BY: Steve Chapman| Washington Examiner| May 25th, 2014 | [Original Article]
...Comey is upholding the tradition that
once the government identifies an evil, the evil never goes away — it
only gets bigger and tougher, requiring ever-increasing efforts to
combat it. The Department of Energy was created during the "energy
crisis" of the 1970s. The crisis didn't last, but the department did.
The same pattern holds here. In the decade after Sept. 11,
the number of terrorist episodes in this country averaged 17 a year,
compared to 41 a year in the 1990s. Nor is al-Qaida gaining ground.
Since 9/11, reports the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism
and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, it has carried
out no attacks in the U.S.
But progress is never taken as progress. It's always interpreted as the calm before the storm.
When Comey arrived, nerves were raw from the Boston Marathon bombing,
which sparked fears of a wave of domestic attacks. Since then, there
has not been a single death from homegrown terrorism in the U.S. In the
following 12 months, the number of Muslim-Americans arrested on
terrorism charges was 15, below the annual average of 20.
"Almost all of these arrests were for attempting to join a foreign
terrorist organization abroad, not for planning attacks in the homeland,
and were motivated by sympathies with rebels in Syria and elsewhere
rather than by al-Qaida's call for Muslims to attack the West," wrote
David Schanzer of Duke University and Charles Kurzman of the University
of North Carolina Chapel Hill in The News and Observer of Raleigh.
None of this matters to Comey or his
associates in the federal government, which has an unbreakable addiction
to dire forecasts. When it comes to national security, they see every
silver lining as attached not just to a cloud, but to a skyful of black
thunderheads. Read Full Article
No comments:
Post a Comment