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Passivity
to Blame for Terrorist Attacks
By Charles Stampul
The September 11th 2001 attack on America was like no
other event I have ever lived through.
But the feeling I got watching the Twin Towers collapse after being
struck by US jets, hijacked by terrorists, was strangely familiar.
By the next day I figured out why.
On almost a daily basis in America a person is victimized, either
raped or murdered, by a repeat violent offender.
Similarly, Al Qaida, the Islamic fundamentalist organization that
waged war on the United States on Tuesday was behind other terrorist
attacks and threats that went unpunished.
Al Qaida, a group led by Usama Bin Laden, and sheltered by the
government of Afghanistan, has been linked to terrorists who attempted to
destroy the World Trade Center in 1993. He has also been indicted for the
deadly 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and
Nairobi and was linked to last October's bombing of the USS Cole in Aden,
Yemen, which killed 17 American servicemen.
Laden warned three weeks ago that he would attack American
interests and promised "a very big one."
Almost all the evidence gathered so far points to bin Laden.
A manifest from one of the hijacked flights listing a suspected bin
Laden supporter. Senator
Orrin Hatch of Utah, disclosed in a CNN interview that a communication
intercept from one of the suicide flights revealed that a bin Laden group
claimed to have "hit two targets."
The attack on the United States could and should have been
prevented. America should
have wiped out Bin Laden’s group and the states harboring him after the
attack on the USS Cole. But
America’s leaders were too passive to do what was necessary, or afraid
to act in a way that the United Nations would condemn.
As a result, thousands of innocent people are dead, America’s
financial center is destroyed and the economy is severely damaged.
But that is just the beginning.
When an individual who has been in and out of jail for rape and
murder commits a mass murder or sexual assault, individual freedoms are
usually compromised. Guns are
made harder to get and keep, new databases are created and so on. So it is not just the direct victims that suffer, it is all
members of society. The same
happens with terrorist attacks. Rather
than annihilate the perpetrators, the states that aided them and possibly
even any other group taking credit for the attack, politicians are going
to make US citizens pay. There
is going to be more pressure to ban guns and additional efforts to track
citizens.
A specter of an attack of this nature has been hanging over the
United States for quite some time. For
a long time people believed that an assault on American soil could not
succeed. But the 1993 bombing
of the World Trade Center has shaken that confidence.
Prior to the September 11th attacks on the Twin Towers
and the Pentagon, several experts in national security have stated that
the United States is vulnerable to a ground assault
We should be relieved that it is now over.
America’s leaders will now take the kind of action they should
have taken a long time ago. As
far as terrorist strikes, therefore, the worst is likely over.
The threat now lies in the security measures the United States
Government might take to prevent a similar event in the future.
Charles Stampul writes On
Principle, an individualist ethics column, and is working on a novel
called Progress. To read more of his work visit www.peerlesspress.net
or write on_principle@hushmail.com
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