Posted on 02/23/2002 12:55:07 AM PST by JohnHuang2
A little doubt is a good thing. There is nothing worse than a person who is "often wrong, but never in doubt." We all have these people in our lives and know how frustrating they can be. Those of us who care about others as well as our own reputations are wise to use a little humility to get through our days, because one cannot always be right.
Except when one is talking about the inability of the federal government to protect us against terrorists.
If one dares to contest claims that the feds are "on the case" and we should all get back to our normal lives, one is exhibiting good common sense and is on firm ground when he shouts, "nonsense!" Of course, this cranky position is unpopular in many quarters because as we all know, you cannot make a dollar if everyone is hiding inside their houses.
Now get out there and buy something, stupid!
The primary business of America is business, if recent accounts of resistance by American and Canadian businessmen to enhanced border security is any measure. Human life seems to come in a distant second place. Heaven forbid that any of us receive our gimcracks and gadgets a day or two late because some Teamster driving a truck had to wait in a long line a couple of extra hours to cross any one of our Mickey Mouse border checkpoints.
Commerce aside, we would not want to interrupt any plans that your average Middle Easterner has for driving down to Southern California for a nice cozy family reunion. Since we don't profile anybody lest we offend and drift into the dreaded land of political correctness, there should not be much delay for them. We don't want to put anybody out. On the way back to Canada (unless he stops to blow up a busload of people) perhaps our welcome visitor can conduct a video surveillance of a nuclear power plant to pinpoint weaknesses.
Evidence of this U.S. Border Patrol nightmare can be found in the latest Government Accounting Office report that says that our borders are still a sieve, especially the Canadian border.
Terrorists can pour across our borders at will, apparently, and the federal government – long before Sept. 11 – had known this. Yet nothing substantial has been done about it. The Canadian border is especially troublesome because of documented evidence of several well-known terrorists who were easily able to establish residence in Canada, then waltz over the border to implement their deadly tricks.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the terrorists who were thankfully arrested by the FBI before they could light their fuses were set to blow up the Los Angeles International Airport, New York City's subway system and the Holland Tunnel. Or was it the Lincoln Tunnel? Hey, what's a tunnel or two when you consider the commerce that could have been interrupted by pesky and nosy U.S. Border Patrol agents poking under every other canvas cover?
Now I know there are those who are going to say, "Aldrich, don't you ever stop? We have our guy in the White House right now! Become a cheerleader, for Pete's sake!"
Yes, I prefer George W. Bush to Bill Clinton or Al Gore any day of the week. But I have also learned a few things about politics in this town. The lobbyists, who pound on the heads of every elected official night and day, are not lobbyists for the human race. They are sent here to make sure the "wheels of government" turn smoothly. They are here to engage in commerce. They are not security experts, and clearly they don't understand what their incessant pressure is doing to our nation's security. What's more, I'm not sure there's evidence that even if they knew, they would care.
It's people like you and me who are lobbyists for our nation's security and the human race. We don't get paid to do it, and we have no large sums of money to hand out to promote our cause. All we can do is offer good advice, based on common sense and experience (not to mention very recent history) to the people we have elected and hope and pray that they put a higher value on a single human life – especially an American life – when they decide how many new federal agents they will send to patrol the borders. Sending them right now would be a grand idea.
I won't apologize for being a contrarian. And, I'm willing to get my new Lava Lamp a couple of days late if it means we won't have to go through another 9-11. How about you?
He's correct
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[Excerpt] Whether Almarabh may actually have been employed as a truck driver is unknown, and investigators have refused to say whether they have found records of him transporting hazardous material as a driver. Last July he was found hiding in the back of a truck that was attempting to enter the United States from Canada at Niagara Falls, Ontario.
The Canadian passport and immigration card he had in his possession was fraudulent, and Almarabh was detained by Canadian authorities. No alarms were raised at the Canadian border that Almarabh's name had come up in the US Customs investigation, and US investigators were not alerted to his having been detained.
Instead, he was held for a preliminary hearing on the fraud charges. Although Canadian officials feared Almarabh would not show up for any future hearings, they relented on the pledge from Almarabh's lawyer that he would be staying with his uncle, a Muslim cleric who supervised a religious school in Toronto. The uncle posted $7,500 bail for Almarabh's release.
No mention was made at the hearing that the uncle, Ahmed Shehab, shared control of the school with Mahmoud Jaballah, a man Canadian authorities had long suspected to be associated with an Egyptian terrorist group. When Jaballah was arrested in Toronto last August for being in Canada with forged immigration papers, documents filed in court by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service stated that he was a member of the extremist group Al Jihad, and had supported and ''will engage in terrorism.''
Almarabh's hearing last summer in Canada was not the first time that Canadian immigration authorities had dealt with him. In mid-1995, he was detained by Canadian officials for being in the country without a proper visa or citizenship papers. He told officials at the time that while he was born in Kuwait and had been living in recent years in the United States, he was ''stateless.'' His petition for citizenship was denied, and he returned to Boston and his life as a cabdriver.
Within months, he met and married Van Thi Huynh, a Vietnamese-American 12 years older than him, who was living in Dorchester at the time with her adolescent son. US immigration officials questioned whether the marriage was simply arranged by the couple to provide Almarabh legal status to remain in the country, and Almarabh faces a hearing before the Office of Immigration Review if and when he resolves the questions about his alleged involvement with Hijazi and Al Qaeda.
The concerns by Canadian officials last summer that he would not show up to defend himself against charges of possessing fradulent immigration documents turned out to be warranted. Almarabh slipped back into the United States in July. Source
no one really has looked to where the blame properly rests for 9.11--the airline ceo's that did away with security on planes.
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