FrankRep
01-04-2010, 07:16 PM
Americans must rethink the approach to crime-fighting in general and the War on Terror in particular. by Beverly K. Eakman
'Catch and Release' Is for Fish, Not Criminals and Terrorists (http://www.jbs.org/immigration-blog/5810-catch-and-release-is-for-fish-not-criminals-and-terrorists)
Beverly K. Eakman | John Birch Society (http://www.jbs.org/)
04 January 2010
America does a lot of things well. One thing it doesn’t do well is fight crime — terrorist or otherwise. We never did a really good job of crime-fighting, but the old-style cops, judges, and juries managed at least to keep our children and neighborhoods safer than they are today.
In the 1960s, college-age Boomers bought into the leftist claptrap that violent criminals could be “turned” into responsible citizens (i.e., rehabilitated), just as easily as they could be “turned” into monsters by circumstances (e.g., alcoholic parents, bullying peers). At that point, the expression “soft (versus tough) on crime” entered America’s campaign rhetoric and never stopped. The latest incarnation of the debate is the botched intelligence surrounding the “Christmas bombing,” in which Al Qaeda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda) was able to slip 23-year-old Nigerian bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onto Northwest Flight 253 flight from Amsterdam to Detroit wearing a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with the powder explosive PETN. "Soft on terror? Not this president (http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/6041ZA/G7WAE/KSWKVS/AEWCT1/HSXFT/UP/h)," asserted an editorial in The Washington Post for Jan. 3, 2010.
So, with the hurried implementation of even more invasive security measures already in the pipeline — full-body scanners and other draconian procedures (see Dec. 22 article at The New American.com (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/crime/2618-tsa-baggage-screening-set-to-take-out-grandmas-cookies)) — the issue of security-versus-privacy again has taken center stage. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong topic. The real issue is free governments essentially abdicating for some 40 years (thanks to leftist propagandizing) their responsibility to apprehend threats to public safety, be they purse-snatchers and burglars, or rapists and mass murderers. In its place, countries like Great Britain and the United States instituted what can best be described as college-dorm-style hall-monitoring tactics. This resulted in today’s “gotcha” justice, as opposed to criminal justice and set us up for a tremendous fall.
The body of missing 11-year-old Sarah Haley Foxwell of Salisbury, Maryland, taken from her bedroom the week before Christmas, and found on Christmas Day — not exactly the “gift” her horrified parents were expecting — is symptomatic of a much larger problem that goes to the very heart of the War on Terror. A long string of sex-torture murders and sex-related kidnappings by known convicts preceded this atrocity in this decade alone: among them, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, and siblings Dylan and Shasta Groene. The stories are similar and gruesome. The perpetrator is typically a serial criminal who somehow never serves out the original sentence, is poorly monitored or “rehabilitated,” then recycled back to society. Like a fish, the criminal is caught, then released.
If America cannot keep its own criminals out of circulation, how can we trust government agencies to deal effectively with terrorism, which is an order of magnitude more difficult? Despite all America’s hot-shot forensic, behavioral and technological sophistication, 21st century law enforcement cannot even keep youngsters from being snatched on their tricycles. Do we really expect it to stop foreign-born terrorists from spreading their violent message of jihad via a network of sleeper cells, recruits and “religious” leaders?
In both cases, our approach is essentially the same. Schools have police on rooftops, metal detectors to check backpacks and lunch pails for weapons, eating utensils are excluded from the cafeterias, and 6-year-olds suspended for pointing a chicken wing at a little pal across the table and saying “bang-bang.” In other words, we harass and humiliate little kids, sending them to counseling and maybe drugging them too, for completely ridiculous infractions.
Shortly following the 9/11 attacks and establishment of “tougher” federalized safety measures, one politician reportedly asked a friend in the Mossad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad) (the Israeli Intelligence agency) what he thought of America’s new security system. The agent quipped:
“Security system? This isn’t a security system; it’s a ‘bothering people system.' ”
Touché.
