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"And finally, they no doubt would hate for GW to have prevented a terrorist attack in the US for all these years since 9/11, only to have the terrorists attack us when a Dem prez and Congress were in control."
I've said this for years- the lack of a high-profile terrorist attack in this country over the last 7 years has more to due with the overwhelming self-restraint of individual Muslims in this country than any other single factor.
Law enforcement prevention measures are secondary to that fact- no matter whether the government is headed by a Republican or a Democrat as President.
Terrorist action does not require a conspiracy in order to successfully carry out an attack with terrible consequences.
Consider the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007. The only thing lacking in order to make it a "terrorist attack" was a statement left in the record by the deceased killer, indicating that it was carried out for a political purpose.
Actions by more than one person are not necessary. "Weapons of mass destruction" are not necessary (and it's certainly a lot easier to make such materials with commonly available ingredients to produce crude weapons than it would be to resort to high technology to make the more sophisticated ones.) Even firearms are not necessary.
There are multiple incidents of terror violence in this country that have been carried out over the years, for which the perpetrators have never been apprehended or identified. If perpetrators of the Tylenol poisonings of the 1980s had sent letters to the press stating that their acts had a political motivation, would then-President Ronald Reagan have been justified in instituting a campaign of wiretapping and summary detention of a pool of likely suspects? Would such measures have guaranteeed any better success in apprehending the Tylenol killer(s)- who, I might add, remain(s) at large?
http://ask.yahoo.com/20030130.html
[link at my sig]
Instead, the government and American industries instituted a response in order to effectively close that loophole. It worked.
Similarly, the principal response to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks should have been to close that chink in the armor against terrorist vulnerability, by reinforcing cockpit cabins in airliners, and revitalizing the then-moribund Sky Marshal program. Those are important measures, because commandeering an airliner is the only way that a terror band could ever obtain the equivalent of a targetable cruise missile. without direct state sponsorship from a large military power.
Frankly, I'm unsure of the current status of either measures to reinforce airliner pilot cockpits against hostile intrusions, or of the Sky Marshal program. I know people were talking about it, in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. But then the defensive response seemed to shift, into the Permanent State of Emergency, as the more effective means of protection.
Who knows? As far as I know, the airliners are still easy targets, once someone with pilot skills can get themselves on a passenger jet with enough skills and weaponry to get through to the controls.
And- as in so many other cases- one person is all that's really required, for that. There are so many ways that one person can wreak terrible havoc in this society- especially if they don't care whether they live or die, as we've been told so many times is the case with fanatical radical Muslims as a population.
In a modern, developed industrial state with a huge geographic area, there's only so much that can be done to prevent terrorism- unless one wants to institute a panopticon state of satellite surveillance, a permanent imposition of random checkpoints on every highway system, and the mass detention of all suspect populations.
Would you support those measures in the name of increased security, ehillesum?
Even the State authorities in geographically small nations under continual battering from random terror attacks, like Sri Lanka and Israel, have thus far refrained from such drastic measures.
