The January/February issue of The Atlantic has some interesting articles including their yearly “State of the Union” series looking at where America is right now. In addition, there are some though provoking articles about terrorism. The one that I really found most compelling was “Success Without Victory,” written by James Fallows. In this article he criticizes the current focus of preventing terrorism and offers concrete examples of how resources should be used to prevent acts of terror on U.S. soil. He points out that screening lines are the most familiar reminder of post-9/11 security-and this exemplifies what’s wrong. There are two people whose job is to see if the name on your driver’s license is the same as the name on your ticket-as if any self-respecting terrorist would forget to match these up. The airport screening process costs Transportation Security Administration $4 billion a year.
He makes several other astute points as well:
“The TSA has a total budget of $5.3 billion-more than 80 percent of which goes to airport screening…TSA…has well under $1 billion for everything except airlines: roads, bridges, subways, tunnels, railroads, ports…”“Terrorism is simply too cheap, too available, and too tempting to ever be totally eradicated,” says Stephen Flynn the author of the recent book America the Vulnerable.
“U.S. Homeland Security policy has embraced the false idea that all American communities are likely targets of terrorism,” Benjamin Friedman wrote. “It is time to stop indulging the expensive myth that risks are geographically distributed, time to abandon feel-good security, and time to accept reality: some risk is inevitable, some of us should be more afraid than others, but our fear is what our enemies intend.
“Saying that ’freedom is the future of the Middle East’ is seen as patronizing, suggesting that Arabs are like the enslaved peoples of the old Communist World-but Muslims do not feel this way: they feel oppressed but not enslaved.”
There’s a lot of food for thought. It seems like those in power are ignoring the obvious. I guess future policy will be the true barometer of which direction we will go in terrorism prevention.
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