Adam's Apple
Senior Member
- Apr 25, 2004
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The Lessons of Toronto and Domestic Intelligence
By Richard A. Posner, The Chicago Tribune
June 8, 2006
There may be stronger objections to creating a domestic intelligence agency, though I doubt it, but it is high time these objections were addressed in a comprehensive feasibility study--just the sort of thing that one might have expected our Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence bureaucracy created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004--to conduct. It has not done so.
The Toronto arrests should be a wake-up call to Americans. We knew from the London transit bombings of last summer that a nation's citizens can be recruited for terrorism, but we were reassured by the fact that England like other European countries has a large, poorly integrated, radicalized Muslim minority, surely unlike the Muslim minorities in Canada or the United States.
We have to rethink this comfortable assumption, at least insofar as Canada is concerned. Canada has approximately 600,000 Muslims, most of whom (like most other Canadians) live very close to Canada's largely unguarded 4,000--mile border with us. The United States has an estimated 2 million Muslims.
The vast majority of North American Muslims are loyal; and even among those who hate our governments and way of life only a tiny minority would ever turn terrorist. But that tiny minority could do immense damage, against which our best protection is a well-designed system of domestic intelligence--something we do not have.
for full article:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0606080015jun08,0,1709468.story?col...
By Richard A. Posner, The Chicago Tribune
June 8, 2006
There may be stronger objections to creating a domestic intelligence agency, though I doubt it, but it is high time these objections were addressed in a comprehensive feasibility study--just the sort of thing that one might have expected our Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the intelligence bureaucracy created by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004--to conduct. It has not done so.
The Toronto arrests should be a wake-up call to Americans. We knew from the London transit bombings of last summer that a nation's citizens can be recruited for terrorism, but we were reassured by the fact that England like other European countries has a large, poorly integrated, radicalized Muslim minority, surely unlike the Muslim minorities in Canada or the United States.
We have to rethink this comfortable assumption, at least insofar as Canada is concerned. Canada has approximately 600,000 Muslims, most of whom (like most other Canadians) live very close to Canada's largely unguarded 4,000--mile border with us. The United States has an estimated 2 million Muslims.
The vast majority of North American Muslims are loyal; and even among those who hate our governments and way of life only a tiny minority would ever turn terrorist. But that tiny minority could do immense damage, against which our best protection is a well-designed system of domestic intelligence--something we do not have.
for full article:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0606080015jun08,0,1709468.story?col...
