You probably read this week that a fired Florida professor was acquitted on charges of terrorism conspiracy in what was described as a major setback for the U.S. government and the Patriot Act. (That made Page 1 of the Chicago Tribune and New York Times.)
You might have missed the story, though, that an Arab-American college student in the U.S. was convicted last month of plotting with Al Qaeda to assassinate President Bush and commit other acts of terror here. (That story made page 16 in the Tribune and page 18 in the Times.)
We thought of that in the aftermath of the tragedy Wednesday in Miami, where a man who evidently was mentally disturbed was shot and killed by federal air marshals. The man charged off an American Airlines jet, threatening that he had a bomb in his backpack.
If you think the marshals acted improperly, then read the most disturbing story in the Tribune Thursday: a report by Jon Hilkevitch on the evidence that terrorists are flying on commercial airlines, looking for weaknesses in onboard security. Among other things, they appear to be trying to assess which pilots carry arms.
We are still at great risk. Yet some polls show that Americans grow more complacent about that risk the longer this country goes without an attack.
If they do, they have good role models. There were Washington politicians reacting in predictably dreary fashion this week to a new report from members of the Sept. 11 commission. Their first response wasn’t to think about public safety, it was to gauge political risk and opportunity.
The report graded federal efforts to prevent terrorist attacks since Sept. 11. It slapped the Bush administration and Congress with a report card full of D’s and F’s. It said that despite some successes, the country remains alarmingly vulnerable to attacks across the board.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said that “an F is too high a grade for the Bush White House and Washington Republicans.” Republicans countered in defensive fashion.
We all share this burden. Political posturing won’t protect Americans. The report wasn’t aimed at Republicans or Democrats. It was aimed at American lawmakers. No politician can guarantee that terrorists will never again strike on U.S. soil. But the country surely won’t be protected by partisan hot air.
The panel said there has been little progress in the sharing of intelligence by federal agencies, a key failure identified in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. It sharply criticized government efforts to prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. It focused on the absurd way that the Department of Homeland Security distributes state anti-terrorism grants: based on politics, not on risk. Wyoming receives nearly twice as much per capita as does New York, a major terrorist target.
In its milestone report last year, the Sept. 11 commission concluded: “We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.” In other words, the country had been lulled into thinking it was beyond the reach of terrorists. One would think we learned the gravity of the threat on Sept. 11, 2001.
Yet, on Monday, panel chairman Thomas Kean sharply asked: “We believe that terrorists will strike again. If they do, and these reforms that might have prevented such an attack have not been implemented, what will our excuses be?”
There will be no excuses, not for the Bush administration, not for any member of Congress, not for any one of us.
