Your Solutions on....

This thread is for the naysayers, for the people who are diametrically opposed to anything and everything this Administration has, is, or will do.

This is your chance to get on record with your better ideas.


National Security:

Since it's currently in the forefront of the news at the moment, let's start with national security. There's been a lot of talk from the SLeft on what we shouldn't do. Now I would like to hear your reasoned, rational ideas for effective national security.


-Kiamat Dusk

oh dear god...

One suggestion:

Port Security: http://www.secureports.org/improving_security.html

That means:

Collecting advance, pre-vessel loading information on container shipments from shippers and importers to ensure that appropriate government authorities know precise cargo contents and the identity of the parties involved in the cargo shipments.

Enhancing the government's cargo security risk assessment screening of all cargo containers before loading aboard vessels in foreign ports to prevent dangerous substances and devices from entering the U.S.

etc.

There are a lot of things we can do now - before an expensive Cargo X-Ray Screening System that will take a long time to install. (I'm not saying we should not implement the X-Ray, I'm just saying we should do some of the more obvious measures first).

Another suggestion would be to secure the countries Power Grid, so that no one can access it and shut it down.

The same applies to the water system.

It concerns me when I do not see bills and funding to address the security of our critical infrastructure. People are hedging their bets on whether or not we will be attacked again in order to gain political advantages. (Total Information Awareness is definitely a political advantage, particularly when you can spot the nonconformist talking to reporters).

There have been a lot of good security recommendations from Bruce Schneier, a life boat of common sense in a random sea of security bullshit. http://www.schneier.COM/

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Drop the doctrine of preemption (or as the rest of the world calls it, aggression). It's irrational and as we've seen so far it causes more violence and bloodshed than it prevents. The faulty logic of preemption is what caused us to invade Iraq in an effort to prevent Hussein from being a threat to his neighbors. Instead we've caused war between Sunnis and Shiites with is very likely to spread throughout the region. Our insanely naive domino theory that's supposed to cause freedom and democracy to spread across the region is instead causing ethnic violence to destabilize the region. The big winner is Iran who now has more influence than ever. The big losers... the US, Israel, and every peace loving person in the middle east. The first step to a more secure US? We need to get the hell over ourselves.

Great answer-and precisely the sort of thoughtful alternatives I was looking for. I would, however, like to hear you elaborate on just how you would go about securing the power grid and water system.

-Kiamat Dusk

This is the sort of foaming mouthed polemics I want to avoid so I'll be brief.

Pre 9/11-no preemption
Post preemption-no attacks on American soil

-Kiamat Dusk

And this is the kind of faulty "logic" that gets us into trouble. That statement is the equivelant of "banannas are yellow. School buses are yellow. Therefore, all banannas are school buses." Don't lecture me about polemics if you're going to start throwing around kindergarten logic.

I'm not sure what you consider reasoned or rational, or in what manner you are referring to national security, so I will lay out a few ideas for various problems.

For the problem of national security abroad, I propose that we divorce control of the military from politcal office. My biggest problem with Bush as a president is that he was and is dangerously underqualified to direct military operations (as are many of his advisors). There are a number of ways to do this, but the general idea is that if a president wants us to fight a foreign entity, congress should be declaring war first, then the military may decide how to approach such a conflict.

On the problem of border security, there are a number of things that can be done depending on what we want done. I'm sure you know that the supposed hijackers were legal immigrants (they had visa's). So first, I would propose streamlining the current immigration process as outlined in the illegal immigration thread. Next I would propose we link up that faster, more efficient process to our intelligence agencies in conjunction with international security groups who track known terrorists and felons that are known to cross international borders.

On our ports we need to put in place the manpower and resources to know what every container is going to contain before it is packed, what they had when they left port, and what they had when they arrive. This is already done in a number of countries and can be done here.

I don't think anyone is particularly arguing for no national security or any kind of deliberate insecurity when they criticize what we have now. There are obviously a number of logistical problems with my own suggestions, but the idea is to make our country better on a whole and I don't think anyone can argue against making our country better.