We force women to cram cosmetics into postage-stamp-sized containers, pull old people with hip replacements and surgical implants into full-body-scanners, X-ray hearing aids and laptops, and DVD players, and generally create long queues of irritated passengers — for what? So that people who have already been labeled dangerous — like Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, convicted shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and accused Ft. Hood killer, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan — can continue to beat the “system” and attack our people.
Meanwhile, the electronic fence we were going to construct following the 9/11 attacks is barely started. We roll out the welcome mat for individuals from hostile countries; fail utterly to connect dots that are in plain sight concerning the activities and contacts of known terrorists (such as Abdulmutallab’s buddies, former Guantanamo detainees, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi (a.k.a. Guantanamo prisoner #333) and Said Ali Shari (a.k.a. Guantanamo prisoner #372), both thoughtfully released from custody according to State Department logs, to continue their pursuit of jihad.
Are we stupid? Do we have a death wish?
Not exactly. What America does have is a bunch of leftist loonies in the bureaucracy with no stomach for either crime control or national defense. That necessarily extends to immigration issues, teaching patriotism in schools, and safeguarding our Christian heritage of constitutional ideals.
But wait! This isn’t to imply any intentional disrespect for religion on the part of our government or its minions. The Brookings Institute, a liberal Washington-based think-tank, for example, has sponsored the Doha Center, located in Qatar, and recently cited West Bengal “madrassas (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/31/non-muslim-pupils-flock-to-west-bengal-madrassas/)” — yes, that’s those schools where youngsters are recruited for jihad — as models for modern educators, and has further suggested that Pakistan emulate them, inasmuch as these particular madrassas are more progressive and employ a few non-Moslem instructors. (See photo above of students having lunch in a madrassa, in Karachi, Pakistan.) A Brookings study claims that even Hindus, Christians and animist tribes are sending their children to Bengali madrassas, just as “some Pakistani Muslim families send their children to Christian schools ‘because of the high quality of teaching and discipline’ there.”
All religions are equal, you see. And if even animists are sending their kids to madrassas, well, we certainly want to encourage that, don’t we?
Imagine such logic being applied by Generals George Patton, Douglas MacArthur or by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman to Nazi, Japanese, and Soviet aggressors. Suppose they had just thrown open the borders, accepted any number of them as “refugees” and welcomed them as “peaceable peoples,” all the while trying to establish a “Democratic Nazi Germany” in the Rhineland so as to give their citizens the tools of constitutional government to temper their leaders’ bellicose rhetoric and dissuade their young men from “joining” the military.
It’s a good bet that such efforts would have resulted in these famous Americans being executed for treason — after an endless stream of spy cells from the Axis powers had succeeded in decimating our cities.
The fact is, there existed many excellent German and Japanese spy rings in the United States, some of them having flawless command of our language, culture, finance. In many ways, they were better cells than the Moslem jihadist ones we host today. Yet, in an age before computers, we caught nearly all of them. We failed only in the case of Soviet sleeper networks, especially after the 1950s.
Many of the younger, radicalized militants of today, like the Christmas bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab, started out not so much as wannabe jihadists, but playing the modern-day version of cowboys-and-Indians, mimicking shows, movies and games every kid saw. Only in this case the “battle cry” was more along the lines of “let’s pretend we are terrorists” instead of “you be the cowboy and I’ll be the Indian.”
But as parents became less involved in their children’s upbringing — thanks in part to governments that aggressively promoted day care, feminism, and a hodgepodge of children’s “rights” — these “let’s pretend” games of youth were poorly monitored and morphed into “Lord of the Flies (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/summary.html)”-style behaviors. Just as the parents of the Columbine killers didn’t know their little darlings were storing pipe bombs in their bedrooms, other parents failed to scrutinize the video games, song lyrics and “educational” activities that suddenly incited ever more youngsters to violence. Once drugs (legal and otherwise) were added to the mix, a new generation of little monsters was ripe for recruiting. And not only in the United States. By the time peace-and-love groupies of the free world were parents of teenagers themselves, a whole socialist-leftist bureaucracy was firmly entrenched everywhere, busily “empowering” an amoral, highly sexualized and rootless brood of agitated, drugged-up and poorly educated kids.
