We just had former US Coast Guard
Commander Stephen Flynn stop by the editorial board here at the Dallas
Morning News. Fascinating guy. He says that neither Bush nor Kerry is doing
remotely enough to take care of the domestic security situation, nor is
Congress. He said most American elites are content to sit back and to hope
it doesn’t happen again, because taking the kinds of measures that would
both reduce the chances of it happening again and make America more
resilient in the event that it does, strike them as too difficult or costly.
And that is a terrible miscalculation, he warned, one that stands to do
serious damage to American government and civil society in the event of
another 9/11, or worse.
I asked Cmdr. Flynn, who’s now with the Council on Foreign Relations, how
one makes the case for serious domestic security reform in the face of quite
a few people who say, as soon as this or that measure is proposed, that it’s
an intolerable restriction of civil liberties, and if we do X., the
terrorists will have won. He responded that he was talking to the head
of the ACLU, and asked him if he thought something like 9/11 was going to
happen again. Yes, the man said. Then, said Flynn, he asked the ACLU chief
what the civil liberties record of this country has been in the past when
we’ve been frightened by trauma. Not good, he quoted the ACLU head as
saying.
“I told him that given our history, if he waits until the next 9/11 happens,
he’s not going to have a voice at the table to talk about civil liberties,”
Flynn told us. “Shooting down any discussion of pragmatic steps we should be
taking to protect ourselves, and the civil liberties tradeoffs that would
involve, by saying ‘the terrorists will have won’ is just putting your head
in the sand. The reality is there are people in our midst who want to kill
us, and kill us in largenumbers. We have to face that now, because if we
wait till the next time, we’re not going to handle it well. We have a narrow
window of opportunity, and it’s closing.”