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December 18, 2006

Fear Everyone!

We can no longer afford to be afraid only of Arab Muslims. Now we have to be afraid of everybody. Al Quada has just completed the year-long training of a 12-man team of westerners in Afghanistan in preparation for future terrorist attacks on their home countries. They include two Norwegians, one Australian and nine Britons and they have been prepared to act as underground recruiters and organizers back home. And some, if not all, may have succeeded in traveling from home, through Pakistan and into Afghanistan without ever leaving any official trace – in other words, there is no evidence they ever left their home countries.

Britain cannot possibly watch all the people it knows are traveling back and forth to Pakistan each year, where terrorist connections are being made, let alone those it does not know left the country. This is a problem for the U.S.:

One particular worry is that under current practice, British visitors to the States are not required to apply in advance for temporary visas, which are routinely granted to any British passport holder who is not on a watch list. In other words, the door is wide open for Britain's growing ranks of young jihadists, even those who have attended Qaeda training camps, if they are unknown to intelligence agencies.

This is certainly a serious matter, and one which I hope will actually be the focus of all that wiretapping, library use-checking, email-reading, and other intrusive attention being doled out by federal anti-terrorism officials. That is, if they can squeeze some time to track real terrorists into their busy schedules.

Maybe it is finally time to accept the need to screen Grandma at the airport. You just can't know for certain whether she was secretly trained by al Quaida or perhaps even recruited to serve as a suicide bomber. Speaking of which, perhaps we should also screen all persons seeking to enter crowded areas. And to really be safe, everyone should just stay home as much as possible, watch sporting events on television, wait until the PlayStation 3 is available by mail-order, telecommute, and get one of those handy home-delivery services for groceries. Otherwise, not only are you risking becoming a victim of a terrorist attack, but you are also behaving suspiciously like a would-be terrorist.

Remember, people. We must all be very afraid.

Posted by Becky at December 18, 2006 09:52 AM