The velvet glove of martial law?

On Friday, March 16th President Obama continued the breakdown of the Bill of Rights started with the Patriot Act in 2001. That is the opinion of much of the Internet, and a quick read of Executive Order -- National Defense Resources Preparedness seems to confirm it. But such things seldom occur in a vacuum, and this is no exception. The text is basically an update of executive orders going back to 1950, including EO's by Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

I haven't read the full order, but I've read enough of it to know that I could easily, if I wanted to, write a long, point by point blog on the potential dangers of each section. The language would be easy to use for fearmongering. But the fact is, to take any one section of the economy under complete government control would require not just an executive order, but a clear and present danger of a type I'm not sure anyone could have been convinced existed even immediately after September 11, 2001. To create true martial law over the entire country would be far more difficult. It could probably be done, but it would probably require more resources than are available without pulling troops home from foreign posts - assuming the troops would go along with it.

The reality is that any competent entity, public or private, will have disaster preparedness documents. That's what this executive order does. It spells out who is in charge of what in the event of natural or manmade disasters. It makes some changes to take recent developments into account, but does very little to significantly change what was done by earlier presidents.

Like any other leader, President Obama has done plenty of things to disagree with and fight about. This just isn't one of them.

Goodbye, Osama bin Laden

Originally posted 05/02/2011 on lubbockonline.com

Osama bin Laden has been killed after almost a decade in hiding. What does that mean? In the end, not much. It is an intelligence coup, one that, in terms of the difficulty of finding Mr. bin Laden is almost the counter-balance to the blunders that allowed 9/11 to happen. In terms of national security we will have higher risks when travelling to the Middle East for a while, our embassies and companies in the Middle East will be at greater risk of attack, and there will likely be more attempts to get a successful suicide bomber on a plane.

Bill Brenner on the CSO blog believes that bin Laden's death won't change much, and that's actually a good thing. Bill recently made a trip to Ground Zero in New York and was offended that people seemed to have forgotten what happened there. But it didn't take him long to realize that they hadn't forgotten, they had paid their greatest tribute to the victims of Osama bin Laden that could be paid (my words). They had refused to let Osama succeed in his primary goal. As much as our government has been affected by fear of terrorists, the people of New York City had moved past the attack and gone on with their lives. As has the rest of the country. We have not allowed terrorist to terrorize us. So in that sense, Osama bin Laden was a failure. Despite his greatest success and the attempts of many to use it to take away the personal liberties U.S. citizens have always enjoyed, we are still a nation of free men, not a police state. As long as we are Americans, that will not change.

I am not saying that President Obama, the intelligence community and our military don't deserve thanks and praise for killing Osama bin Laden. They do. He needed to be taken out. The fact that another will take his place doesn't change that. The fact that 9/11 was as much our ineptitude as it was his planning doesn't change that. Osama bin Laden attacked our country, and we didn't rest until he paid for that. Though administrations changed, though guiding political philosophy changed, we did not forget what Osama bin Laden had done and we did not rest until he paid. That also will not change.

That is a good thing.