Little wonder, then, that Abdulmutallab was a wealthy banker’s son, and a college graduate of a prestigious free-world college in London. Or that Abdulmutallab’s own father had called authorities to warn them about his son’s apparent radicalization. Or that, according to a report obtained just last month by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, U.S. federal agents and Pakistani security officials recently interrogated five American Muslims, aged 19-25, suspected of traveling from the Washington, DC area to fight with Al Qaeda and the Taliban against coalition forces. Or that John Walker Lindh, the first so-called “American Taliban,” captured in Afghanistan during the initial phases of the U.S. invasion there, was a 20-year-old product of his parents’ liberal permissiveness. Or that Richard Colvin Reid (a.k.a. Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja, a.k.a. “shoe bomber”), was actually a British citizen and a self-admitted member of Al Qaeda, as well as a career criminal, along with his father, Colvin Robin Reed. (The list of barely adult radicals is long.)
Although the 60s-era peace-and-love crowd was nowhere near a majority at the time, they wound up making it easy for terrorists, Marxists and other radical talent spotters and handlers to recruit.
Today, we are awash in computers that track and monitor individuals’ whereabouts, along with financial transactions, cell phones, baggage X-ray machines, and a de facto national ID system via the Social Security Number (which is easily cross-matched with everything from credit cards, to telephones, to passports and vaccination records). Yet, we cannot find (or keep locked up) obvious threats to public safety that are under our noses.
It was the passengers, not government agents, on Flight 253 who thwarted the Christmas Day bombing on Northwest Airlines, shoe-bomber Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63, and September 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah on United Airlines Flight 93, crashing it into Pennsylvania soil instead of the U.S. Capitol or White House.
When Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, chirped shortly after the Christmas Day bombing scare that the system had worked because airline security was everybody’s business, she was wrong. Our “bothering people” system did not work, nor is it the job of average folks to take on dangerous terrorists. If they do, and later cannot prove their case definitively, they can expect a lawsuit. The Council on Arab-International Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union have proved quite adept at initiating them.
Another chilling incident (http://www.nationalterroralert.com/updates/2009/12/03/what-happened-on-airtran-airways-flight-297/) that occurred on November 17, 2009 serves as an example. It left passengers wondering how to contend with what looked like either a dry run or imminent attack. Some 11 Middle Eastern men in full attire boarded AirTran Flight 297 from Atlanta to Houston, and according to an eyewitness, “peppered themselves throughout the plane all the way to the back. As the plane taxied to the runway, the stewardesses gave the safety spiel … [when] one of the men got on his cell and called one of his companions in the back and proceeded to talk on the phone in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively.” When a stewardess repeatedly told the man that cell phones were not permitted, one of the men said “shut up infidel dog!” He also began to scream in her face in Arabic. At that exact moment, all 11 of them got up and started for the cabin. The eyewitness in question, Tedd Petruna, proceeded to help turn the men over to TSA agents, and the flight was cancelled when the rest of the passengers finally found their voice following an abrupt changing of the crew and refused to fly.
This is why public safety and “the common defense” (i.e., national security) were two things the U.S. Constitution included as being government’s business.
The United States has been implementing instead a “bothering-people” system of crime-fighting since at least 1965. The result has been to acclimate us to a lifestyle devoid of any expectation of privacy and instilling a “sheeple” mentality. Young people today under age 20 don’t bat an eyelash at the inconvenience and insult. Older Americans are learning to keep quiet in their irritation, lest they aggravate agents of the State.
Meanwhile, our government and its minions in the bureaucracy practice catch-and-release, over and over — be they illegal immigrants, convicted criminals, sex offenders or terrorists.
