December 19, 2005 --To start with, any legislation that is comprised of so many controversial components that it requires the originators to work overtime creating an acronym that sounds patriotic in a distorted effort to disguise its inherent evilness should be left to die a slow, miserable death.  I mean really; what the hell is Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism anyhow?  Why not just call it the United Socialists Against Patriotic Americans Tenaciously Resisting Intrusion, Oppression, and Tyranny?  That would be a more forthcoming acronym, would it not? 

 

Here are the facts.  The United States does not need the U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act, or a Department of Homeland Security.  To those who point to the fact that no terrorist attack has occurred on U.S. soil since 9/11 as evidence that the U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act and the Department of Homeland Security must be effective tools in preventing acts of terrorism, I ask, them this simple question. “What prevented terrorist attacks in the United States prior to 9/11?” 

 

Of course, the gung-ho U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act supporters have no satisfactory explanation as to how the United States avoided a terrorist attack prior to 9/11 without the benefit of the domestic spying capabilities articulated in the U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act.  Regardless, the truth is that terrorism landed on American shores because of gross incompetence by the same federal employees who are now consolidated under the big tent called the Department of Homeland Security. 

 

Despite how hard the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act supporters try to convince the American people otherwise, the fact remains that according to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report released in 2002, U.S. Intelligence had information in 1998 that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosives-laden plane into the World Trade Center.  However, the Federal Aviation Administration found the plot “highly unlikely given the state of that foreign country’s aviation program,” and believed a flight originated outside the United States would be detected before it reached its target inside the country.  How literally hundreds of thousands of federal level law enforcement, military, and intelligence gathering agency employees and federal agents could not produce one voice loud enough to sound the alarm that the flight would not necessarily need to originate outside the United States, that if could actually originate a hope, skip, and a jump away from the known target, is simply unfathomable. 

 

So what did the U.S. Congress and the President do in response to this extreme dereliction of duty demonstrated by so many civilian federal employees?  Well, they gave them medals, promotions, and created some more cushy government jobs.  What did you think they did; fire them?   Hell, the FAA couldn’t even muster enough leadership to mandate that all commercial flights must have secure cockpit doors; something the FAA and the commercial airline industry had been talking about for decades.  Yet few people lost their jobs with the FAA after 9/11 even though there is a paper trail a mile long that proves they knew the risks associated with the cockpit doors of commercial aircraft, and did nothing about it. 

 

The U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act should be allowed to expire because it was not, is not, and will never be required.  After all, what good is any intelligence gained by the U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act if the federal government lacks the intuition to quantify the risk?  For the most part, the same people who could not read the writing on the wall in 1998 are still employed by the federal government, and alarmingly; remain in positions requiring them to provide risk assessment of known threats.  The United States unequivocally had all the intelligence required to prevent 9/11, and our federal government blew it. 

 

There is nothing in the U.S.A. P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act that could have helped the intelligence community quantify the risk associated with a group of unidentified Arab men flying a plane into the World Trade Center, or the fact that such a plane could originate from Boston instead of Baghdad.  No matter how strongly you want to believe otherwise, incompetent risk assessment and unsecured cockpit doors are the only real reasons 9/11 ever happened.  The U.S.A.  P.A.T.R.I.O.T. Act has nothing to do with either.