Oh Yeah, Terrorism

I am reserving commentary on Osama because I have an op-ed that might be in distribution soon that I wrote this morning after doing a radio appearance on that situation. I'll keep you posted. I also am working on a piece on Africa and terrorism that I hope to have out in the next week or so and another on torture. I'll link if I can, and if I cannot, I'll post them here. In the meantime, Democratiya has published my review of Daniel Byman's Deadly Connections: States That Sponsor Terrorism.

In its own words, the England-based Democratiya:

is a free bi-monthly online review of books. Our interests will range over war, peace, just war, and humanitarian interventionism; human rights, genocide, crimes against humanity and the responsibility to protect and rescue; the United Nations, international law and the doctrine of the international community; as well as democratisation, social and labour movements, 'global civil society', 'global social democracy', and Sennian development-as-freedom.

A piece of news that slipped under most people's radars (mine own included, but to be fair, on the day this happened I was in Johannesburg) occurred right next door to me in Midland. According to this ABC News report, suspicious mass purchases of cellular phones in California, here in Texas and other places has raised FBI suspicions. It is far too early to speculate what this all means, but the Midland police see a "terror cell" connection. It is too early to tell whether this is self-aggrandizing or not, but it ought to remind us that we are hardly out of the woods.

Which brings me to a question: Why has the terror alert level not budged since Osama's announcement? It seems suspicious that last year the terror level jumped constantly, for no apparent reason, and always when the President needed a boost in the polls. Now the one man who is most responsible for the wars we now fight threatens us, and there is not so much as a sympathy vibration? It is one thing to say that the terrorists will not change the way we live our lives. It is quite another to pretend that Osama is somehow irrelevant in all of this. Now don't get me wrong -- the one-size-fits-all, Washington-DC-is-at-the-same-alert-level as-Washington,-New-Hampshire system is irredeemably dumb. But if it must exist as is, am I to believe that we are just as safe today as yesterday, but that throughout the election cycle last year we were in a universal frenzy of intermittent danger punctuated by the calm brought about by the stewardship oif our brave and competent leaders? I guess this just confirms that this administration sees terror threat levels as just another tool in the political shed, to be wielded whenever it is most advantageous.