On Friday, September 14, 2001, at 08:53 AM, Howie Goodell wrote:
The U.S. and its citizens have just suffered the Pearl Harbor of post-national conflicts.
We are not "post-national." The "end of history" forecast by Fukuyama has not happened.
America is frequently accused of being a global policeman; now is the time to do it well.
I can't speak for _you_, but *I* am not supporting "global copdom." Don't volunteer my money, please. Join the Foreign Legion if you want to fight in Sudan.
This jihad also needs single-mindedness. We are after terrorism, not ethnicity; we will cooperate with all governments and groups who can help us, and spare none who oppose us in this. The stakes are too high to play favorites.
Shred the Constitution! Arrest those who speak out against this American Jihad!
into account, but that world changed September 11. Security must be a major design goal of many features of our society: airplanes and airports, subways, stadiums, water supplies, product packaging, personal identification. The vulnerabilities of existing systems need painstaking analysis. Some upgrades will be expensive, in many ways. Creative engineering and thorough debate of the options are essential to keep the costs bearable and our brave new terrorist-resistant world livable.
Fatuous nonsense. Those who choose to live or work near "soft targets" should deal with the consequences, not those of us who understood the nature of soft targets many years ago and took steps to distance ourselves. (Paying to "harden" football stadiums is a lot like paying to help people rebuild houses on beaches.)
One example: the IDs for airplane crews, and eventually everyone who travels or goes near an airliner, could be "smart cards" containing their owners' biometric identifiers -- like fingerprints, voice, picture, and retinal scan -- cryptographically signed by the agency that collected them.
You are not a friend of ours. This is such a leap into the Surveillance State Void that I am speechless that any member of our list, even Choate or Farr, could advocate it.
Maybe after this horror we should take the cause that undoubtedly drove these suicide bombers and make it disappear: we should lose our patience with that little piss-ant real estate disagreement in the Middle East. Give the Israelis and Palestinians a month to agree on a map, or we'll do it for them. Then we add a 10-mile-wide corridor in the middle, let the Army Corps of Engineers give it a year of loving care, and announce we will blow away anything that moves in it for the next few decades. Note the glassy pellets strewn along the middle: their radioactivity is intense but short-lived. 30 years from now you might survive a crossing. Jerusalem belongs to the U.N. now. All rise!
You are dangerous to the cause of liberty. It is not *my* business as a free citizen of these united states to tell the Arabs and Zionists where there border must be and then to enforce it. Reread what George Washington said 200 years ago about foreign entanglements. Reread the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. It's scary that so many people like you are out there, screaming for intervention and crackdowns on liberty. --Tim May