“The whole point is to disrupt terrorism at an early stage instead of letting the conspiracy fully hatch,” said Viet Dinh, a former top Justice Department official under Attorney General John Ashcroft who now teaches law at Georgetown University. “We cannot take the risk of the conspiracy taking place. What you get is shorter sentences but greater prevention.” NY Times, December 7, 2003
My question is, why is our government so modest? Where are the visionaries? Why are they so humble? Where is that “can do” spirit?
We have a government department, under John Ashcroft, that seeks to prevent conspiracies before they happen. But why aren’t they out there preventing murders and larcenies and drug deals and marijuana smoking before they happen? Lack of vision, that’s all. Lack of spirit. If they only applied the kind of exciting focus and determination that they show in the pursuit of terrorist conspiracies!
Think about it. If we could catch some of those teenagers reading books or watching movies about drug use, and give them more frequent but lighter sentences, why we could put the entire drug problem to rest in less than one generation.
How about kids playing with guns? It’s clear they’re thinking of growing up to become hit men. Bust ’em.
Two men in Oregon were sentenced to 18 years in prison for planning to go to Afghanistan to train for jihad. A jihad is a holy war against the infidels.
I don’t think the U.S. government means to say that it is illegal to believe that the west wants to destroy Islam and, therefore, conscientious young Moslems ought to be trained to be ready to fight the west. Well, wait, I think they do. It’s a new approach to war: it is now illegal.
It wasn’t illegal ten years ago. If a young Arab in the U.S. decided to go join the Muhajadeen, the U.S. did not interfere.
But today, it is illegal.
Yesterday, it wasn’t. Yesterday, the same young men were going over to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians. That was okay. These young men became the Taliban and oppressed and brutalized their own people. That was okay.
Then they turned on us.
It’s Legal When I Say It’s Legal!
For people who think, however, we have achieved the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the absurd: the United States of America now imprisons people for thinking about doing things that probably shouldn’t be illegal in the first place. The U.S. has sponsored terrorism in Afghanistan when the Soviets were the occupying force. We gave them bazookas and grenades and told them to take back their country. But now that we have taken their country, similar
actions are deemed terrorist.