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February 04, 2010

How's That Counter-Terror Debate Working Out?
Posted by David Shorr

God bless our own Adam Blickstein, who is on the case, right on the ball. He's there at every turn, exposing the deceit, hysteria and all-around ridiculousness of the opposition's fear-mongering. Adam and others have built up an overwhelming arsenal of facts about how effectively the justice system handles terrorists -- not only in prosecuting but in collecting actionable intel-- and examples showing the Bush Administration didn't even do what's being asked for. Boy,the voices of reason are mopping the floor with theoe shameless and dishonest manipulators.

Wait, revealing the facts hasn't sent the fear pushers running for the hills? What's going on here? In all seriousness, doesn't this debate have a weird through-the-looking glass feel to it? What's the way back to a right-side-up world?

Maybe part of it is to pull back from the trees of the facts to see the forest of the overall deception. I don't think the idea of politicizing national security really captures the bald mendacity at work here. These arguments are vapor. There's nothing to them. They're wild fantasy, being pulled out of conservatives' -- I mean pulled out of the air. (Of course, it would help if these points weren't given the media space so that they look simply like one side of an honest disagreement.)

I like to read foreign policy books. I particularly like to read foreign policy books by journalists. One of my favorites is Ron Suskind's One Percent Doctrine, which might point toward the answer here. The main theme of the book is to draw a contrast between the day-to-day work of hunting down terrorists and the maniacal do-what-looks-and-feels-the-toughest crusade of Vice President Cheney and the cabal.

I know we can't all be Stephen Colbert, but we could at least take inspiration from his send-up of conservatives outrage over Obama's failure to say "win" in his Afghanistan speech. Perhaps more than any other issue, the law enforcement v. war debate is a battle between reality-based seriousness and utter unseriousness.

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Comments

Yeah this is very well given information.I would like to share that on this mater Obama said the federal system for tracking potential terrorism suspects will be reviewed because the latest incident showed it had possible failings....

Hi,
Lord West is co-ordinating the work that is being done to see what measures can be taken to improve security in all these areas, and we will continue to update our counter-terrorism strategy in the light of all the new information we have.

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