Oh come on..for the love of christ…security is pretty shitty at OR/Y-12 but I dont see a convoy of terrorists driving through the main gates and heading to a building with a stockpile of plutonium. And if they do get into a building..so F%^& what? You would have to strap on a couple thousand pounds of explosives to get a rather large explosion to throw out radiation over ETenn..take off your tin foil hat…

Thanks a lot, mainstream media. I’ll be sure to trust what you say in the future.

Of course it could happen here or anywhere for that matter. It is ridiculous to think that you can protect any part of any county from a package exploding.

I wouldn’t rely on Fox News for any information. Recently they brought on a commentator about the bombings. Know what his subtitle was? Former Terrorist. It’s ridiculous.

They attacked the WTC because it they though it was the center of power for the Zionists (yep, they actually believe that “Elders of Zion” crap). I never understood why congress and the white house aren’t bigger terror targets than the pentagon. Perhaps they thought we would just elect fiercer warmongers. I also heard they went long on gold and short on stocks.

I think that a worse attack would have been to unleash 20 trained snipers with 20 bolt action, scoped rifles. Rifles, not carbines, the kind of gun that can go through a foot of wood and still kill. It was not widely reported, but Moose and his goons were going through the Maryland state records and showing up at residents doors seizing peoples’ .223 AR variants without a warrant. They test fired and did the voodoo “ballistic fingerprinting”crap. Of course there were no hits, but I really doubt that after the whole mess they threw away the “fruit of the poison tree”.

Now is a good time to mention that despite the unconstitutional Maryland “Assault Rifle” database and despite profiling the killer as a disgruntled, white guy in a white work truck who is stupid enough to buy his “assault rifle” in Maryland so it can be properly registered; the killers ended up being Type 2 Muslim guys in a dark colored car, with a stolen rifle. But hey, gun control still works.

Did I just say that chief Moose “profiled” the killers? Wouldn’t that make Moose a racist?

If somebody is going to blow something up in East Tennessee, it won’t be Knoxville. Oak Ridge is full of nuclear material (that’s where they put the stuff that other countries surrender as well as much of our own stock) and it just happens to be the city that gave birth to what they want more than anything else. A big fat nuclear bomb.
It’s not a question of if they will hit Oak Ridge, it’s a question of when.
Small town with almost no security and the potential to cause more chaos than hitting 5 large cities at the same time.

Knowing all of this…I’m still fine living here. If I don’t have a government that can protect me, I deserve to get blown up. I voted for the people in charge of protecting me. If I didn’t vote for the people who could do the best job then I am at fault.

Also…

Nothing, and I mean NOTHING is going to stop people from shopping at Wal-Mart.
Blow it up. Burn it down. Gas all of the shoppers. Lace all of the shelves with anthrax. It doesn’t matter.

They are open 24/7 and prices are low.
People are never too scared to go to Wal-Mart.

This si a bit snarky, but it does have a seriuos point: the people who report on and make decisons about reporting on are not generally directly connected to locations like OK City, and hence the level of fear is not neccesarily the same. Add to that the fact that an attack on OK City looks weak and pathetic to the international community, and the lilihood of such an attack is much less than an attack on a large city like NYC or Chicago.

Its also a bit weird to see people essentially arguing that the country would collapse based on a London style attack in a plce like Peoria. Nothing collapsed after OKC, and nothing collpased after 9/11. I think we need to start giving our fellow citizens a bit of credit here.

Sorry, but Knoxville and other small cities are oasises of peace and tranquility and an attack there, or in peoria, or even St. Louis would go a long way towards shaking the resolve of the nation because all of a sudden rural americans (or even people in small sized cities would understand).

Yeah, like if somebody targeted some rural backwater like Oklahoma City (hypothetically speaking), it would bring the nation’s resolve to its knees.

I mean, they had 20 operatives in country. One got arrested ahead of time but didn’t tip off the operation.

