Reply #40: Considering the fact that our Intelligence Services operate in EVERY major city of every nation

[bertman]

on the planet. Considering the fact that these are the folks who can spot a pimple on a camel's ass in Azerbaijan via satellite technology. Considering the fact that it is the SOLE function of these people to protect us from terrorists who, by the way, have been known on MULTIPLE occasions to board aircraft bound for the U.S. of A. from foreign airports. Considering that they seem to have adopted the "we'll deal with every different situation AFTER it has occurred instead of preemptively working with our allies from the gitgo" method of security. Considering all of this, I no longer believe that these "incidents" are due to the infinite creativity of Nigerian lost youth or the stealthy skills of would-be bombers like Richard Reid.

They are due to the well-planned and well-executed efforts of our intelligence community to ignore procedures that at least one other nation has successfully used for decades--our ally, Israel.

How long would the American taxpayers willingly give boxcar loads of money to intelligence agencies if there were not some "terrorists" who hated our freedoms?

Does anyone remember what happened to the "Peace Dividend" we were about to reap after the Soviet Union dissolved and became a global non-threat to us? It lasted until President George Herbert Walker Bush decided that we needed another major threat to deal with so he invaded Iraq in Operation Desert Storm. We Americans were actually asking our President to reduce the money that we spent on national "defense" before that great threat to America arose in the Middle East. Of course, after we discovered that the tyrannical dictator Saddam Hussein had a million man army and twenty Russian Panzer divisions that were massing on the U.S. border for an imminent attack, we all rallied and opened our pocketbooks to the thieves at Langley and the Pentagon. And the White House.