Epitomizing our folly, in 2008, Maryland sent Halloween pumpkin signs (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,438725,00.html) that read “no candy at this residence” to some 1,200 convicted-and-released violent and child-sex offenders in the state. The former convicts were to post these on their front doors or “possibly [as in maybe] face a parole violation.” The mandate was rescinded when it became the butt of late-night TV jokes.
Given this approach to public safety, it should come as no surprise that, amid charges of torture of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, at least two of the terrorists sent there were found to have been enrolled into an “art therapy rehabilitation program,” then set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials. Among other activities, the program provides detainees with paints and crayons as part of a rehabilitation regimen. Now it appears that these same two “rehabilitated” terrorists may be the same men suspected of being co-conspirators with Umar Abdulmutallab in the Christmas bombing plot.
“The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke,” a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees. This is the kind of foolishness that passes for a tough approach to crime and terrorism. (For further information, read the Washington Times article of January 4, 2010, "Hot Button (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/04/hot-button-67426984/).")
Americans must rethink the approach to crime-fighting in general and the War on Terror in particular. It is absolutely essential that we deny criminals and enemies, in whatever form they present themselves, the means and the capability of carrying out attacks. Once one looks at it from this simple angle, a straightforward, effective approach can be decided. For starters:
* Gear all crime policy to the criminal element, not to responsible citizens if you expect to get, and keep, their support.
* Catch-and-Release is a method of replenishing the supply of fish; it does not work well with criminals or terrorists.
(Read also, "Why Is Islamberg Now a Ghost Town? (http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/p_williams/2009/12222009.htm)")
SOURCE:
http://www.jbs.org/immigration-blog/5810-catch-and-release-is-for-fish-not-criminals-and-terrorists
'Catch and Release' Is for Fish, Not Criminals and Terrorists (http://www.jbs.org/immigration-blog/5810-catch-and-release-is-for-fish-not-criminals-and-terrorists)
Beverly K. Eakman | John Birch Society (http://www.jbs.org/)
04 January 2010
America does a lot of things well. One thing it doesn’t do well is fight crime — terrorist or otherwise. We never did a really good job of crime-fighting, but the old-style cops, judges, and juries managed at least to keep our children and neighborhoods safer than they are today.
In the 1960s, college-age Boomers bought into the leftist claptrap that violent criminals could be “turned” into responsible citizens (i.e., rehabilitated), just as easily as they could be “turned” into monsters by circumstances (e.g., alcoholic parents, bullying peers). At that point, the expression “soft (versus tough) on crime” entered America’s campaign rhetoric and never stopped. The latest incarnation of the debate is the botched intelligence surrounding the “Christmas bombing,” in which Al Qaeda (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Qaeda) was able to slip 23-year-old Nigerian bombing suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab onto Northwest Flight 253 flight from Amsterdam to Detroit wearing a syringe and a condom-like bag filled with the powder explosive PETN. "Soft on terror? Not this president (http://link.email.washingtonpost.com/r/6041ZA/G7WAE/KSWKVS/AEWCT1/HSXFT/UP/h)," asserted an editorial in The Washington Post for Jan. 3, 2010.
So, with the hurried implementation of even more invasive security measures already in the pipeline — full-body scanners and other draconian procedures (see Dec. 22 article at The New American.com (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/crime/2618-tsa-baggage-screening-set-to-take-out-grandmas-cookies)) — the issue of security-versus-privacy again has taken center stage. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong topic. The real issue is free governments essentially abdicating for some 40 years (thanks to leftist propagandizing) their responsibility to apprehend threats to public safety, be they purse-snatchers and burglars, or rapists and mass murderers. In its place, countries like Great Britain and the United States instituted what can best be described as college-dorm-style hall-monitoring tactics. This resulted in today’s “gotcha” justice, as opposed to criminal justice and set us up for a tremendous fall.
