A Commentary by Doug Draper
When Japan attacked a major American naval base at Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, then- U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was quick to call it “a day which will live in infamy.”
Indeed, anyone old enough to remember that day, which finally and fully launched both the United States and Canada into a Second World War that ultimately destroyed the lives of tens-of-millions of people, will ever forget where they were when they heard the news about the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Just as no one old enough will ever forget where they were 11 years ago this September 11 when they heard about the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York City and the Pentagon in New York, not to mention another planned attack on Washington, D.C. that was brought in a field in Pennsylvania when brave passengers crashed through a flight-deck door to thwart that jet’s hijackers. And we all know that we have been paying the price in weakened economies in the United States and Canada, a loss of freedom of movement and civil liberties, and in fear – however real or fanned by fear-mongers – that we are no longer safe, wherever we go in our communities, from a possible terrorist attack.
Obviously, the events that unfolded on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 – eleven years ago this day – were horrendous. My wife and I had good friends and work associates of ours who came close to being one of the more than 2,900 people who died that day, and one of my wife’s associates perished in the rubble of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Her body was never found.
So this post is by no means an attempt to soft soap or walk away from evil conduct that has and might very well continue to destroy the life of any man, woman or child in the name of some psycho’s cause. It is an attempt, however, to throw out a few questions here.
The first one asks where the governments of Canada and the United States are really at when it comes to spending the resources needed to track down those who may truly be posing a threat to our freedom and security? When you have governments and their homeland security and policing agencies who feel they have to frisk or do a virtual strip search of everyone, from a young child who looks like he or she jumped out of a Norman Rockwell painting to someone’s dear old granny who might otherwise be home baking pies, one must wonder if they have any kind of clue who they are looking for in the first place.
In Canada, we have an RCMP that, more than two decades later, still can’t bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst act of terrorism ever hatched on the country’s soil – the Air India bombing that wiped out the lives of more than 300 people. In the U.S., as I have said, they are frisking down or detaining every individuals from one that might fit the stereotype of a terrorist to people who look like Opie or Aunt Bee from that wholesome old ‘Andy Griffith Show’ generations of us watched on TV.
A year or so ago, I heard an interview with a retired head of security for the government of Israel – a country that has had more than its share of experience dealing with terrorists – who stressed that if a country has got its intelligence act together (meaning that it is spending the resources needed on intelligence operations), it doesn’t need to be feeling up every person getting on a plane or holding up every person crossing a border. It has a damn good idea who it should be looking for before that individual even gets to the airport or border crossing.
In the eleven years since 9/11, where is any evidence that our security people know who they are looking for? Why is it so necessary to treat all of us as if we are possible terrorist suspects? Why is it that, less than two years ago, a guy was able get on an American jetliner wearing an underwear bomb and the only thing that stopped him from blowing up that plane over the skies of southwestern Ontario and Michigan was his own incompetence and a few passengers who wrestled him down?
We have governments in Canada and the United States who are still into a 20th century, cold war mindset where security means spending countless billions of dollars on warships, fighter jets and the like, when the enemy today is more often some extremist nut with a bomb hidden in his under garments
Meanwhile, the rest of us go on living in this constant state of fear where we are able to give up more and more of our freedom of movement and civil liberties because, as the saying goes, if we haven’t done anything wrong, what have we got to hide? Why should we care?
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