Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Countries Not Doing Enough on Terrorism

In an article by Reuters, the head of the international police force Interpol says that governments aren't doing enough to protect against terrorism.

(Ron) Noble (Interpol's secretary general) said Interpol had a database of more than 13 million stolen and lost passports. But apart from Switzerland, which uncovered 100 people carrying stolen documents every month, no country comprehensively checked passports against its list.

He said the public would find it hard to understand why a measure which could prevent a terrorist attack and was "obvious to do, easy to do and a modest cost" was not being done. He said heads of state and senior ministers would be to blame.

I think it's quite easy to understand why we aren't doing something "so obvious to do" to prevent terrorism. Every initiative by the intelligence community is compared to domestic spying and Big Brother. Even completely legal programs such as the Swift banking program, which monitored terrorists banking transactions, was treated with typical hysteria that somehow totally innocent people were getting their ATM withdrawals monitored.
"After September 11, if a citizen were to learn that a terrorist attack occurred by someone having entered their country with a stolen passport that was registered with Interpol but their country wasn't regularly checking it, I say governments would fall," Noble said.

Well, maybe if it was a Republican president and liberals could blame him for not preventing the attack during his eight months in office while dismissing the previous administration's eight years of doing nothing.