The body of missing 11-year-old Sarah Haley Foxwell of Salisbury, Maryland, taken from her bedroom the week before Christmas, and found on Christmas Day — not exactly the “gift” her horrified parents were expecting — is symptomatic of a much larger problem that goes to the very heart of the War on Terror. A long string of sex-torture murders and sex-related kidnappings by known convicts preceded this atrocity in this decade alone: among them, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Elizabeth Smart, and siblings Dylan and Shasta Groene. The stories are similar and gruesome. The perpetrator is typically a serial criminal who somehow never serves out the original sentence, is poorly monitored or “rehabilitated,” then recycled back to society. Like a fish, the criminal is caught, then released.
If America cannot keep its own criminals out of circulation, how can we trust government agencies to deal effectively with terrorism, which is an order of magnitude more difficult? Despite all America’s hot-shot forensic, behavioral and technological sophistication, 21st century law enforcement cannot even keep youngsters from being snatched on their tricycles. Do we really expect it to stop foreign-born terrorists from spreading their violent message of jihad via a network of sleeper cells, recruits and “religious” leaders?
In both cases, our approach is essentially the same. Schools have police on rooftops, metal detectors to check backpacks and lunch pails for weapons, eating utensils are excluded from the cafeterias, and 6-year-olds suspended for pointing a chicken wing at a little pal across the table and saying “bang-bang.” In other words, we harass and humiliate little kids, sending them to counseling and maybe drugging them too, for completely ridiculous infractions.
Shortly following the 9/11 attacks and establishment of “tougher” federalized safety measures, one politician reportedly asked a friend in the Mossad (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossad) (the Israeli Intelligence agency) what he thought of America’s new security system. The agent quipped:
“Security system? This isn’t a security system; it’s a ‘bothering people system.' ”
Touché.
We force women to cram cosmetics into postage-stamp-sized containers, pull old people with hip replacements and surgical implants into full-body-scanners, X-ray hearing aids and laptops, and DVD players, and generally create long queues of irritated passengers — for what? So that people who have already been labeled dangerous — like Christmas bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, convicted shoe-bomber Richard Reid, and accused Ft. Hood killer, Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan — can continue to beat the “system” and attack our people.
Meanwhile, the electronic fence we were going to construct following the 9/11 attacks is barely started. We roll out the welcome mat for individuals from hostile countries; fail utterly to connect dots that are in plain sight concerning the activities and contacts of known terrorists (such as Abdulmutallab’s buddies, former Guantanamo detainees, Muhamad Attik al-Harbi (a.k.a. Guantanamo prisoner #333) and Said Ali Shari (a.k.a. Guantanamo prisoner #372), both thoughtfully released from custody according to State Department logs, to continue their pursuit of jihad.
Are we stupid? Do we have a death wish?
Not exactly. What America does have is a bunch of leftist loonies in the bureaucracy with no stomach for either crime control or national defense. That necessarily extends to immigration issues, teaching patriotism in schools, and safeguarding our Christian heritage of constitutional ideals.
But wait! This isn’t to imply any intentional disrespect for religion on the part of our government or its minions. The Brookings Institute, a liberal Washington-based think-tank, for example, has sponsored the Doha Center, located in Qatar, and recently cited West Bengal “madrassas (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/dec/31/non-muslim-pupils-flock-to-west-bengal-madrassas/)” — yes, that’s those schools where youngsters are recruited for jihad — as models for modern educators, and has further suggested that Pakistan emulate them, inasmuch as these particular madrassas are more progressive and employ a few non-Moslem instructors. (See photo above of students having lunch in a madrassa, in Karachi, Pakistan.) A Brookings study claims that even Hindus, Christians and animist tribes are sending their children to Bengali madrassas, just as “some Pakistani Muslim families send their children to Christian schools ‘because of the high quality of teaching and discipline’ there.”
All religions are equal, you see. And if even animists are sending their kids to madrassas, well, we certainly want to encourage that, don’t we?
