Al Qaeda agents are “evaluating” U.S. airports—isn’t that nice?

Explaining the raising of the national terrorist threat level to “orange,” the second highest level, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge said that “recent reporting reiterates that al-Qaida continues to consider using aircraft as a weapon. They are evaluating procedures both here and abroad to find gaps in our security posture that can be exploited.”

A simple question: How could Al Qaeda members be “evaluating” the security procedures used in U.S. airports unless they were freely traveling around in the U.S.? And how did they get into the U.S. in the first place? President Bush said Iraq did not yet pose an imminent danger to us, yet we needed to invade it anyway (which I supported). But we are already in imminent danger from terrorist attacks here, and we have not faced the simple fact that it is our country’s open doors, and our spiritual/philosophical/religious/political/economic commitment to those open doors, that have put us in that danger.

An entire U.S. infantry division, some 20,000 to 25,000 men, was assigned to tracking down Hussein. It’s great that we found him. It means the threat that he could come back and tyrannize Iraq and threaten the rest of the world is gone forever. It means the Ba’ath holdouts are probably finished. Nevertheless, all Saddam was actually doing at the time that thousands of GIs were searching for him was hanging out in a shack by the side of the Tigris eating candy bars, reading Crime and Punishment, and letting his beard grow. Al Qaeda agents are at this moment living in American cities, driving on American highways in American rent-a-cars, flying around on American airliners, looking for some vulnerability they can exploit—an airport where they can board a plane carrying plastic weapons or where they can shoot a missile at a plane as it takes off, a power plant they can blow up, a water supply they can poison. Each of these killers has to reside somewhere, has to shower and eat and sleep somewhere, just like Saddam Hussein. Why can’t we devote the same kind of effort to tracking down Al Qaeda agents in the U.S. that we devoted to tracking down Hussein in Iraq? Why can’t we show a fraction of the seriousness about an imminent threat of terrorist attack within our own country that we showed about a non-imminent threat coming from a foreign country?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 21, 2003 10:40 PM | Send