The Fanatic Fourteen

New York Times reports:

"Citizens of Cuba, Iran, Sudan and Syria, countries that are considered “state sponsors of terrorism,” as well as those of “countries of interest” — including Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen — will face the special scrutiny, officials said.

Passengers holding passports from those nations, or taking flights that originated or passed through any of them, will be required to undergo full-body pat downs and will face extra scrutiny of their carry-on bags before they can board planes to the United States."

Now my 2 cents:

I must say I expected better from the Obama administration. In a show of stubbornness, we are refusing to learn from our own mistakes - especially the mistakes that were made in foreign policies - and therefore we are bound to repeat them. One could almost imagine the brain-storming sessions in one of the NSC meetings in the aftermath of the failed airplane bombing on the Christmas day.

"Mr. President, the American people want to see some action taken by this administration. Shall we bomb Iraq or Afghanistan?".

"Nah, I am for a change. Remember my campaign promise? Let's not try to bomb the same 'communication building' in Baghdad that we bombed over and over again during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I need something that caters to liberals yet calms the public down. And don't give me that 'color coded security alert system' BS again, shall we?"

"A list...", murmurs someone from the dark corner of the table, "Give the American people a list. After all they like lists. From high-tech IT personnel programming the next big software application to soccer moms pushing shopping carts in a grocery store, we like 'lists'."

"Okay. A list of what?", Mr. President leans forward, now interested.

"I get it... A list of countries!", the secretary of state jumps in. "I once kept a list of planets I wanted to send that Lewinsky girl to!"

"Alright. I want names of the countries we want on the list.", Mr. President leans over a blank piece of paper, "And don't try spelling out the names of those countries like you did for Bush. It's time for a change. Would be nice if you could name the capitals, their current head of state and a good book to read on each though."

"Nigeria!", every one shouted in chorus.

"Good work, everyone. You all have done your homework and watched CNN last night, haven't you?" Then Obama murmurs to himself, "Welcome to the club, Nigeria...".

The rest of the countries' name needed no introduction and everyone repeated those names almost in unison.

"The easiest NSC meeting I could ever imagine", thought Obama as he sprung out of his chair and announced, "This is good! I have something to tell the American people. Good work folks!"

Of course, we don't know what transpired in such meetings but we all can see the outcome, can't we? Here we go again down the beaten path of paranoia with the same old mantra: "You are either with us (not in the list) or against us (in the list)."

A real change in our foreign policy and the way we run our government would be to abandon these "knee jerk" reactions that have gotten us absolutely no where.

One major problem with the list we see in the news is that it will also be available to Al-Qaeda. And you don't have to be a world class chess player to figure out their next move. See, Al-Qaeda operatives have all the time in the world when it comes to carrying out a suicide mission. Do you think a terrorist won't break his journey to enjoy the local pubs in a country not on the list, then purchase a brand new ticket - and maybe even a new passport to go with it - and will then waltz right through the security holes as big as our discriminating egos?

Meanwhile, we are busy strip searching everyone from these "Fanatic Fourteen" countries. The odds of catching the next terrorist in this manner are slim to none. A terrorist will have to be living in a cave during the past month to fall for this trap. Although, I am not too sure if those living in caves in Afghanistan are completely cutoff from the news and even the Internet. So, forget it!

This latest dropping of the proverbial ball exposes for all to see one glaring mistake that we have been repeating despite a supposedly complete overhaul of our intelligence agencies post 9/11: The fact that we had the pieces of information sufficient to stop an attack yet we couldn't. Sounds familiar? Recall that we said the same thing after 9/11. We discovered that various tell tale signs of an impending hijacking were there. A person of interest (Al-Hazami) was being tracked. He ultimately entered the United States under the radar and was one of the 9/11 hijackers. Various intelligence reports of suspicious enrolling of would-be hijackers into the flying schools existed but never followed up on. Even though some of it is hindsight but the pieces of information do strongly suggest that we should have been able to stop the 9/11 plot in its tracks, yet we could not collaborate among our various bureaucracies. These bureaucracies exist to date.

Instead of unnecessarily (and 'unnecessarily' is the keyword here because if you can establish that it is absolutely essential that we strip search a person of interest then we must and do screen that passenger) screening passengers en mass at the countries level - effectively profiling Muslim countries - if we fix the way we process the pieces of information we readily have, I believe we can achieve air-tight security without having to seal all airports and frisk anything that moves!

Peace.

-- ARK