"Marco Leon" mmleon(at)yahoo.com wrote in :

Anyone who knows anything about national security knows that a
terrorist will not be likely caught at the scene minutes before the
act.

Is this all "window dressing?" Sure it is. But it's a relatively small
price to pay to enjoy the freedom we have. Let's just hope the real
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That depends...

Part of the price we're paying is, for example, the Patriot Act, which
affords police the right to arrest you and hold you indefinitely without
charging you, without an appeals process, and without the checks and
balances that this nation was founded on. Basically, it's Martial Law
without any restrictions, and it is up to the individual "soldiers" to
implement it fairly. How such a thing could be considered a tactic of a
Champion of Freedom is beyond me.

keepers of our security that are behind the scenes are doing their job.

This would have been a better bet. If instead of spending 50 Billion
Dollars in Iraq, we should have spent that money on building, staffing, and
promoting a communications system (tip line, maybe?) that allows our
intelligence officials to properly handle, investigate, and take seriously,
for example, calls from Flight Instructors who claimed their flight
students were behaving suspiciously because they only wanted to learn to
fly a 747, but didn't want to learn to take off or land, then maybe I'd buy
into that plan!

I'm not sure what the right tactic is, but I don't think breaching the
trust of the people is a good one... Especially when you have government
officials scaring the public with talk about "terrorist chatter" in the
same breath as they are trying to make the public "feel safer"...