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President Bush is not doing enough to protect us from suicide bombers.
I work about 3 blocks from ground zero. I can say one thing without fear of contradiction: other than Central Park, there is no other place in Manhattan where you could crash 2 fuel-laden jumbo jets at rush hour and kill "only" 3,000 people than the Trade Center.
As horrific as 9-11 was, if those planes were simply belly landed at different locations on Broadway there would have been six-figure casualties. If the Trade Center buildings had immediately toppled over like felled trees (exactly what the 1993 bombers thought would happen) instead of collapsing in on themselves, more than an hour later six-figures would be my low-end estimate.
I have thought about this every day that I am there.
That is what the 9-11 plotters really had in mind. They were not trying to kill 3,000, they were hoping for thirty times that number!
We need to remember that because this is the mentality we are up against.
That is why our government is clearly not doing enough.
The problem in "doing more" is the fact that we are a free society. While only a minuscule percentage of Muslims are suicide bombers, 100% of all suicide bombers are Muslim. Even though it would be 100% effective against suicide bombers, we cannot ban Muslims from flying on airlines or riding the subway. Targeted searches against "Mideastern types" might be held to be unconstitutional profiling. They will say we need to search everyone or no one at all. Do we realy need to search a mother trying to board the subway with her two young children, Tiger Woods, Jennifer Lopez or Bill Gates?
Would a change in U.S. foreign policy prevent such acts? I think not. We may not be at war with Islam, but fundamentalist Islam is at war with us. They have determined that the Burgha and Hollywood cannot coexist in an information age and are determined to do something about it!
Fanatical terrorists don't need much of excuse to do their "thing." Two days ago, I saw Tony Blair being questioned on whether he thought that his government's actions in Iraq were the root cause of the London bombings. I immediately had the vision that, after a future act of terrorism on British soil, a reporter might ask if he thought that Britain's reckless policy of equal rights for women, which is an insult to fundamentalist Islam, was insensitive and, therefore, the root cause of the recent poison gas attack that killed thousands.
Where do we go from here? The reason that the West did not even know that we were at war with these fanatics was because they were so miserably inept and the few "successful" atrocities were so far away: Bali, Kashmir, etc. 9-11 changed all that.
I can only give a suggestion for the N.Y. City situation. Security vs. freedom has been and will always be a balancing act. A multi-partisan committee with real powers should be selected to determine where the line should be drawn in the New York Metropolitan area. It should be composed of equal numbers of Democrats, Republicans, liberals and conservatives. It must also include members of major groups with an interest in the outcome, including the Islamic community. The members of the committee must be accountable for their votes on various security measures that are proposed. None of the measures adopted must ever be permanent. They should have short "sunset" provisions, one or two years at most.
If the current threat requires a potentially severe intrusion on our rights, such a provision should automatically expire or be reauthorized every 90 days.
The provisions must, of course, always pass Constitutional muster.
In this way the electorate, our people, will get the security level they want - and deserve.
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