In a speech, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich gave some challenging
and sober thoughts, worthy of a weekend more serious Grif.Net:
“The third thing I want to talk about very briefly is the genuine danger of
terrorism, in particular terrorists using weapons of mass destruction and
weapons of mass murder, nuclear and biological weapons. And I want to
suggest to you that right now we should be impaneling people to look
seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of if it
weren’t for the scale of threat.
Let me give you two examples. When the British this summer arrested people
who were planning to blow up ten airliners in one day, they arrested a
couple who were going to use their six month old baby in order to hide the
bomb as baby milk.
Now, if I come to you tonight and say that there are people on the planet
who hate you, and they are 15-25 year old males who are willing to die as
long as they get to kill you, I’ve simply described the warrior culture
which has been true historically for 6 or 7 thousand years.
But, if I come to you and say that there is a couple that hates you so much
that they will kill their six month old baby in order to kill you, I am
describing a level of ferocity, and a level of savagery beyond anything we
have tried to deal with.
And, what is truly frightening about the British experience is they are
arresting British citizens, born in Britain, speaking English, who went to
British schools, live in British housing, and have good jobs.
This is a serious long term war, and it will inevitably lead us to want to
know what is said in every suspect place in the country, that will lead us
to learn how to close down every website that is dangerous, and it will lead
us to a very severe approach to people who advocate the killing of Americans
and advocate the use of nuclear or biological weapons.
And, my prediction to you is that either before we lose a city, or if we are
truly stupid, after we lose a city, we will adopt rules of engagement that
use every technology we can find to break up their capacity to use the
Internet, to break up their capacity to use free speech, and to go after
people who want to kill us to stop them from recruiting people before they
get to reach out and convince young people to destroy their lives while
destroying us.
This is a serious problem that will lead to a serious debate about the first
amendment, but I think that the national security threat of losing an
American city to a nuclear weapon, or losing several million Americans to a
biological attack is so real that we need to proactively, now, develop the
appropriate rules of engagement.
And, I further think that we should propose a Geneva Convention for fighting
terrorism which makes very clear that those who would fight outside the
rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction, and those who
would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of
rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it
gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous.”
~~
Dr Bob Griffin, www.grif.net
1 cross + 3 nails = 4 given