Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Can Gaps in Security be Filled?

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"They will look at what we do and do something different"

That sums it up and most importantly the political theater is really meant to just make us "feel better," but it won't actually accomplish anything. One dialog that seems to be missing from most reports on this incident is that it failed. Civilians stopped this extremist and there was no violent jihad because the guy FAILED. I would expect at this point a Michael Bay film based off of this braze citizenry, however not even a Lifetime movie has been discussed. (too cheeky?)

As the rest of video points out we need to proactively investigate the processes by which terrorist operate. We already know what they can't do, how do we figure out what they will do next? The same goes for homegrown and domestic terrorists. This isn't a Muslim world fight and it is downright foolish to believe so, there have been in attacks in Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

The reason I point out many instances of "fear the brown people" is because it was the mentality that led to critical decisions in regards to anti-terrorism, Afghanistan, Iraq and our foreign policy for the past eight years. Those very policies, some of which are still in place, to this day have hindered our progress and safety in America. You can't make decisions based on fears or knee jerk response and you especially can't listen to leaders in pants wetting GOP. They wrote the book on fear politics.

Glenn Greenwald adds this:

As always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again, independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? Isn't it obvious that our five-front actions are going to cause at least some Muslims -- subjected to constant images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at our hands, even if unintended -- to want to return the violence? Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're unleashing from a decade-long (and continuing and increasing) multi-front "war" in the Muslim war?

There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself.



I am Frank Chow and I approved this message

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