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Strategies & Market Trends : VOLTAIRE'S PORCH-MODERATED -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (52391)	5/30/2002 10:51:21 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 65232

Jim watched Lou Dobbs this evening...Money Line In an independent poll a wopping 78% of the Am public no longer trusts the Stock Market recovery...hmmmmmmmmm t

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (52391)	5/30/2002 10:52:19 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 65232

Undoing September 11 Maximizing the odds that it won't happen again. By William F. Buckley, Jr. May 28, 2002 1:50 p.m. Those who would undo September 11 are these days concentrating on delinquencies, some fanciful, some joltingly real, in our security services. Most critics are asking for an independent commission to look into the question, What might have been done to spare us, the living, the shame of it all, and to have spared them, the dead, the terminal pain? There is so much murk where security questions are involved we need to trim down the welter in search of a few givens. Here they are: 1) This side of the people caught on the l04th floor and their relatives, probably President Bush suffered the most on September 11. For him the whole world changed, and he found himself in charge of the world and in the role of activist commander in chief. What follows is that he could not conceivably be charged with insensibility to what happened, or indifference to the failures of the security system. 2) We know that a persevering and acute FBI agent in Arizona, Mr. Kenneth Williams, pieced together miscellaneous findings and deduced the possibility of an aircraft seizure in the air by terrorist-minded freshly trained pilots. He reported his suspicions and they were substantially ignored. 3) We know also that a Middle Easterner taking airplane training in Minnesota aroused suspicion. The FBI moved in on this visa-delinquent and got hold of his laptop computer. Enter Demon Bureaucracy. How to get into a computer owned by a foreigner caught acting suspiciously? The detainee is a French citizen of Moroccan descent. He is surrounded by the FBI, the CIA, the police, and 280 million Americans; but his laptop goes untouched. Why? Because there is no court order to open it up, and the feds are afraid to ask for a court order. Again, why? Because, it is surmised, to do so would suggest a lurking xenophobia, inasmuch as, recently detained, was a Chinese scientist in Los Alamos who wasn't proved guilty. If on the heels of that inquiry we jumped on an Arab, mightn't the world think we were persecuting people of yellowish skin? What we were not doing was finding out what was there to find in the laptop of the man who, we eventually learned, was the 20th member of a terrorist team concerting to blow up parts of Manhattan and Washington. 4) The inattention to the intelligent demands of national security in Arizona and Minnesota justify militant executive and legislative action. If there are laws on the books that too cutely separate the jurisdictions of domestic-security and foreign-security interests, the laws should be revised. If legislative inquiry points up executive sloth or lumpen complacency, then shakeups persuasively reassuring need to be done. The public gets a measure of legitimate satisfaction from hauling public officials before duly constituted legislative committees and hearing them explain such anomalies as the inaction in Arizona and Minnesota and to recommend such corrections in administrative practice as the president has overlooked or declined to take. The division is on whether the executive should be required to furnish information deemed necessary, or useful, to adequate security practices. That's a very old turf war. FDR leaned on it after Pearl Harbor. Joe McCarthy and Truman/Eisenhower fought over it. There isn't going to be a constitutional epiphany coming up, firmly establishing the boundaries of legislative and executive jurisdiction. What minor addition to routine security precautions would have kept Kennedy alive and safe on November 22, 1963? Answer — almost any. The killer depended on one thousand coincidences working for him, and so did the killers of September 11. Our job is to maximize the odds against its happening again, but this can't rule out the guy who happened to black out in Oklahoma when the barge came upon the pylon of the bridge with the cars passing over it. More guards on bridges? nationalreview.com