SteveS said;
Jeff, I tend to agree with you, but could you give more on:
Quote:
Just what we're doing. Fight them on their turf not ours, and keep a good watch on their communities in this country and in the prisons where they are recruiting to stop these events before they happen. It's the only possible solution.
Israel has done this, and just like having armed citizens hasn't stopped the attacks, this approach hasn't either. Simply fighting them on their turf doesn't prevent others from coming here, nor would it stop the ones already here. Watching them helps, and I am not suggesting that we don't aggressively pursue them abroad, but I guess I don't fully understand your position.
What more can a free society do? How many more rights and freedoms are you willing to give up? The situation here isn't all that similar to the situation in Israel. The Palestinian leadership has done everything in their power to keep their people living in abject poverty which gives them an almost unlimited number of young, disaffected, angry people who have little hope to sacrifice as pawns to accomplish their political goals.
Those conditions don't exist in the US. The poorest Americans live in conditions that most of the Palestinians would consider luxurious. So the fanatical fighters that it would take to mount such an attack here would have to be either brought in from the Middle East and kept under constant watch by their controllers, lest they be corrupted by the Great Satan that is our society, or they would have to be recruited and trained from the Muslim population here, which while not impossible, would be difficult because most Muslims living in the US enjoy a fairly high standard of living. Converts living here probably are the best bet to recruit from as converts to any cause tend to be easy to radicalize. We just don't have the disaffected population that they can draw from. The groups they do have to draw from are small and easy to keep an eye on. Bringing in a large enough force to pull off an attack like that and hiding all of their preparations wouldn't be an easy thing.
F4GIB said;
OK.
When, not if,
(1)they come here because we've controlled them overseas,
(2)they get to the school because CIA/FBI/State intelligence has failed,
(3)they have all their tools of war because Customs missed that particular container, and
(4) their truck starts, they don't blow any traffic lights, etc., so
(5) their platoon of terrorists DOES ARRIVE at the school,
NOW, assume you are the Illinois Commissioner of Public Safety, what is your perfect plan to deal with the situation?
First off, I do not possess the financial resources to buy a high position in Illinois State government. So even if there were a commissioner of public safety, I could never hold the job, because in Illinois you get to positions like that because:
A. You bought the position for yourself with cash donations to the party. (There are no campaign finance laws in Illinois)
B. You have done the appointing official a seriously large political favor and the official owes you or your political sponsor.
So F4GIB, just for the sake of argument, let's say you opened up your checkbook and sent me say, $120 K to buy the position with here is what I would do:
DISCLAIMER: This plan is based on what might be actually possible based on the current political and fiscal limitations that we face. It does not include pie in the sky proposals that have no chance of being implemented either because they are too costly or because the political climate would never allow them. That doesn't mean I personally am against other perfect world proposals, it just means that I acknowledge that we don't now live and most likely never will live in a perfect world. I prefer to live in the real world and to base this discussion on what's actually achievable.
1. I would move funding from things like studies on the impact of community based policing in rural areas into intelligence units and add liaison officers into the headquarters of the various federal agencies charged with gathering intelligence.
2. I would secure the funding to put a mobile data computer in every squad car in the state. I would have a computer network created where every sworn officer, if he/she didn't work out of a squad car, they would still have daily access to the network.
3. The state police intelligence center would put out a daily email intelligence update to every officer in the state.
4. I would propose and push for the passage of legislation that would require every school district in the state to hire a full time security director. The security director would have to have a military combat arms or intelligence background or extensive law enforcement experience and be able to pass a background check equivalent to a US Government SECRET clearance. The security director would have a voice equal to that of the district superintendent and the power to amend or veto construction plans or activity plans for security reasons. The security director would be on the distribution for the daily intelligence updates.
The security directors in each school district would have a statutory requirement to complete an annual risk assessment. School Boards would be mandated to fund physical security measures before they funded anything else. The school security plan would be tested annually. The district would have 30 days to correct any deficiencies identified in the exercise or would lose accreditation.
5. I would propose and push for the passage of legislation permitting any school staff member who was interested to take the 40 hour mandatory firearms training portion of the basic law enforcement certification and permit them to carry a weapon on school property. (CCW would be nice, but it's not politically possible in the foreseeable future. This is a state that just voted to deny parole officers the right to carry their issued weapons off duty.)
6. I would propose and push for the passage of legislation requiring school districts to conduct 40 hours of in service training per year for all staff members on response to a terrorist attack. No staff or faculty member would be permitted to work while students are in the building until they had completed that requirement.
That's the plan. That's about all we can do.
It can't be to do nothing because "nothing will work." Surely you don't believe this bit of defeatism: "To put it simply, we can't put this fire out if it starts."
It's not defeatism. It's a fact. Once the truck or bus load of terrorists is unloading on the school grounds, the game is over. The best we can do is try to get as many people out as possible before they seize control. We aren't going to fortify our schools and man them with dedicated security forces capable of stopping the attack cold. We don't have the political will nor do we have the resources to do that. Schools are soft targets. There are too many of them to make them hard targets. We need to fight this threat by doing all we can to prevent it and whatever we can to minimize the damage if we fail to prevent it. During the cold war it was readily apparent that we couldn't defend every possible nuclear target. So we adopted a policy of Mutual Assured Destruction. MAD isn't likely to work against our current enemy. But we're in the same position now. There are simply too many schools to harden and too few security forces to protect them all.
The American way of war is to fight it on the enemy's home turf. We need to continue to do that.
Jeff
