He was a drug informer that was released from parole by (maybe) the D.E.A. in order to help with the “war” on drugs in Pakistan. Unfortunately, he was also a radical Islamist who helped coordinate several terror attacks, including a big one in Mumbai. Whoops! Our bad, India. Boy, is our face red!
But, really, how could we have known? Oh, that’s right, three of his ex-wives/girlfriends warned us that he was becoming radicalized (is that like a bee that becomes Africanized? Or a metal that is galvanized?). But, they were just women scorned, so easily ignored.
To me, this raises three questions (at least):
Which war is more important? I think most people would go with terror, but the government seems to go with drugs. (My view is that both should be treated like crimes, not wars)
What’s the point of giving up our civil liberties so the government can have all of this extra info? My view is that the problem is too much information, and we’ve seen many examples where the government had information in hand but ignored or overlooked it (see also the underwear bomber, whose father had been warning the US that he was becoming galvanized, uh, radicalized).
Was there some subtle sexism in play in this case? I think yes. If this had been a radical Islamist woman whose exes were warning about radicalism, the government agencies would have paid more attention.
This happened during the Bush administration, but so what? The Obama administration has been just as bad or nearly as bad with expanded executive branch powers. And, sure, there’s an overwhelming amount of information coming in, but the technology will catch up, and then the apparatus will be in place for really serious civil liberty intrusions. If not the Obama administration, it will be the 2016 Palin administration or the 2024 Chelsea Clinton administration.
The ‘war’ on terror and ‘war’ on drugs is complete political b.s. If people were really serious about ‘freedom’ then we would be better off doing something like this:
a) legalize, regulate and tax drugs based on actual scientific data and research such as this:
b) get our troops out of afganistan and iraq and persecute/prosecute terrorists as criminals. we’re half-way there, we already consider them ‘illegal-combatants’ - what the hell does that mean anyway… a criminal?
c) spend our ‘war’ resources on the following:
—Education
—Re-hab
—Prosecution of terrorists
—Securing our borders
It doesn’t mean anything; that’s the point. If we called them criminals or POWs then they’d have specific legal rights; we called them a made up term like “illegal-combatants” in order to pretend they had no rights so we could feel self-righteous about torturing and murdering them.
In the case of terrorists, I think it is more like their hearts are becoming vulcanized.
Anyway, I agree with the last poster where drugs are concerned. Legalize them (or some of them- while that study shows alcohol to be the most dangerous drug overall, I am skeptical of legalizing anything that can cause a person to drop dead on the spot), tax them, do more education and rehabilitation.
I agree about treating terrorism more as a crime than an excuse for multi-trillion dollar unilateral military action. Look at out budget! It is ridiculous that our military budget is as large as it is, and the problem is only compounded by the war on terror. No, I don’t advocate letting terrorists off the hook, I just think we ought to ask ourselves if terrorists can be brought to justice without invading the country of 25 million people that surrounds those terrorists.
Let’s go back and look at why our military budget metastasized the way it did. In part one of the video The Power of Nightmares, they claim that the neo-conservatives wanted to create some Myth of America for its citizens to believe in in the aftermath of the failure of liberal reforms of the '60s and '70s. This part of the story starts at about 19:50. They explain how Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Cheney et al fed bald-faced lies to the CIA under the Ford administration (at 26:00, 28:45-team B at the CIA) to inspire a HUGE military buildup against what was in fact an imaginary enemy. This buildup never went away, as you can see in the pie chart I posted above. And now we are turning this military against threats that can’t hold a candle even to the former USSR, and it is screwing us financially.
At least that is one take. I am curious what others think of the reliability of this information.