USS Clueless              Voyages of a restless mind

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Stardate 20010911.1455 (Crew, this is the Captain>On Screen): There are at least three major political issues which will be permanently affected by this event. First is the US use of the death penalty. If the US manages to lay hands on whoever was behind the attack on the World Trade Center towers, they will be tried for capital murder and if convicted will be executed. If there was ever a case which deserved the death penalty, this is it. We're talking about thousands of deaths (including hundreds of heroic emergency workers who were crushed when the buildings collapsed) and tens of thousands of injuries; "Life imprisonment without parole" simply isn't a sufficient punishment. If Timothy McVeigh wasn't enough of a monster for anti-death-penalty activists, how about whoever is behind this?

If someone crashed a jet into comparable buildings in London or Berlin or Paris and killed comparable numbers of people, would the Europeans still be opposed to the death penalty for those behind the plot? In the last two years the US has been taking a lot of guff from overseas about our use of the death penalty. I suspect that is going to stop now.

Second is the entire issue of encryption and electronic snooping. One of the questions which is going to get asked is why it is that US intelligence agencies didn't pick up on this and prevent it. The answer is that it isn't possible to have perfect intelligence, especially in a free state with the kinds of privacy protections that we have in the US. Despite this event, we should not give the government more control over our communications and this should not argue against the free use of encryption.

Third is that moronic missile defense. Please note that this attack was not carried out using ballistic missiles and that if the missile defense had been in place it would have been completely useless in preventing it. Given that if a rogue power wants to attack the US they clearly won't use a ballistic missile even when we don't have a defense against such, what is the point of building a defense against ballistic missiles anyway?(discussion in progress)