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Originally Posted by Lil Dancer
Pardon my skepticism, but the Terrorism alerts smelled too strongly of politics. How interesting that in the past election, whenever Bush's popularity numbers were down, there came about another "alert". It was his ace in the hole. Get people scared, talk in vague terms about the evil doers, etc., and people will be too afraid to make a change; they'll stick with the guys promoting the war because they think they'll be "safer". Plus, many people erroneously thought that Iraq was somehow involved with 9/11, and the war was a way of punishing the attackers.
Sorry, I'm one of the many who don't believe the war has made us safer. We're spending billions of dollars of our resources on the civil war over there, instead of bolstering our national security. What have we done to protect our nuclear plants, our water supplies, etc.?
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Well, for starters a review of the National Infrastructure Protection Plan may help to bring an answer to the protection of nuclear plants, water supplies, etc. (see
http://www.dhs.gov/xprevprot/program...rial_0827.shtm). Add to that a check of the National Incident Management System (see
http://www.nimsonline.com/) to understand what happens prior to, during and after an emergency management incident.
I hate to disappoint the political conspiracy theorists, but terrorist alerts and politics really don't mix. Each alert level and event has its own "triggers" and requires specific actions in response. The folk with the authority to announce an incident is imminent or occurred, or that additional preventive measures over-and-above what is going on at the moment do not "cry wolf." You just can't raise-a-flag and activate further measures unless there is something to act upon - there's just too many internal questions to answer otherwise and the commitment of resources in response requires something to respond to. In other words, the professionals in the national security business - not the politicians - watchdog the system and respond as necessary. There is nothing "amateur" about it, and that's why folk are able to live their lives within America with little-to-no interruption because the pro's (federal, state and local) do what they do, and do it well.