The Terrorists are Winning (Part 1)
By Royce Carlson

The Bush administration’s response to the attacks was, among other things, to pass the Patriot Act and a bill to create a Department of Homeland Security. In both of these bills are new laws that make America less free. We are all under surveillance now. The government will now start tracking and storing our every transaction. We are all considered possible suspects now. The government can now search and seize without a warrant in more cases than before. What were formerly considered public records are now less available to the public. Peace activists are now being stopped at airports and not allowed to fly. And this is probably just the beginning.

So, you see, America has done what the terrorists wanted. It has become less free. We are becoming more and more like the police states that George Bush says terrorists like. The terrorists are beating us. We are losing the war.

The efforts to make America more secure by taking away our privacy rights will not protect us. What will terrorists do if every transaction with an electronic record is tracked? Do you think it will stop them?

Say you and a group of your terrorist buddies want to get your hands on a couple of hundred guns without the government knowing about it. No problem!

Just go to a gun show or a swap meet and pay cash for the guns. No records of gun sales are required at gun shows or swap meets. If you pay cash, no one will ever connect you to this purchase. See how easy?

If you need some bombs, you can make them yourself out of fertilizer, gasoline, or dozens of other industrial products or you can smuggle them in from another country. I know what you are thinking. How could they smuggle anything into the country with our high security? Well, hundreds of tons of illegal drugs get into the U.S. every year in spite of the government’s efforts to stop it. In fact, the powers that be can’t even keep drugs out of prisons!

The Dept. of Homeland Security bill allows the government to create a central database with all of our information in it. And because of this they think they can catch more terrorists. They are wrong. They already had enough information to stop several of the 911 terrorists before they committed their terrible acts but they ignored it, or didn’t connect it with other important information. Now they will have hundreds (maybe thousands) of times as much information to sift through. Instead of looking for a needle in a haystack, they will be looking for the same needle in a thousand haystacks. It’s not going to work.

In the meantime, the United States will continue with its misguided foreign policy of bullying, bribing and threatening smaller, less powerful countries. Instead of protecting us against terrorist attacks, U.S. foreign policy is creating more terrorists daily and turning former allies into enemies. Changing America’s foreign policy is the only real way to win the war on terrorism. Restoring our individual rights to privacy is the best way of showing the world that terrorists can’t beat us.

Part two of The Terrorists Are Winning will be published at Zenzibar next week.