Homeland Security

There is no question that Al-Qaeda terrorists and other dangerous groups seek to attack us here in America and we must protect ourselves.  TO WIN THE WAR ON TERROR in the long-run, we must destroy those who seek to destroy us and win the respect of the world.  In the meantime, we must minimize the potential to do us harm by better protecting our critical infrastructure and by destroying the weapons of mass destruction that we already know to exist.  We do not need to give up our freedoms or turn America into a police state to protect ourselves, but we do need to think critically about how to prevent future attacks against us.

We must:

Capture or kill those who seek to harm us

Our intelligence agencies must learn to cooperate with each other and with the intelligence agencies of our allies to uncover hidden terrorist cells and to destroy them.  Our nation’s military is designed to fight other nations…not terrorists.  In many ways, we are still better prepared to repel the Soviet Army in Europe than to repel Al Qaeda attacks on our homeland.  This is a war in which our intelligence agents and our special forces will be on the new frontline.  As a congressman, I would make absolutely sure that these people get every dollar and tool they need to do their job right.

Eliminate sources of biological, chemical, and radiological weapons that terrorists would seek to obtain and use against us

Weapons of mass destruction may not exist in Iraq , but we do know they exist elsewhere.  When the Soviet Union collapsed, massive inventories of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons were badly managed and it is widely believed that these weapons have been stolen and are still at risk of winding up terrorist hands.  It is absurd that Congress decided to cut the funding for the tiny program that pays Russia to destroy these old Soviet weapons of mass destruction.  We will have fought a war and spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist…surely we should be spending more than the few millions that we currently are to destroy the weapons of mass destruction that we know exist in Russia .  We cannot be penny-wise and pound foolish when it comes to preventing terrorists from getting weapons of mass destruction.

Resolve the grievances caused by our ill-conceived foreign policies

As the world’s greatest nation, we should have the confidence to admit that we have made mistakes in the past and to rectify those mistakes.  Too often in the past we have made deals with dictators.  For decades, we have given weapons, money, and support to dictators and corrupt foreign leaders in attempts to buy their allegiance.  In giving these rulers our tax-payer dollars and the means to stay in power, we linked ourselves with scoundrels and drawn the contempt of the unhappy masses over whom they rule.  It’s unfortunate that we have done this, but that does not mean that we must go on doing it.  We would better off if we kept our money and weapons here at home rather than wasting it on foreign rulers and inspiring hatred against us for our short-sighted alliances.

Identify our key vulnerabilities here at home and do whatever we can to limit the risks we face from an attack

Unfortunately, airliners are not the only terrorist target we need to worry about.  Our nuclear power plants, chemical factories, our food and water supplies, our transportation networks, our power grid, and other key infrastructure are still dangerously vulnerable to a terrorist attack with potentially terrible consequences.  These weaknesses in our system must be examined and improved.

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