On the London Car-Bomb Plot
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Here's everything you need to know about the London dual car-bomb attempt:
The War on Terror utterly failed to prevent it.
The plot was foiled, not by warrantless wiretapping, not by Guantanamo, not by Britain's Big Brother panopticon system, not by seizing laptops at border crossings, not by liquids bans on airplanes, not by random suspicionless searches on subways...
...but by an ambulance crew and a tow truck driver just doing their jobs.
Meanwhile, unless we are going to start banning the sale or use of gasoline, propane and nails (not to mention cars), anyone will be able to create similar devices. It is unpreventable.
So the question becomes: Do we step back from the brink and recognize that the price we have paid in terms of our civil liberties (and our common sense) has bought us little or nothing? Or do we blindly sink even deeper into the swamp of anti-terror totalitarianism, convincing ourselves that if we restrict ourselves just a little bit more, ban just one more dangerous thing, watch (or "detain") just more category of people, curtail just one more civil liberty, then the terrorists will all be defeated and it will all have been worth it?
The goal is not and cannot be to prevent every bad act at any cost. The goal must be to determine the optimal balance of safety and liberty. And we are nowhere near that optimal balance today.
The plot was foiled, not by warrantless wiretapping, not by Guantanamo, not by Britain's Big Brother panopticon system, not by seizing laptops at border crossings, not by liquids bans on airplanes, not by random suspicionless searches on subways...
...but by an ambulance crew and a tow truck driver just doing their jobs.
Meanwhile, unless we are going to start banning the sale or use of gasoline, propane and nails (not to mention cars), anyone will be able to create similar devices. It is unpreventable.
So the question becomes: Do we step back from the brink and recognize that the price we have paid in terms of our civil liberties (and our common sense) has bought us little or nothing? Or do we blindly sink even deeper into the swamp of anti-terror totalitarianism, convincing ourselves that if we restrict ourselves just a little bit more, ban just one more dangerous thing, watch (or "detain") just more category of people, curtail just one more civil liberty, then the terrorists will all be defeated and it will all have been worth it?
The goal is not and cannot be to prevent every bad act at any cost. The goal must be to determine the optimal balance of safety and liberty. And we are nowhere near that optimal balance today.
Posted by Kip on
29 June 2007
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