America's Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism(online.wsj.com) |
America's Chronic Overreaction to Terrorism(online.wsj.com) |
What are we giving up to gain our freedom and is it worth it in the long run? The intelligence apparatus our nation has constructed only has value as long as we have fear, they are thereby induced to continually keep us in a state of fear whether real or fabricated. My biggest fear is that many of these recent "terrorist incidents", not 9/11, were in fact created by our own agencies...yes a bit of a tin foil hat scenario to be sure but one that is not all together unreasonable given the current revelations.
I don't think they consciously did it. But I do think our policies and heavy-handedness have created more terrorists than we've defeated.
http://www.wenatcheeworld.com/news/2007/may/11/paid-fbi-info...
http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/absisfin.pd...
http://politicalscience.osu.edu/faculty/jmueller/since.html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120917/05193620404/fbi-co...
It's that simple.
I believe that's the main reason (if not the only reason) why it is being kept alive (today by using the cheap manipulation technique of fear).
Which incidents do you specifically think were fabricated?
Not to mention clearly stating we bugged this guys call was stupid from an intelegence standpoint.
Snide remark aside, I'll admit that my comment is not very insightful, because it is pretty much common knowledge. That does not make it any less true though.
The aim of a terrorist is to instill terror in the population. I don't delude myself I thinking you can carry on as if nothing happened, but the measures that are taken should be an appropriate response to the threat, not born out of fear or an effort to soothe the population. If you don't let an irrational fear take hold of you, then all the terrorist efforts have been in vain.
That is also more or less the point of the article, I just laid it out more tersely.
After listing historical terrorist events and responses, Mr. Koppel tries to lump in our invasion of Iraq as an over-sized reaction to terrorism from 9/11 which happened eighteen months earlier.
The invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, it was about oil, as we all know now, after the propaganda has died down and people have generally gone back to sleep.
The loss of privacy and rights since then, and currently, is our govt misbehaving, and also has nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.
The government's motive is oil, money, growth in scope, etc.
The government's justification is terrorism. So this conversation is absolutely related to terrorism.
Awareness of that difference is important. Articles like this are key to promoting awareness.
Yes, among the people at the top who planned it, it was not a reaction to terrorism. But the public support for it absolutely was.
Our democracy is far from perfect, and much of government is corrupt, but the government is still by and large a reflection of the people. The people's massive overreaction to terrorism allows, even requires, the government to do bad stuff like invade Iraq, wiretap every American phone call, and more.
We need to convince the people to stop overreacting to terrorism so that the government loses that excuse to misbehave.
Why not? It happened before, how could it not happen again? Actually, seen from outside of U.S., the Iraq events that followed the reinstatement of the Bush family appear very naturally, those were like... family policy!
When you help build the prison, don't be surprised when you find yourself in it.
In a hypothetical world without 9/11, the Bush administration would still want to invade Iraq, no doubt. It's been shown that they started the project of figuring out how to do it well before. But I don't think they'd be able to pull it off. Public opposition would have been much greater, Congressional opposition would have actually happened, and I don't think they would have been able to steamroll over that, or even anywhere close.
Bush more or less came into office as a lame duck. He was the first president in living memory to have won the election while losing the popular vote. He was often thought of as a buffoon, and even his supporters, in my experience, supported him more out of team spirit than because they actually thought he was some brilliant leader. I believe that, in this environment, the default position on a proposed invasion of Iraq would have been a solid "no, why would you even want to do that?"
But mix in 9/11 and the following year and a half of terrorist-related paranoia and fighting, and a lot of people changed their minds to "yes, we must support our leaders in their glorious fight against the al Qaeda menace."
>>>Not to mention clearly stating we bugged this guys call was stupid from an intelegence standpoint.
Agreed. I'm still surprised why this administration continues to leak intelligence to the media. All those lines of communication and means of intercepting intel are now burned.
You should have heard the backlash against Biden for dropping the "ST6 killed bin Ladin" bomb in the press. People were saying that naming (a defunct since 1987) SEAL team as being responsible for killing bin Ladin equated to placing those SEALs at risk... (as if being a SEAL wasn't already placing yourself at risk?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Special_War...
"Marcinko was the first commanding officer of this new unit, which was first called MOB 6 (Mobility 6) and Sixth Platoon. Eventually the unit was dubbed SEAL Team Six. At the time there were only two SEAL teams. Marcinko named the unit SEAL Team Six in order to confuse Soviet intelligence as to the number of actual SEAL teams in existence."
And what makes them so special:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Special_War...
"Candidates are put through a variety of advanced training courses led by civilian or military instructors. These can include free-climbing, advanced unarmed combat techniques, defensive and offensive driving, advanced diving, and Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training. All candidates must perform at the top level during selection, and the unit instructors evaluate the candidate during the training process"
In in short - they're the best of the best. Also, they haven't been defunct since 1987. They were renamed the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group. The Army equivalent is Delta Force.