Anti-terrorism

[kandrathe]

On the other hand, what I meant to mention: Why exclude the 27 mostly European states from these measures? That does not sound fair, and who's to say that the next bomb (which will hopefully never happen) might be exploded by, say, a German citizen? As a security measure, there's quite a hole in this plan, as I see it.

Good point. The agreements that the US has with those 27 nations allows US citizens to travel unhindered with a US passport, and vice versa. Their is a level of trust given and controls in place for getting a US passport, but maybe not enough. The same might be true with Germany, in that it might be too easy for German passports to be issued (or forged). I think what we are seeing is that the US is trying to tighten the holes, while abiding by our former policies, and a breakdown in that open international trust we had taken for granted.

It is easy for me to travel to most of Europe (and vice versa again) and so that is good for our economies. Americans go to Germany bringing thousands of dollars to spend on the airfare, hotels, food, beer and buy way too many pewter momento's for their friends and relatives.

What I would like to see would be that US passports (and those of other nations) require much more scrutiny (including fingerprints) before being issued, and that they contain within the unreproducible page (like a hologram on our credit cards, or drivers licenses) that physical descriptive information like age, height weight, eye color, sex, blood type, and fingerprint like information that would make it impossible to use stolen or forged credentials.

For my personal opinion: I find this measure quite extreme, pretty much like one step down from a "No (insert Nation under suspicion for harboring terrorists) allowed in here"-sign. I just hope that these measures will be more equally balanced (see above) in the future.

I think we could all be enlightened by an analysis of the 9/11 terrorists prior travel activities, how they moved around from nation to nation, how they made use of the laxness in "restrictions" (security) to slip through nations undetected. You would find that we (in the US) are as guilty of "blindness" to the obvious. Here where I live in Minneapolis they arrested one of the 9/11 terrorists (on Visa violations at first) two months prior to 9/11. The people at the flight school called the FBI because it became appearant that he was interested in taking lessons on how to fly a 747, but wasn't interested in the classes on how to land a 747. But, that is another long winded fiasco. Suffice it to say that the local FBI office had enough information to believe that this guy was a part of a terrorist cell operating in the US, and forwarded the information to the head office where it got lost in a paper shuffle.

I just hope that these measures will be more equally balanced (see above) in the future.

I'm sure they will. In fact, I think the pendulum will return to the laxness side again once the threat levels remain low for long periods of time. Unfortunatly, I believe it's just going to take some time for that to happen.