The link to article from which Dirigo quoted in The Nation.

It ought to be required reading.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080218/dobie

Thanks for the help with the link to The Nation piece.

I need to call Rent-A-Geek, but I just do my reading and pass on some tidbits, to stay in the loop.

No geek needed. You offered more than ample information to trace it. It's just that as I began reading, I decided to make it as easy as possible for others to find and read it. It's compelling, and horrifying, and sickening, and maddening. And, it ought to be required reading. I'd sort of like to shove it down some CiC's throat.

If there is a known known, such as Qaida, doesn't FISA--as it stood, before the breaching--already cover such threats?

"There are, he added, 'occasions when people in the U.K. would wish that those in the U.S. might listen and learn from our experiences.'

'If you are looking at colonialism, if you are looking at operations on an international scale, if you are looking at understanding each other's culture, understanding how to operate in a military insurgency campaign, we have been through them all,' he said. "We've won some, lost some, drawn some. The fact is there is quite a lot of experience over here which is valid and should be listened to.'

The fallout from Iraq has fueled, the prince argues, 'healthy skepticism' toward what is said in Washington and a feeling of 'why didn't anyone listen to what was said and the advice that was given.' "

---Stephen Castle

---The International Herald Tribune, 2/4/08

~~~

Andrew served 22 years in the Royal Navy and was a helicopter pilot during the Falklands War.

So the next question is, why aren't you people torching ATT kiosks in malls for doing the same thing you're freaking out about here? Heh.

-- shooter242

Since the constitution does not interpose itself between two private entities such as a corporation and an individual, some regulatory mechanism must be invoked. We'll get around to it. But first, let's deal with the constitution, quaint as it is.

Prof. Mueller's article in Foreign Affairs:

Is There Still a Terrorist Threat?: The Myth of the Omnipresent Enemy

John Mueller

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2006

For the past five years, Americans have been regularly regaled with dire predictions of another major al Qaeda attack in the United States. In 2003, a group of 200 senior government officials and business executives, many of them specialists in security and terrorism, pronounced it likely that a terrorist strike more devastating than 9/11 -- possibly involving weapons of mass destruction -- would occur before the end of 2004. In May 2004, Attorney General John Ashcroft warned that al Qaeda could "hit hard" in the next few months and said that 90 percent of the arrangements for an attack on U.S. soil were complete. That fall, Newsweek reported that it was "practically an article of faith among counterterrorism officials" that al Qaeda would strike in the run-up to the November 2004 election. When that "October surprise" failed to materialize, the focus shifted: a taped encyclical from Osama bin Laden, it was said, demonstrated that he was too weak to attack before the election but was marshalling his resources to do so months after it.

On the first page of its founding manifesto, the massively funded Department of Homeland Security intones, "Today's terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon."

But if it is so easy to pull off an attack and if terrorists are so demonically competent, why have they not done it? Why have they not been sniping at people in shopping centers, collapsing tunnels, poisoning the food supply, cutting electrical lines, derailing trains, blowing up oil pipelines, causing massive traffic jams, or exploiting the countless other vulnerabilities that, according to security experts, could so easily be exploited?

One reasonable explanation is that almost no terrorists exist in the United States and few have the means or the inclination to strike from abroad. But this explanation is rarely offered.

(...)

The results of policing activity overseas suggest that the absence of results in the United States has less to do with terrorists' cleverness or with investigative incompetence than with the possibility that few, if any, terrorists exist in the country. It also suggests that al Qaeda's ubiquity and capacity to do damage may have, as with so many perceived threats, been exaggerated. Just because some terrorists may wish to do great harm does not mean that they are able to.

Gerges argues that mainstream Islamists -- who make up the vast majority of the Islamist political movement -- gave up on the use of force before 9/11, except perhaps against Israel, and that the jihadists still committed to violence constitute a tiny minority. Even this small group primarily focuses on various "infidel" Muslim regimes and considers jihadists who carry out violence against the "far enemy" -- mainly Europe and the United States -- to be irresponsible, reckless adventurers who endanger the survival of the whole movement. In this view, 9/11 was a sign of al Qaeda's desperation, isolation, fragmentation, and decline, not of its strength.

Those attacks demonstrated, of course, that al Qaeda -- or at least 19 of its members -- still possessed some fight. And none of this is to deny that more terrorist attacks on the United States are still possible. Nor is it to suggest that al Qaeda is anything other than a murderous movement. Moreover, after the ill-considered U.S. venture in Iraq is over, freelance jihadists trained there may seek to continue their operations elsewhere -- although they are more likely to focus on places such as Chechnya than on the United States. A unilateral American military attack against Iran could cause that country to retaliate, probably with very wide support within the Muslim world, by aiding anti-American insurgencies in Afghanistan and Iraq and inflicting damage on Israel and on American interests worldwide.

But while keeping such potential dangers in mind, it is worth remembering that the total number of people killed since 9/11 by al Qaeda or al Qaeda­like operatives outside of Afghanistan and Iraq is not much higher than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States in a single year, and that the lifetime chance of an American being killed by international terrorism is about one in 80,000 -- about the same chance of being killed by a comet or a meteor. Even if there were a 9/11-scale attack every three months for the next five years, the likelihood that an individual American would number among the dead would be two hundredths of a percent (or one in 5,000).

Although it remains heretical to say so, the evidence so far suggests that fears of the omnipotent terrorist -- reminiscent of those inspired by images of the 20-foot-tall Japanese after Pearl Harbor or the 20-foot-tall Communists at various points in the Cold War (particularly after Sputnik) -- may have been overblown, the threat presented within the United States by al Qaeda greatly exaggerated. The massive and expensive homeland security apparatus erected since 9/11 may be persecuting some, spying on many, inconveniencing most, and taxing all to defend the United States against an enemy that scarcely exists.

http://tinyurl.com/lqaca

The threat exists but is so remote, like earthquakes on the east coast, that no one pays any attention to them. They happen, but so rarely and so minor they do no damage and kill no one, unlike traffic accidents, which happen everyday and kill many people. And the cost/benefit analysis of highway safety regulation indicates it not only saves lives, but money as well, in the long term.