Mad

It has been over eight years since the world trade center towers were attached by Muslim extremists. Our lives would be changed forever. The victims extended beyond those in the towers, in the four aircraft, those offering support in the months after the disaster and countless families from all over the country. Thousands of innocent people died that day and today many still suffer the psychological and physical effects of those attacks. Our decade has largely been defined by what took place that day.

We depend on our government for among other things protection and defense. What has been done in the eight years to insure that an attack of this magnitude never takes place again? What has really changed with regards to public safety in this country during the past six years? Have those who are responsible for the attacks of September 11 really been brought to justice? Has our government done what it is supposed to do by protecting us against threats both foreign and domestic?

We got the answer to that question last week when a young Nigerian man 23 years of age tried to detonate his underpants which had PETN explosives sewn into them. He would have been successful in doing so had it not been for the quick response of passengers and crew aboard the aircraft.

In response to the attacks of September 11, the US Government established the Department of Homeland Security. Billions of dollars have been spent to secure our borders and make us safe, but the same problem existed on December 25, 2009. Our government, for some yet unexplained reason was unable to connect the dots even though yet again all the warning signs were available to us to thwart this attach.

So what has changed since the towers were brought down? To our credit it would appear that we are better about coordinating interagency communication. Thankfully there has been no disaster in the US anywhere approaching the scale of what took place in 2001 to test that claim. Yet we have been told that should a disaster take place we are now better prepared than we were. This contention was apparently proven false last week. Perhaps our most visible sign of change since 911 has been that air travel is now more difficult and will likely become more so. In this day of political correctness 70 year old ladies are being searched along with those who obviously fit a profile more along the lines of those who wish to hurt us. In the most egregious example of creating a two tier have/have-not hierarchy, private companies had set up camp at some of our busiest airports and created a pre-screening process that allows those who pay a fee to whisk through security lines faster than those who do not fly regularly or do not have the means to pay that extra fee. Thankfully the system has been dismantled and the company is now out of business. All this while innocent citizens of the US with the “wrong name” are placed on a no-fly list and are unable to board a plane.

So how close are we to putting the genie back in the bottle? $250 million was budgeted during the last year of the Bush administration to capture Al Qaeda’s leaders. Though at times during the past ten years we have had the opportunity to capture several in the leadership ranks, today we cannot say exactly where Osama Bin Laden resides. What is being said is that Al Qaeda has regrouped and is working back up to full strength. Yemen is the latest country to harbor and train these terrorist. The two who assisted in training the underwear bomber of the past week were said to have been released from Guantanamo Bay and “rehabilitated” by the Saudis. The Taliban, the government harboring Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 2001has again gained strength and persecuting women in Afghanistan and is claiming responsibility for kidnappings and killings and have regained control of remote areas of that country. We wait anxiously to see if 18 months and 30,000 troops will make a difference in that largely ungoverned country. When asked why we cannot search Pakistan for Al Qaeda operatives and perhaps Bin Laden himself, we are told that there are complexities in doing so even though we know those who are harboring Bin Laden (and growing opium bound for the US as heroin) are located there.

Our government points to no terrorist attack taking place on US soil as success of our war on terrorism. But attacks on the European continent and Britain show that our neighbors and allies that gains are negligible. In this country freedoms granted and taken for granted for over 200 years have been diluted under the guise of the “Patriot Act.” While goods and services move more freely than ever between the borders of Mexico and Canada and the United States, citizens are now required for the first time to possess passports to travel legally to each of those two countries. Countless other civil liberties have been watered down including the government ‘s warrantless wiretaps and ability to know which books you check out from the library.
The citizens of the United States need to remember that our constitutional republic was founded on a government for and by the people. It is our responsibility to demand from those that we place into office that they work on issues that really matter to our country and our allies. Does it really matter if those who are homosexual want to marry? Or does it matter that thousands are never the victims of an unprovoked attack on US soil ever again? Does it really matter if someone burns the US flag? Or does it matter that we have no long-term energy policy that allows us to no longer rely on those who hate us and are empowered to fund wars against us by the very dollars that we provide them?

As much as we want to deny it, 911 demonstrated the US is no longer an outpost and geographically immune to attack. We need to work more closely with our allies. While the US may lead, we cannot afford to go it alone. Muslim extremists view their jihad against the infidels as world-wide. Our plan to combat this enemy needs to be worldwide and in cooperation with those who have shown over the years to be our unwavering friends. Our politicians need to tackle the difficult issues and stop distracting us and themselves with divisive and diversionary rhetoric and party politics. Today, there is no head of Homeland Security for the simple reason that republicans think that the nominated candidate for the position is pro-union. As a result they have held up his nomination. Among the first lessons of American Revolution, our founding fathers said that if we do not hang together, we will most assuredly all hang separately. That sentiment has never been truer than it is today.