After reading Monday’s column entitled “U.S. does not defend privacy,” I was very disappointed with its lack of factual accuracy and by the naiveté of the author concerning the war on terrorism.
First, his criticism of Ronald Reagan (for appointing three judges to the FISC review board who supported Ashcroft’s proposal) was completely off the mark and does not at all reflect Reagan’s character. Reagan abhorred big government and spent most of his life fighting — and finally defeating — communism, the most repressive type of big government. He made reducing big government in Washington his No. 1 one domestic priority.
The author’s joke about Reagan’s debilitating Alzheimer’s was in very poor taste. Even now that the ex-president is a shadow of his former self, the fact remains that this man, more than any other single individual, brought down the Soviet bloc.
One of the lessons we could learn from Reagan was wars must be fought with only one goal in mind: absolute and total victory. The war on terrorism must be fought in exactly the same way or it is doomed from the start, like the Vietnam War and the dismal détente policy.
As the author pointed out, efficiently analyzing intelligence data is the key to preventing future attacks. The Department of Homeland Security was created exactly for this purpose, not “so the government can garner any information or people they deem suspicious or potentially dangerous.”
It does not include the controversial Operation TIPS idea or authorize the Total Information Awareness program for using computer databases to pick out terrorist tendencies. Its goal is simply to combine existing agencies into one department to strengthen our ability to combat terrorism.
The $40 billion price tag stated by the author is just plain wrong; the $40 billion figure is actually the sum of the current budgets of the 22 separate agencies which the Homeland Security Department will replace, not the cost of implementing the new department.
If we truly want to defeat the terrorists, we need both a strong offense and defense. Our troops in Afghanistan provided the offense, and the Homeland Security Department will be a good first line of defense.
Keith Platfootstudent in engineering