When I say "rational" and "reasonable" I mean answers like yours and Rose's. Both are clear headed, free of hyperbole, down to earth. Unrational is like Chip here who offers no real solutions, he just knows that if Bush implemented it-it must be bad. That doesn't get us anywhere and drags an otherwise intelligent exchange of ideas down to the level of petty mudslinging.

I should have clarified that I meant internal security, but thinking about it now, I guess it's all linked. We go out there to keep them from getting in here. I was thinking more along the lines of what are people comfy with the CIA, NSA, and various and asundry other intelligence bodies doing to protect them. But I welcome this expanded discourse.

And you're right to point out that the 9/11 hijackers were in this country legally. I would go farther and point to the Oklahoma City bombing as a reason we need to look internally just as hard as we look externally.

-Kiamat Dusk

While I agree that's a matter of concern, how would you go about it? Most power companies run scores, if not hundreds, of substations. Each substation feeds hundreds to thousands of customers. But they can be switched in/out to reroute power around problems. As for the power generation plants, they already have pretty good security -- not anti-terrorist level security unless they're a nuke, but you can't just walk in off the street.


Chip, Saddam was already a threat to his neighbors (as well as his own people). In that respect, our invasion was not pre-emptive. If anything it was a long-delayed reaction to his 12 years of obfuscation, lying, stonewalling, threats and manipulating the U.N. inspections. He could have survived just fine had he done like Qaddafi did with Libya - agree to open cooperation and disarmament. But he refused and made it look like he was hiding something. As we now know from recovered documents, "containment" was a fundamentally flawed policy that was NOT working. Our only other option was to walk off and let him rebuild his WMD programs -- something he went to great effort to preserve as a future option.

Not sure what that has to do with the original question, but I had to point that out.

I thought this guy had a pretty good idea...

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0506/051506ol.htm

Yeah, that must be why we rolled over him in a matter of days and found no WMD... but that was hardly a surprise considering Rice and Powell had made public statements just prior to 9-11 that the sanctions and no-fly zone had done their job to keep him boxed in and that he posed no threat to his neighbors. They also said there was no evidence that he was trying to restart his nuclear weapons program. I'd be happy to find the video if you like. Iraq is a hell of a lot more of a threat to its neighbors now than it was before we invaded. Hussein, brutal as his regime was, kept the Sunnis and Shiites from going at each other.



So 19 people who had no connection at all to Iraq did something terrible and suddenly Iraq is a huge threat? Riiiiiigggghhhhht. I still have that oceanfront property in Kansas available for you, Cindy.

My point is that if we want a more secure United States a good place to start would be to examine the reasons why so much of the world hates us and change our ways instead of doing everything in our power to make the problem worse. A police state is not the answer. That cure is worse than the disease.

Interesting reading: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04140t.pdf

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I'd just like to point out that over half of those stated as having been part of the plot are still alive (even though you'd think that flying a plane into a building should be fatal).

So people actually now believe September 11th was a pre-emptive strike on America by Iraq. It is amazing how the power of the press and propaganda can re-write even recent history and people believe it.

Problem: Religious Right
Solution: Angry Robots

Kiamat, why do you see this as a battle? Why does it have to be an "us against them" situations?

Wouldn't working together in a cooperative manner be more productive?

Or do you just enjoy pointless arguments?

The only person who implied that was CHIP.

It's pretty clear that Cindy was saying that in a post 9-11 atmosphere, the situation in Iraq needed to be addressed. You can question the judgement of such a decision, but please don't try to attribute your own assertion to Cindy's argument.

We did, however, find ample evidence that his programs had been put into cold storage (so to speak), to be easily ramped back up as soon at everyone was looking the other way. And the historical record is available for everyone to see as to what he would do when he had those WMD. Let the record show that Saddam was not only the only Middle Eastern dictator to use WMD on his own people, but the only one to use them against a neighbor (Iran). His fingerprints were even on the 1993 World Trade Center attack that tried to use cyanide. Yet you trust him?


