Re: CIA Confirms: Waterboarding 9/11 Mastermind Led to Info that Aborted 9/11-Style A
Nothing is a 100% guarantee; but it continues to BEG the question, the alternative is to do what? Nothing?
I am always amused how people can conveniently forget our mindsets right after the 9-11 attacks. But I am stunned how they can pretend that it never occurred or will never be repeated perhaps with even more devastation.
Denial can do that to people.
And you assume I have denial about how we felt after the 9/11 attacks....why?
I have no issues with a large ramp up immediately after a devastating thing to be sure such doesn't snowball. However, it needs to be reduced back to a reasonable level in due order shortly after.
You get mugged and have a knife put to your throat during it. After that point you get extremely paranoid. You get a massive home alarm system for your house that you've got set to go off at the slightest thing, you go out and register a BIG handgun and start carrying, you don't lave the house except during the day and even then its extremely rarely. All of these are reasonable reactions to having such a horrible event take place as you're not wanting it to repeat itself, especially that soon. You do all this in hopes of recovering to live your normal life in peace and actively without fear.
However, if 8 years later you're still barely leaving your house except for essentials and you're still having to go reset your alarm constantly due to minor things tripping it and you still have this huge unwieldy gun that's probably not practical for personal self defense in the street you're being overly paranoid and foolish to the point that you've given up any sort of normal and none-frustrating life in exchange for your safety.
In my mind, the smarter thing to do would be as your paranoia and confidence increases after a few months or a year you scale your alarm system back to a reasonable level so its not falsely going off constantly, you go out and maybe get a more practical easy to carry and simpler to fire gun, and you actually start living a normal life out and about instead of being a shut in.
Same thing with this. Ramping things up massively in the short term after 9/11 was no problem to me. However, I expected those things to be stripped away a great deal as we moved farther away from it because the entire reason I thought they were there was to ensure the longevity of our freedom at the expense of some short term loss of it. And, in the end, we'd arrive at a place where we've learned some lessoned, fixed a few things (like removing the Gorelick Wall for example, or updating our surveillance law to the 20th century, or increasing our human intelligence), but return to a FREEDOM focused society.
That hasn't happened. Instead, the security focused society has not subsided and in some instances increased. The amount of freedom we gave up has NOT been given back to us this far out.
Do I want another 9/11 to happen? No. But I would rather take a 9/11 every 10 years and take the chance that it hits me than continuely go down a road where the very founding principle of America, FREEDOM, is stripped farther and farther away in the name of security.
However, as old El Rushbo says so often, I reject the premise of your argument. I reject the premise that we HAVE to go over the top and full out to ridiculous levels of security to be able to prevent another 9/11. I believe a near equal amount of protection can be had through less freedom encroaching ways, and I believe that violating the very thing that is used as the reason we need to protect ourselves is counter productive. It is like buying security to keep ones money safe, but spending all of ones money on that security.
No sir, you're absolutely mistaken. I've not forgot 9/11, nor how we felt at that time, nor do I have a problem with the things we did immediately proceeding. Its the fact that so many of the things that should've gone away over time remain and so many other things have been continued that I have an issue with long after 9/11.
