Security Efforts Turning Capital Into Armed Camp

[_Jumper_]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/22/politics/22DIST.html?pagewanted=1&hp


<WASHINGTON, Feb. 21 — An antiaircraft missile, ready for use, sits atop a federal office building near the White House. Devices that test the air for chemical and biological substances are positioned throughout the city. Subway stations are now equipped with "bomb containment" trash bins. A major highway that runs by the Pentagon is being rerouted several hundred yards away. A security wall is going up around the Washington Monument.

Day by day, the nation's capital is becoming a fortress, turning a city known for graceful beauty into a virtual armed camp. In response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal security agents along with their counterparts in the Washington, Maryland and Virginia governments began a huge effort to build permanent safeguards for the capital area's most important buildings and monuments.

The effort that built slowly after the 1995 bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City intensified after one jetliner slammed into the Pentagon and another jet crashed in Pennsylvania, presumably on its way to a target in Washington.

But more recently, security efforts have gained a new urgency as officials seek ways to stop truck bombs and other terrorist tactics that have been used in other countries, like suicide bombers. >

[RC]

1. Just think how much safer the world will be

when we get these war criminals out of our white House and into Leavenworth where they belong.

[_Jumper_]

2. Amen

n/t

[grasswire]

3. very sad

I'll never visit Washington again. The likelihood of removing these measures is slim to none, even with a Dem president in the White House. It was such a beautiful representation of a free land. I couldn't bear to see it now.

[Columbia]

4. You should see what you have to do to see the LIberty Bell in Philly.

Talk about irony...

[Media_Lies_Daily]

5. Reminds me of pictures of WWII Berlin...

...oddly appropriate comparison considering the political beliefs of the NeoCons.

[Arianrhod]

6. This is the landscape of fear. n/t