At a huge cost to US taxpayers, and with rapidly disintegrating control (see the French & Russian backdoor bargains that circumvented sanctions). How long would you propose we continue to maintain the no-fly zone?


Not yet anyway.


You seem to be swallowing the media sensationalism that focuses on anything negative in Iraq. Just the other day you accused me of swallowing the "party line" -- which is worse?
[/left]
[left]Yes, those whacky Iraqis are just pounding the pudding out of each other [/left]


Goodness, Chip, where did I connect Iraq to 9/11? Please show me.


First, the only people I've head lately who think most of the world "hates us" are writing for extreme leftwing sites like commondreams.org. Pfft. (For the record, radicals in Western Europe are not "most of the world" Second, I don't live my life according to what other people think of me -- if I feel the security of my family and friends is at stake, I'm going to do what I need to do and their help is welcome but not required.

The fact is, we're the biggest, most obvious target of their own angst but we didn't put the mullahs in power nor did we tell them to keep their people in poverty & ignorance (while blaming those bogeymen in Israel). The fact is that Iraqi patriots welcome our support - they know they would never have been free of Saddam without us, nor would they be building their own government without our help. They can hate us later. For now, we're doing good work.

Sounds to me like what you'd really like is for us to just withdraw from engaging with the rest of the world. Let the mullahs and tyrants run free, let half the world starve without American food and aid. That fence Congress wants to build along Mexico's border could be extended along Canada and the shores too, I guess. I just hope you're prepared to live with perpetual fuel shortages, constant economic Depression and STILL no security. I wonder how long before you would be bashing our administration for not doing anything about what's going on in the world?

Since 9/11 I have been snapping my fingers vigerously and hooting like an owl to avoid elephants trampling my family. Since 9/11, I am happy to hoot that no elephants have trampled my family.

Hoot hoot. *snap snap*

I can't really offer any brilliant suggestions for national security since I'm in no way qualified so I can only opine about the underlying rationale. What bothers me about this debate is that it assumes a great deal... that suddenly the world is far more dangerous than it was ten years ago or that we're suddenly far more risk averse. We're still freaking out about 9-11 five years later, and still based on the exaggerated fear that terrorists are bent on killing us all (in some substantially different way than the "death to America" shit that's been going on our entire lives?). I think both of those assumptions are false.

In order to have a rational debate about national security there first has to be a rational view of how much risk we're willing to accept and how much risk terrorism actually poses compared to other risks. This sudden rush to wrap the country in plastic sheeting and duct tape and kick out all the Mexicans (because god knows they're a huge terrorist threat) seems knee-jerk. Knee jerk responses to irrational fear result in really bad ideas.

A few thousand people died in a really horrible and spectacular fashion five years ago. The risk of any of us meeting our demise in that way is minute... I mean seriously tiny. And yes, some day some one will probably nuke a city with a bomb they snuck somewhere. It'll be horrible, and we'll deal with it and move on. Half of New Orleans was wiped off the map a few months ago and we're not even talking about that anymore. The tsunami claimed more than a quarter million lives. We rebuild. We move on. And if we're rational we accept that it's only a matter of time until the next disaster.

How many people died from famine last year? Hundreds of thousands? Millions? How many died from the flu just in this country alone? Compare that to the tiny number of deaths from terrorism and tell me that this rush to become a surveilance society is in any way a rational response to threat. It's not.

You're priceless Chip.

I don't recall lots of serious statements about MEXICANS AS TERRORISTS.

Please don't make me list the terrorist attacks against US interests here and around the world in the last 15 years. I'm sure you are aware of them.

Natural disasters and engineering flaws/accidents should not be equated with INTENTIONAL VIOLENCE AND MURDER (terrorism).

You take your medication Lordfly, it's for your own good.

What is this, irate husband or something? I didn't mention Cindy. It's a situation that exists, Cindy or no Cindy.

Of course they should. This is all about saving your own ass isn't it? If we're trying to make ourselves safer from danger we should be spending our money on the things that actually kill huge numbers of people. Why is terrorism different, because there's ideology attached? Then our motive isn't preventing death. It's waving the flag.