A Beslan of our own?
UPDATE: The original story from which I quoted below is no longer at the link provided. A search on ABCNews’ website yielded this article instead, basically saying that there’s no connection between the Iraqi with the school plans and any terrorist threat. Never mind that in the original report cited below, the man was described as “an Iraqi insurgent involved in anti-coalition activities. I’m still trying to find the original story, but in the meantime, I find it curious that the information about the school plans was discovered in July. Why is that significant? Because of this:
U.S. security officials are investigating a recent intelligence report that a group of 25 Chechen terrorists illegally entered the United States from Mexico in July. [emphasis mine]
Is it possible that these two pieces of information had the same source?
I lament with Michelle Malkin that our border situation has become a casualty of politics.
Originally posted: October 08, 2004
Does anyone doubt anymore that the people we are up against would love to give us our own Beslan here in the United States?
From the ABCNews article linked above:
Schools in six states in particular are being watched closely based on information uncovered by the U.S. military in Baghdad this summer, law enforcement and education officials told ABC News.
A man described as an Iraqi insurgent involved in anti-coalition activities had downloaded school floor plans and safety and security information about elementary and high schools in the six states, according to officials.School officials in Fort Myers, Fla.; Salem, Ore.; Gray, Ga.; Birch Run, Mich.; two towns in New Jersey; and two towns in California have been told to increase security in light of the discovery.
Officials in the New Jersey towns, Franklinville and Rumson, were notified by counterterrorism officials last month that their schools had been possibly singled out.
On Wednesday, the federal government warned schools nationwide to look out for suspicious activity that might signal terrorist activity, and told school officials to be on the lookout for anyone spying on their buildings or buses, expressing interest in obtaining site plans, and other types of suspicious activity.
It followed an analysis by the FBI and the Homeland Security Department of the school siege in Beslan, Russia, last month, in which nearly 340 people, many of them children, were killed.
Law enforcement officials said they had no easy explanation why an insurgent in Baghdad would be gathering such specific information about American schools, some of them in small towns.[Umm... duh? -SCP]
And though the information was recovered in July, it was not given urgency until the attack in Beslan.
I don’t know if cells in the U.S. have the wherewithal to pull off this sort of thing or not at the moment… scratch that. If Klebold and Harris could do it at Columbine I don’t think a cell of highly motivated Islamo-fascist fanatics will have any trouble. After all, they wouldn’t even have to hide their cache of weapons under the bed to keep their parents from finding out.
The one advantage Klebold and Harris had that the terrorists may not was an intimate familiarity with their school. May I suggest that if you see persons of middle-eastern descent lingering around schools for no apparent reason that you might want to let someone in law enforcement know about it? You might catch some grief, depending on the mindset of the person you reach. You might be called bigoted or intolerant. Then again, you might just prevent this.
2 Comments
October 13th, 2004 at 2:55 pm
In many ways, I don’t think it even matters if there’s any kind of direct connection. It reminds me of Condoleeza Rice’s quote, which was butchered in Farenheit 9/11:
“Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It’s not that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York.”
I think we’re not used to the fact that a liberal (in the classical sense) government can only really work if the people have a common thread of morality which says, essentially, it’s not acceptable behavior to kill other people because you disagree with them. Once you cross that line, you don’t deserve to have your speech protected, your culture lionized, and your rights fought for. You deserve to be destroyed. Maybe that’s harsh, but I think that’s the conclusion that we’re slowly going to reach in the next few years. Liberals (in the non-classical sense) wail and wail about free speech being stifled (while stifling free speech) when it comes to things like rappers not being able to use all five words in their vocabularies, and they talk about how horrible it is that police will include the race of a suspect when trying to capture him, but can’t allow themselves to believe that there are real people in the world that want to kill them just because they don’t agree with them.
If anyone should know this, it’s New York, but it looks like they’re going to vote for Kerry. To quote American Beauty, “never underestimate the power of denial.”
October 13th, 2004 at 8:11 pm
Once Again Reports Of Terrorists Crossing Our Southern Border
A Washington Times article has a report on an investigation into 25 Chechen terrorists crossing into the United States through the Mexican Border. For the uninformed the Chechen terrorists are the ones involved in the Beslan School Massacre. U.S. secur…