Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Underpant bombers and crotch terrorists

Can only be defeated by the boring work of intelligence and police work, not by gazillion dollar jets and hundreds of thousands of soldiers.

Robert Scheer:
Preventing terrorist attacks on the U.S. homeland has nothing to do with occupying vast tracts of land or winning the hearts and minds of backward villagers whom we falsely depict as surrogates of an evil empire, as we did in Vietnam and are now doing in Afghanistan. What is needed is smart police work to catch these highly mobile fanatics, and that begins with actually reading and then acting on the readily available intelligence data. It requires detectives with brains and not generals with firepower.

The ballooning of the defense budget after 9/11 has proved a great boondoggle for the military-industrial complex, which suddenly found an excuse to build weapons and deploy conventional forces against a superpower enemy that no longer exists. But our stealth fighters and bombers designed to defeat Soviet defenses that were never built are a poor match against a terrorist’s stealth underwear.

3 comments:

mahakal said...

Next they'll start shoving the explosive up their bums, and maybe we'll realize that it just isn't practical to cavity search all passengers.

The word verification is "train" which I would rather take.

ellroon said...

Amazing how we will restrict our own civil freedoms while not addressing WHY there are terrorists and HOW to fix the problem. When you have people willing to die for their bizarre and unfathomable reasons, you need to go to the root of the problem: where they live, how they grew up, why they believe there is no future worth living for and death is the only answer.

Checking peoples bums won't do it. ... Although I'm sure there are a few Congressional Republicans who think it is a really good idea and are planning trips abroad as we speak...

ellroon said...

A blazingly good pun, Steve! Don't think you can get any pyre ... Can't compete with this...

So I'll just quote from Ray Bradbury:
"It was a pleasure to burn."
- Fahrenheit 451