Imagine such logic being applied by Generals George Patton, Douglas MacArthur or by Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman to Nazi, Japanese, and Soviet aggressors. Suppose they had just thrown open the borders, accepted any number of them as “refugees” and welcomed them as “peaceable peoples,” all the while trying to establish a “Democratic Nazi Germany” in the Rhineland so as to give their citizens the tools of constitutional government to temper their leaders’ bellicose rhetoric and dissuade their young men from “joining” the military.
It’s a good bet that such efforts would have resulted in these famous Americans being executed for treason — after an endless stream of spy cells from the Axis powers had succeeded in decimating our cities.
The fact is, there existed many excellent German and Japanese spy rings in the United States, some of them having flawless command of our language, culture, finance. In many ways, they were better cells than the Moslem jihadist ones we host today. Yet, in an age before computers, we caught nearly all of them. We failed only in the case of Soviet sleeper networks, especially after the 1950s.
Many of the younger, radicalized militants of today, like the Christmas bomber, Umar Abdulmutallab, started out not so much as wannabe jihadists, but playing the modern-day version of cowboys-and-Indians, mimicking shows, movies and games every kid saw. Only in this case the “battle cry” was more along the lines of “let’s pretend we are terrorists” instead of “you be the cowboy and I’ll be the Indian.”
But as parents became less involved in their children’s upbringing — thanks in part to governments that aggressively promoted day care, feminism, and a hodgepodge of children’s “rights” — these “let’s pretend” games of youth were poorly monitored and morphed into “Lord of the Flies (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/flies/summary.html)”-style behaviors. Just as the parents of the Columbine killers didn’t know their little darlings were storing pipe bombs in their bedrooms, other parents failed to scrutinize the video games, song lyrics and “educational” activities that suddenly incited ever more youngsters to violence. Once drugs (legal and otherwise) were added to the mix, a new generation of little monsters was ripe for recruiting. And not only in the United States. By the time peace-and-love groupies of the free world were parents of teenagers themselves, a whole socialist-leftist bureaucracy was firmly entrenched everywhere, busily “empowering” an amoral, highly sexualized and rootless brood of agitated, drugged-up and poorly educated kids.
Little wonder, then, that Abdulmutallab was a wealthy banker’s son, and a college graduate of a prestigious free-world college in London. Or that Abdulmutallab’s own father had called authorities to warn them about his son’s apparent radicalization. Or that, according to a report obtained just last month by the National Association of Chiefs of Police, U.S. federal agents and Pakistani security officials recently interrogated five American Muslims, aged 19-25, suspected of traveling from the Washington, DC area to fight with Al Qaeda and the Taliban against coalition forces. Or that John Walker Lindh, the first so-called “American Taliban,” captured in Afghanistan during the initial phases of the U.S. invasion there, was a 20-year-old product of his parents’ liberal permissiveness. Or that Richard Colvin Reid (a.k.a. Abdul Raheem and Tariq Raja, a.k.a. “shoe bomber”), was actually a British citizen and a self-admitted member of Al Qaeda, as well as a career criminal, along with his father, Colvin Robin Reed. (The list of barely adult radicals is long.)
Although the 60s-era peace-and-love crowd was nowhere near a majority at the time, they wound up making it easy for terrorists, Marxists and other radical talent spotters and handlers to recruit.
Today, we are awash in computers that track and monitor individuals’ whereabouts, along with financial transactions, cell phones, baggage X-ray machines, and a de facto national ID system via the Social Security Number (which is easily cross-matched with everything from credit cards, to telephones, to passports and vaccination records). Yet, we cannot find (or keep locked up) obvious threats to public safety that are under our noses.
It was the passengers, not government agents, on Flight 253 who thwarted the Christmas Day bombing on Northwest Airlines, shoe-bomber Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63, and September 11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah on United Airlines Flight 93, crashing it into Pennsylvania soil instead of the U.S. Capitol or White House.
