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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hdl who wrote (19524)	10/26/2002 10:51:17 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Respond to of 27720

Absurd isn't it?

To: hdl who wrote (19524)	10/26/2002 10:52:01 AM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27720

What Al Qaeda Learned in D.C. By FRANK RICH nytimes.com Does everyone feel safe now? There are good reasons why the sniper siege terrified Americans who were far from the line of fire, but they're not the reasons that have dominated the media babble. It's not that we all have relatives in Washington or knew a child slated to go there on a school trip. It's not that we were watching too much bad TV. Sure, cable dished out the story as if it were Gary Condit or shark attacks redux, with hapless CNN going so far as trying to add actors from CBS's "Crime Scene Investigation" to its already inept roster of profiling pundits. But however trivializing the style of presentation, the content was weighty. The reason that a USA Today/CNN poll this week found that the sniper was the second most highly watched news story in a decade, second only to 9/11, may be that Americans intuitively sensed that it could be the second most important story as well. What made the story both scary and substantial was the mercilessness with which it exposed our permeability to a terrorist attack at home more than a year after 9/11 "changed everything." Whether this Muhammad was an Atta sympathizer or not, the fact remains that one or two gunmen were able to paralyze the capital of the most powerful nation in the world for three weeks, to the point of threatening the ability of citizens to carry out the most fundamental rite of democracy, freely walking into polling places on Election Day. Media critics complained that the sniper usurped more significant news stories like Iraq, Bali and Moscow, but in truth these are all strands of a single story. Each day that the sniper remained in charge was a day likely to embolden our foes, just as we prepare to expand the war on terrorism. "Even if the sniper isn't connected to Al Qaeda, he's showing our vulnerability," said John McCain when I spoke to him the day before the suspects were identified. After the bombing in Bali, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense, was moved to observe that it was "a wake-up call for the Indonesians." Are we sleeping through our own wake-up call? Relief that the killers seem to have been caught should not be confused with closure. We must not now forget that the failures of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement as the sniper piled up his kills were a replay of the turf wars between Rudolph Giuliani's cops and the feds after last fall's still-unsolved anthrax attack. The Pentagon, which may soon face the task of tracking down Saddam Hussein in a city of five million, made the mistake of tipping off the sniper of its air surveillance plans for the D.C. area. The syndicated columnist Michelle Malkin argues persuasively that the I.N.S.'s decision to release John Lee Malvo after his December 2001 arrest by immigration authorities was "in clear violation of federal law." These are merely the leading indicators of a larger drift into complacency that is hardly limited to this one form of terrorism or a single city. Just how much so was cataloged yesterday by the Council on Foreign Relations, which released an alarming document with a most un-council-like title to match: "America Still Unprepared — America Still in Danger." The report is the work of a bipartisan task force headed by Warren Rudman and Gary Hart and stocked with intelligence, military and foreign-policy heavies as various as the former F.B.I. superagent James Kallstrom, the Iraq hawk George Shultz and the former N.I.H. head Harold Varmus. "The next attack will result in even greater casualties and widespread disruption to American lives and the economy," they wrote. The facts back up their fears. They found that the nation's 650,000 local and state police still have no access to federal terrorist watch lists. They found minimal surveillance of the potentially explosive cargo containers transported to and within the U.S. by ship, truck and train. (We seem to be making the unwarranted assumption that Al Qaeda's next attack will again be by plane.) Though President Bush told the nation this month that a single "Iraqi intelligence operative" could with one "small container" wreak havoc with chemical and biological weapons, we are largely defenseless against such an attack: "Police, firefighters and emergency medical personnel in most of the nation's cities and counties are no better prepared to react now than they were prior to September 11."

To: hdl who wrote (19524)	10/26/2002 1:00:40 PM
From: Tadsamillionaire	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27720

Almost from the start, media "experts" predicted that when the Beltway sniper finally was run to ground, he would turn out to be a paranoid, paramilitary type radiating black-helicopter delusions. Wrong. At daybreak yesterday, Gulf War (news - web sites) veteran John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo, a 17-year-old Jamaican, were in custody - and a .223 rifle recovered from their vehicle. For sure, it's not clear precisely what motivated Muhammad. Or, in fact, that he is what he certainly appears to be - the D.C. sniper. But he converted to Islam 17 years ago and formally changed his name from Williams a year ago - and reportedly was sympathetic to the 9/11 hijackers. He also provided security several years ago for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan's odious Million Man March. Nutsy cuckoo? Maybe. Something more ominous? Perhaps. But just as it's premature to assign motive to the deadly attacks, it's also too soon to be deflecting responsibility. Already, voices are being heard to the effect that all Muslims shouldn't be besmirched because Muhammad, a Muslim, allegedly took it on himself to launch a three-week reign of terror in and around the nation's capital. But nobody is blaming all Muslims - and certainly not Islam itself - for the murders. Yes, we understand why Faiz Rehman of the American Muslim Council yesterday said: "We'll probably have a backlash. People in a hurry will think that this is just a Muslim thing again. The community really fears it." But it's hard to ignore certain facts. story.news.yahoo.com