely what Al Qaeda doesn't want. Instead, the government's response to the latest incident once again is doing exactly what Al Qaeda's wants. Which leads me to ask: Why do we keep playing the game by their rules?
Does being hassled at the airport equal greater security? Have our diminished civil rights and increased government powers kept us safe?
All the evidence points to a resounding NO. After all, it was individuals, not government, who came to the rescue.
Government Lies About Flight 253
Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.
Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man. This is not the so called "Sharp Dressed" man. I will refer to this man as "The man in orange". The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) "You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out." We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway. This entire time period and until we left customs, no person that wasn't a law enforcement personnel or a passenger on our flight was allowed anywhere on our floor of the terminal (or possibly the entire terminal) The FBI was so concerned during this time, that we were not allowed to use the bathroom unless we went alone with an FBI agent, we were not allowed to eat or drink, or text or call anyone. I have been repeating this same story over the last 5 days. The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth. Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for "immigration reasons." Notice that this man was "being held" and not "arrested", which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.
Yes. The government lies. The government lies all the time. Democrat, Republican, it doesn't matter. They lie.
How Progressives Crack-Down on Terror
The administration is intent in on unionizing and submitting our airport security to union bosses [and] collective bargaining, and this is at a time, as Senator Lieberman says, we've got to use our imagination we've got to be constantly flexible. We have to out think the terrorists. When we formed the airport security system we realize we could not use collective bargaining and unionization because of that need to be flexible. Yet that appears to be the top priority of the administration.
The Obama Administration's Response to Terror Flight 253
On December 26, two days after Nigerian Omar Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to use underwear packed with plastic explosives to blow up the Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight he was on, and as it became clear internally that the Administration had suffered perhaps its most embarrassing failure in the area of national security, senior Obama White House aides, including chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod and new White House counsel Robert Bauer, ordered staff to begin researching similar breakdowns -- if any -- from the Bush Administration.
"The idea was that we'd show that the Bush Administration had had far worse missteps than we ever could," says a staffer in the counsel's office. "We were told that classified material involving anything related to al Qaeda operating in Yemen or Nigeria was fair game and that we'd declassify it if necessary."
It's time "we the people" get serious about Radical Islam and except it for what it is, a religious problem. The government won't save you because it can't. Only Jesus can save you. And because radical Islam hates individual freedom, we should give them what they don't want, and expand freedom in the U.S.A.
History has proven beyond doubt that expanding government power always results in failure, and then tyranny. Trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives lost, and 8 long years of war ... and what do we have to show for it?
Panic in Detroit.
I’m all for expanding our freedoms instead of this mess we go through now with little effect. However, until I can fly with my gun, I’d just as soon get searched with everyone else.
I’d rather just not fly.
An excellent post. I have long been a critic of security theater. You know, like taking your shoes off or going through a metal detector to visit the USS Constitution and the Liberty Bell. In case the government hasn’t noticed, terrorists don’t follow the rules, so why punish ordinary citizens with little effect?
Now they want to use the “nudie” scanners, but I have serious reservations that would have caught the panty bomber. An explosives detector, bomb-sniffing dog, or explosive detecting swab might have.
And, like with the Fort Hood killer, the government failed to see or act on a number of red flags. We want to blame the lack of using technology in the panty bomber’s case. Instead, there’s an obviously disturbing trend of failing to connect the dots in all this wonderful data we’re collecting in a dozen or so different systems. There’s still a lack of coordination between agencies that seems little improved since 9/11.