Now, imagine if your 20 guys, instead of going to flight school and shuffling through metal detectors, each bought or rented a compact car and filled it with ANFO/TNT and nails. Then pick 20 different cities and have each guy drive his car through the front door of an elementary school.

The effect on our country — the level of fear, the economic shock, the resulting willingness to sell liberty cheap in the name of security — would all make 9-11 look like a walk in the park.

The sad thing is that our society hasn’t really made any serious effort at threat assesment or coming to grips with the meaning of terror in our lives. We’ve settled for feel-good, band-aid solutions like nationalizing airport security, erasing ditgital images of bridges from Jane Doe’s camera and expensive administrative bloat (DHS), but no one has talked about what might happen next. We’re not preppared and we’re not safer (except to the minimal extent that terrorism has largely been focused on Iraq for the last two years but I think we can take it that London signals that our foes have finally clued in to the fact that their efforts in Iraq are only succeeding in getting terrorists killed more efficiently and cheaply than they can really afford).

Sorry, but Knoxville and other small cities are oasises of peace and tranquility and an attack there, or in peoria, or even St. Louis would go a long way towards shaking the resolve of the nation because all of a sudden rural americans (or even people in small sized cities would understand).

As far as the national concern over the sniper – thats simple. He was very much part of the muslim/al quaeda war on America – but for some reason the government is relucatant to go down that path.

The simple fact is he trained with a well known sleeper cell (which was subsequently broken up by the FBI) and while he may have been out to make some petty cash, his underlying motive was hatred of our society. He struck both in an urban and very rural areas (Spotsylvania County and where they caught him was basically uninhabited wildnerness for around here) and targeted children and minorites, etc. Its was shocking an no one knew where he would hit next.

Here in DC, we are still freaked out by it (and the anthrax attacks – we still have almost daily evacuations because of “suspicious powders on packages” even though the press doesn’t cover them – and the constant bomb threats and the threats to metro and the incredible number of violently anti American muslims who live here in the DC area)

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, more than 118,000 undocumented migrants who were caught after sneaking over the nation’s borders have walked right out of custody with a permiso in hand. They were from … also Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen –among 35 countries of “special interest” because of alleged sponsorship or support of terrorism.

Any terrorist attack says that people aren;t safe. but, again, why would the terrorists care if people who ar enot connected to the engines of media, culture and commerce care if they don’t feel safe? Look at the DC sniper thing — quite a lot of national fear for a pretty localized event. If that had happened in Peoria, it would not have become the all consuming media circus that it did.

Of course, trying to understand the insane is almost futile.

And that’s precisely the mistake we (the US) keep making that prevents us from gaining any ground. Pretending that they don’t have an agenda, or that they don’t act in meaningful ways to try to accomplish specific objectives is as counterproductive as it is false.

This is what Clarke warned us about, but unfortunately people were too busy trying to discredit him (for having the audacity to disagree with our Fearless Leader) to bother listening to him.

Paint them as mindless, insane zealots and you simply make it that much easier for them.

lets assume for a minute that al-Quaida cannot pull off a large scale attack. Even assuming hat, whats mor eimpressive internationally – -a small scale attack in say Chicago or a small scale attack in say Peoria?

Furthermore, the economic, cultural, and media power centers in thsi country are all in large cities. An attack – -even if small — in one of those cities immeditely increases in symbolic value (which, frankly, is all the value those attacks can have. they are not in a position — and never have been — to do real damage to the infrastrucure of the country)just by the virtue of the fact of where it takes place.

Terrorists would be stupid to hit Peoria when they could hit LA or Chicago or NYC.

And that sentence alone is why I don’t think that al Quaeda is going to hit “rural” targets. They might be evil incarnate, but they ain’t stupid.

If Mohammed walks towards a Wal-Mart in Lubbock, TX with an AK-47 in his hands, he’ll be shot dead by three or four different calibers before he makes it to the door.

Red states profile. And they carry.

In a follow up to this post (good stuff in the comments, by the way), I heard on the news this [...]