When Janet Napolitano, Secretary of Homeland Security, chirped shortly after the Christmas Day bombing scare that the system had worked because airline security was everybody’s business, she was wrong. Our “bothering people” system did not work, nor is it the job of average folks to take on dangerous terrorists. If they do, and later cannot prove their case definitively, they can expect a lawsuit. The Council on Arab-International Relations and the American Civil Liberties Union have proved quite adept at initiating them.
Another chilling incident (http://www.nationalterroralert.com/updates/2009/12/03/what-happened-on-airtran-airways-flight-297/) that occurred on November 17, 2009 serves as an example. It left passengers wondering how to contend with what looked like either a dry run or imminent attack. Some 11 Middle Eastern men in full attire boarded AirTran Flight 297 from Atlanta to Houston, and according to an eyewitness, “peppered themselves throughout the plane all the way to the back. As the plane taxied to the runway, the stewardesses gave the safety spiel … [when] one of the men got on his cell and called one of his companions in the back and proceeded to talk on the phone in Arabic very loudly and very aggressively.” When a stewardess repeatedly told the man that cell phones were not permitted, one of the men said “shut up infidel dog!” He also began to scream in her face in Arabic. At that exact moment, all 11 of them got up and started for the cabin. The eyewitness in question, Tedd Petruna, proceeded to help turn the men over to TSA agents, and the flight was cancelled when the rest of the passengers finally found their voice following an abrupt changing of the crew and refused to fly.
This is why public safety and “the common defense” (i.e., national security) were two things the U.S. Constitution included as being government’s business.
The United States has been implementing instead a “bothering-people” system of crime-fighting since at least 1965. The result has been to acclimate us to a lifestyle devoid of any expectation of privacy and instilling a “sheeple” mentality. Young people today under age 20 don’t bat an eyelash at the inconvenience and insult. Older Americans are learning to keep quiet in their irritation, lest they aggravate agents of the State.
Meanwhile, our government and its minions in the bureaucracy practice catch-and-release, over and over — be they illegal immigrants, convicted criminals, sex offenders or terrorists.
Epitomizing our folly, in 2008, Maryland sent Halloween pumpkin signs (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,438725,00.html) that read “no candy at this residence” to some 1,200 convicted-and-released violent and child-sex offenders in the state. The former convicts were to post these on their front doors or “possibly [as in maybe] face a parole violation.” The mandate was rescinded when it became the butt of late-night TV jokes.
Given this approach to public safety, it should come as no surprise that, amid charges of torture of suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, at least two of the terrorists sent there were found to have been enrolled into an “art therapy rehabilitation program,” then set free, according to U.S. and Saudi officials. Among other activities, the program provides detainees with paints and crayons as part of a rehabilitation regimen. Now it appears that these same two “rehabilitated” terrorists may be the same men suspected of being co-conspirators with Umar Abdulmutallab in the Christmas bombing plot.
“The so-called rehabilitation programs are a joke,” a U.S. diplomat said in describing the Saudi efforts with released Guantanamo detainees. This is the kind of foolishness that passes for a tough approach to crime and terrorism. (For further information, read the Washington Times article of January 4, 2010, "Hot Button (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/jan/04/hot-button-67426984/).")
Americans must rethink the approach to crime-fighting in general and the War on Terror in particular. It is absolutely essential that we deny criminals and enemies, in whatever form they present themselves, the means and the capability of carrying out attacks. Once one looks at it from this simple angle, a straightforward, effective approach can be decided. For starters:
* Gear all crime policy to the criminal element, not to responsible citizens if you expect to get, and keep, their support.
* Catch-and-Release is a method of replenishing the supply of fish; it does not work well with criminals or terrorists.
(Read also, "Why Is Islamberg Now a Ghost Town? (http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/p_williams/2009/12222009.htm)")
SOURCE:
http://www.jbs.org/immigration-blog/5810-catch-and-release-is-for-fish-not-criminals-and-terrorists