With the latest terror plot being a near-miss in Detroit, Americans will have to answer the questions of where they will want to fight this war on terror.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutalib is trying to tell us something – again – that other terrorists around the world have been repeating through their words and, frightfully, through their actions as well.
We have a choice to make, America: we will either accept that we are in a war against terror and fight it overseas or we will accept continued “criminal acts” against Americans on the homeland, acts that will continue to erode away at our privacy and our overall American way of life.
The Obama Administration continues to repeat the flaws of the “other Black president” of the United States (Bill Clinton) by pursuing policies that treat sworn enemy combatants of America as domestic criminals (and, thus, afford them rights granted to those “guilty until proven innocent”) instead of as those caught red-handed trying to intentionally cripple America’s standing economically and globally. Regardless of the high moral ground that we are (honorably) attempting to take with this opposition, the wretchedness involved by these combatants will lead America to choose one of two options: either we will continue this fight as a war that deserves our unmitigated support to move forward with our efforts overseas (and any actions afforded to us as war participants under the Geneva Conventions) or we will continue to forfeit the rights guaranteed us by the Constitution in order for the federal government to meet its Constitutionally-mandated job to protect our sovereignty and ability to pursue “…life, liberty, and …happiness.”
Those appalled with the direction that Bush’s Patriot Act moved the nation in just a few years ago should side with the argument that this war must 1) be acknowledged as a war when we capture (not merely “arrest”) terrorists on American soil and thus 2) be fought on foreign soil (where the majority of these combatants are trained, encouraged, and dispatched for terror) so that the rollback of privacy and rights does not continue. With increased speculation that full-body scanners will be implemented in some airports in the near future, there is the real threat that other private liberties will be challenged as this assault on America marches on. Without the proper perspective and methodologies from the Obama Administration (notably Homeland Security), our actions towards these threats to public safety will always be reactions and, thus, risky at best.
Abdulmutalib and other forces of terror and evil are repeatedly telling us that one way or another, they are going to destroy America if we escalate down this path with the status quo that we are getting from leadership. The forces of al Queda will erode the American way of life through these constant threats of violence, leading to a top-down model of society that hampers the rights and freedoms of the individual and the ability for individuals to creatively and robustly contribute to the greatness of the nation. As well, these forces seek to crush the morale of the nation by creating an unrelenting situation where more Americans grow apathetic towards the threats of terrorism (and the costs we pay therein). The additional “bang-for-the-buck” comes if they succeed with any plots, thus hindering a (slowly) recovering economy with any explosions or other acts that frighten,
