- The Washington Times - Friday, September 21, 2001

Americans need a release for the anger and frustration they feel over the destruction of the Pentagon and

Lower Manhattan, causing twice the casualties of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Columnist Charles Krauthammer is ready to declare war on Afghanistan, while politicians move to scapegoat CIA Director George Tenet.

Such courses of action are not realistic responses to our predicament. The Soviet army could do nothing with the Afghans despite their common border and a brutal effort to subdue the country. How can the United States succeed when it is half a world away from that burial ground of invading armies?

Mr. Tenet is not responsible for the failure of U.S. intelligence. The Democratic Party took the James Bond out of the CIA a quarter-century ago. It was the Clinton administration and U.S. corporations that sold military communications equipment that cannot be monitored to the terrorists, making the National Security Agency deaf to terrorist plans.

And it was the U.S. government that ignored recent warnings from both Israeli and Russian intelligence and assumed there would be no consequences at home of our continual bombing of Iraq and support for Israel.

The United States continues to miscalculate. Indeed, Americans might be so politically correct and racially sensitive as to be unable to deal with the problem at all. According to news reports, the Federal Aviation Administration and airport authorities have given assurances that racial profiling will play no role in beefing up security against an obvious enemy.

Officials at San Jose International Airport, for example, sincerely believe they are giving the country assurances by announcing on Sept. 14 that "our security measures have been and will be the same for any human being."

What a waste of resources in a war against terrorism. Dr. James Smith, a physician from Dothan, Ala., is going to be given the same scrutiny as Mohamed Atta and Marwan Ashehri. Can you imagine any greater nonsense than this?

Bill Schrempf, CEO of NCCI Holdings in Boca Raton, Fla., believes he is reassuring American multicultural sensitivities when he ordered his 850 employees to remove all U.S. flags from display in their offices because displays of patriotism might be seen as a "divisive statement" that gives offense.

CNN reported the multicultural sensitivities of the New York jurors who refused to give the death penalty to Mohamed Al Owhali for bombing the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, killing 213 people on Aug. 7, 1998. The jurors were influenced by the view that "al Owhali was motivated by sincere religious beliefs, including the view that his offenses would save other Muslims, and was influenced by Osama bin Laden who viewed embassies as legitimate military targets."

Mr. Tenet may be canned, but not the Commerce Department officials who enabled terrorists to make their communications impenetrable by the National Security Agency?

What is the point of the FBI's "Carnivore" e-mail snooping program, as the terrorists already have our eavesdrop-proof technology? It will be American civil liberties, not terrorists, that suffer.

If this is the kind of thinking that governs our response, we are going to lose the war on terrorism.

Americans are looking abroad when they should be looking at home. Bin Laden has terrorist organizations in 34 countries. Striking at him in Afghanistan is unlikely to be decisive.

And Bin Laden is only one terrorist leader. There are many Islamic terrorist organizations. As terrorist expert Steven Emerson told Congress last year, the United States and Canada are havens of choice for all of them.

Conflicting reports on TV news tell us that the suicide hijackers Atta and Ashehri were citizens of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. But a Sept. 15 news report on WorldNet Daily says both were Arab-Americans.

If the news report is correct about their nationality, it was the double failure of U.S. immigration policy that allowed Atta to fly a jetliner into the World Trade Center. Not only was he living in the United States, our government refused his extradition to Israel where he was wanted for a series of bus bombings.

If Atta was indeed a naturalized U.S. citizen, we are facing a generalized intelligence failure that goes far beyond the CIA. There are millions of Muslims in the United States. According to terrorism experts, the large Muslim population base has allowed fanatical terrorists to integrate themselves in our society. Looking abroad to Afghanistan and Iraq is looking in the wrong direction.

One or two more days like Sept. 11 and even diehard proponents of open borders will realize that their immigration policy is deadly to Americans. The Democratic Party will understand that it endangered the country with its policy of trying to build a voting bloc of Third World immigrants. Republicans will have to come to terms with their timidity and failure to protect the American persona from "multicultural diversity."

If Sept. 11 was not the terrorists last hurrah but the beginning of a deadly assault on the United States, we will have to do more than racially profile the deadly Fifth Columns that a suicidal immigration policy created in our homeland. We will have to do something, also, about the left-wing multicultural diversity-mongers who assault Americans every day in university classrooms and on the op-ed pages of the New York Times.

Once Americans begin dying in droves, we will remember that treason is real and deadly.

Sign up for Daily Newsletters

Manage Newsletters


Please read our comment policy before commenting.


Click to Read More and View Comments

Click to Hide