Frankly, I think foreign gov'ts have been more effective in tracking down al Qaeda than we have. The gov't has estimated that there are at least 300 sleepers in this country [others say there are more than that] and the last time we picked up anyone was sometime last year.....the guys in Buffalo, NY. I don't see the effort being made to corral al Qaeda.
How do you propose we do this? They are called sleepers for a reason. Unless you start having neighbors reporting "suspicious" people because they are muslim etc. you are left with doing some hard research that takes a lot of time, and may produce little. It would not take much of a push before the left went nuts about civil liberties and profiling.
I am damn sick of the excuses that the GOP public makes for the current administration. Subsequent to 9/11, its been shown that several of the involved sleepers were in violation of one law or another and could have been picked up legally, and such action, maybe, might have averted the whole 9/11 disaster. No one says anything, of course, about this failure to perform because it has become a national virtue to not fault or criticize anyone about how 9/11 was handled.
And if that weren't enough, two weeks to one month before 9/11 the Germans warned us that something big was happening and it would involve hijacking planes.......nothing was done. They also gave us the names of specific people.....again nada was done. And then there was the well seasoned FBI agent in MPLS who warned that something was up, that suspicious foreign nationals were getting their pilot's licenses. She too had names and she too was ignored.
And now its two years later and we are back to the same garbage. Now we are supposed to believe that out of 300+ sleepers not one of them is in violation of their visas or broken the speed limit or violated a gun law or has not filed their income taxes or has not behaved suspiciously or done anything that warrants bringing them in for questioning? And frankly, to blame this lack of activity on the left is baloney since the left has been relatively quiet on those rare times when someone has been taken into custody. And in any case, if the left were to rear its ugly head who's fault is that.....after all, its not the left that has a bad track record of dealing with people of color.
What really burns my butt is that I listen to some of the regulars on this thread complain ad infinitum about the Dems but rarely if anything is said about the lack of action being seen on this front by the current administration. Plus when the administration screws up....like in the current foreign diplomacy disaster, these same people get very quiet.
Listen, this issue is serious and its not business as usual. To play partisan politics as if nothing has changed is courting disaster.
ted |
