ARE WE ANY SAFER TODAY?

The Illusion of Safety…


George Bush has run the past three years on the mantra of keeping us safer.
Has he lived up to the reputation he is trying to build for himself?

Not if you look objectively at what happened immediately after he was elected.
At that time, ex-president Clinton and his staff advised the incoming president and top advisers that bin Laden and Al Qaeda represented serious threats to this country.

But, perhaps more importantly, the Bush crew were advised that the single biggest challenge we faced was the more than six hundred metric tons of enriched material that was still on the market and would be available to terrorists.

Why was this fact important?

Because the terrorists could buy the scientific talent it needed and was able to put together the money and technology to conceivably construct suitcase sized bombs out of the enriched material that if exploded, could render a site uninhabitable for perhaps dozens of years or more.

The Bush administration chose to do nothing!

It was only after the 9/11 terrorist event that the Bush administration started to take seriously the warnings of the Clinton advisers.

However, today, more than three hundred of those metric tons of enriched materials have disappeared. And we might question into whose hands did these enriched materials go?

The dangers posed by these enriched materials are incalculable.

And we do know that for the first time, there is a convergence of people trained in the science of nuclear technology, the technology itself and the money required to fund the development of suit-cased sized bombs that are easy to transport and could raise havoc in our country and its leading cities.

Add to this the fact, that the Bushes have failed to move on the measures needed to protect our ports—even though the estimated costs would be less than 1% of our present spending on
Afghanistan and Iraq.

Has this president made us any safer now?

The answer is self-evident; On almost every measure of what constitutes safety—from protection of the borders to protection for our ports—the answer is unequivocally “no!”