Decius wrote:
Stratfor: Geopolitical Intelligence Report - May 16, 2006

Civil Liberties and National Security

By George Friedman

....
Now flip the analysis. Americans can live with child molesters,
deadbeat dads and stolen car rings more readily than they can live
with the dangers inherent in government power. But can one live
with the threat from al Qaeda more readily than that from
government power? That is the crucial question that must be
answered. Does al Qaeda pose a threat that (a) cannot be managed
within the structure of normal due process and (b) is so enormous
that it requires an extension of government power? In the long run,
is increased government power more or less dangerous than al Qaeda?
....

My answers to these questions are, a) no, and b) not even close.

Let me explain why I say so. 9/11 demonstrated not that we are horribly vulnarable to attack (we are in some ways) but that we simply failed to use the abilities already there. We had the reports from the flight schools, we had Zacharias "I'm an assclown" Moussaoui in jail. We had the reports about Al-Q's previous plans to ram an airplane into the Eiffel Tower. We had a couple of the actual hijackers on watch lists. The FBI had information from Afghanistan that Al-Q was planning an attack. The daily brief was ignored. And those are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head.

All of those were found under due process, what wasn't there was the lack of turf battles to properly coordinate all the information or a sharing and referencing structure to get all of the information together. Maybe if those things had been in place it still might have happened, but the bottom line is the different services not sharing information and not organizing it any cohesive way meant preventing it was a lost cause.

Due process found all of this stuff, it just didn't get it all together until after the fact.

To answer the second question, is Al-Q a threat that requires an extention, unless they get their hands on an ebola strain that jumps around like a cold, or something out of Resident Evil, the answer is not even close. The concern is "Oh my God, they have a nuke." First, the problem there is, where would they get it from? Probably from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Okay, I know it's been a while but one of the things we were working on was working with Russia and the other ex-Soviet countries to secure their arsenals. We seem to have forgotten about doing that since we're bogged down in Iraq, and the Russians don't trust us anymore either (and neither does anyone else on the planet).

Besides, there are much easier ways to get similar effects. Noted on the Daily Show last night, was the comment about CNN being "the most trusted name in AAAAAHHH!!!!" There's a nice big liquified natural gas tanker sitting in Boston harbor. All you need to blow that thing sky high and a big chunk of Boston with it would be at most, a Cesna and a couple jerry cans full of gasoline, and you probably don't even need the Cesna. And that's if your goal is to kill people. There are any number of ways to cause massive havoc I can think of, most of them would be much worse than a nuke, and all of them would be substantially easier to pull off.

Defending against Al-Q and other organizations doesn't take new tools. It takes cooperation among beaurocracies, and intelligent security, neither of which is in any greater supply now than it was five years ago. That we have two ongoing occupations and all kinds of crap going on domestically and we're STILL no safer than we were five years ago, and likely LESS so, tells me we will get hit again. It could easily be as bad as or worse than 9/11, and we are no better prepared to deal with it than we were then as Katrina demonstrated.

What's missing is a brain.

RE: Civil Liberties and National Security