President Bush is Dirty Harry Callahan

by Jim Kouri, CPP After days of carping by Democrats, some Republicans and news reporters over NSA spying, the mainstream news media are piling on the Bush Administration with a new revelation that says more about liberals than it does about our Commander-in-Chief. According to the Los Angeles Times, almost immediately after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that left over 2,500 bodies laying in the rubble of what used to be the World Trade Center, and left over 200 bodies laying in the rubble of part of the Pentagon, FBI agents secretly monitored radiation levels at Islamic mosques, businesses and homes for several years in large cities to determine whether nuclear or chemical bombs were being assembled. Notice how the Bush Administration is always "secretly" doing things? As if normal clandestine operations are conducted out in the open. The Los Angeles Time reported, "The disclosure, following the revelation a week ago that the government has secretly (there's that word secretly, again) spied on US citizens without court permission, angered a number of US Muslim leaders. They cited a Supreme Court ruling three months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in which the justices rejected such government monitoring." "All Americans should be concerned about the apparent trend toward a two-tiered system of justice, with full rights for most citizens and another diminished set for Muslims," said Nihad Award, an official of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation's largest Muslim civil liberties group. (By the way, the Los Angeles Times should ask Dr. Daniel Pipes about CAIR being merely a "civil liberties group -- he can use a good laugh.) But Justice Department officials said the monitoring is lawful. They said investigators have used special equipment to gauge radiation levels at homes, warehouses and religious centers of some Muslim groups, and that the testing is sometimes carried out in or near parking lots and driveways -- areas the government believes to be public property. So let me get this right: If the Democrats were in power and we had President Al Gore, there would have been no NSA spying on communications between terrorists in the Middle East and their operatives in the United States? The Gore Administration would have prohibited the FBI teams from monitoring Muslim groups for radioactive materials? What other actions wouldn't they have taken? Would we have had hundreds of agents writing thousands of affidavits in order to obtain warrants? Would we have depended on judges -- who recently ruled that terrorists have a right to access the US criminal justice system -- to make decisions regarding national security? We can only surmise what the Gore Administration would have done in the days following the 9-11 attacks. But based on his former boss' actions, I don't think Gore would have done much. Recall how President Clinton, after two embassies were bombed in 1998, shot some cruise missiles at tents in the desert and announced that he destroyed the terrorists' infrastructure. Fox News' Fred Barnes incredulously asked, "What infrastructure? A few tents in the desert?" Or the time he blew up a facility in Iraq that he suspected was used to create chemical weapons, making certain to do it at night so as not to kill the scientists who were creating these weapons. I remember the New York Times applauding Clinton for his "restraint" in not killing the very guys capable of producing weapons of mass destruction. I imagine that only some poor schmuck janitor met his maker that night. I believe it's safe to assume, Al Gore as Commander-in-Chief would have taken decisive action and set up a war room committee to discuss what retaliatory actions the US should take against Al-Qaeda in the days after 9-11. And you can bet, based on Gore's history of being a bloviating windbag, that his panel would talk and talk and talk. Maybe he might have launched some cruise missiles. Perhaps he would have made a few arrests followed by high profile trials of suspected Al-Qaeda operatives in the United States. Al Gore believes that the biggest threat to the world is global warming and a President Gore would boast that he will not allow terrorists to distract him from his primary mission -- to decrease carbon emissions in the United States. The war on emissions trumps the war on terrorism. I might be wrong, but I don't have much faith in what a Democrat administration would do after a devastating terrorist attack. They would do what they've always done: treat the attacks as a criminal justice issue instead of a war issue while talking the American people to death. These are America's intellectual giants and as such they have to keep reminding us that they're intellectual giants by talking to us until we reach the point where we start slitting our own wrists with razors. I remember right after the attacks in New York City on that sunny September day when my liberal friends were so scared, some of them actually attended church services. A few were so shaken, they spent an inordinate amount of time in New York pubs and taverns boozing away their fears. And President Bush sensed that fear in Americans -- liberals, conservatives and moderates, all were fearful in those dark hours. Perhaps he could have responded in a more politically correct way, but Bush obviously decided to do whatever it took to protect Americans from further devastation and death. He didn't just talk the talk, he walked the walk. Bush reminds this writer of Inspector Dirty Harry Callahan. His bosses would carp about his disregard for procedure and he'd just stare at them with those cold, hard eyes that revealed his contempt for these empty suits. It's similar to the way Bush looks at the Washington press corps. Dirty Harry wanted to get the bad guys and would do whatever it took and then some. In one scene, he had to find a little girl buried alive by a madman before her air supply was exhausted. While chasing the sicko he shot the sleazebag in his leg. Then he allowed the bad guy to lay on the ground writhing in pain and bleeding profusely, demanding he confess where the kid was buried. Talk about "degrading" interrogation techniques -- Senator John McCain would have suffered a cardiac attack had he been Dirty Harry's boss. If a bunch of thugs killed Dirty Harry's loved ones and threatened to kill others, you can bet the farm he'd be out on the streets hunting them down as if they were rabid animals. On September 11, 2001, the terrorists attacked the country George Bush loves. They killed almost 3,000 citizens whom George Bush loved if only because they were Americans. I watched his televised speech following the attacks. I watched as his eyes welled up with tears over the horrors he saw in New York, Washington, DC and Pennsylvania. And Al-Qaeda threatened to kill more and to destroy more of Bush's beloved America. And from that day on, George Bush became Dirty Harry Callahan. I'll never forget when liberal friends told me -- and they never admitted it again -- "thank God Bush won the election." They instinctively knew the alternative would have been a disaster. We needed a Dirty Harry Callahan, not the television detectives from the Law & Order television trilogy, who spout liberal talking points every five minutes. We need George "Dirty Harry" Bush Jim Kouri, CPP is currently fifth vice-president of the National Association of Chiefs of Police. He's former chief at a New York City housing project in Washington Heights nicknamed "Crack City" by reporters covering the drug war in the 1980s. In addition, he served as director of public safety at a New Jersey university and director of security for several major organizations. He's also served on the National Drug Task Force and trained police and security officers throughout the country. He writes for many police and security magazines including Chief of Police, Police Times, The Narc Officer and others. He's a staff writer for New Media Alliance (thenma.org), and he's a columnist for TheConservativeVoice.Com, AmericanDaily.Com, MensNewsDaily.Com, MichNews.Com, and he's syndicated by AXcessNews.Com. He's appeared as on-air commentator for over 100 TV and radio news and talk shows including Oprah, McLaughlin Report, CNN Headline News, MTV, Fox News, etc. His book Assume The Position is available at Amazon.Com, Booksamillion.com, and can be ordered at local bookstores. If you wish to sign up for his intelligence reports, write to JimKouriReports@aol.com. Kouri's own website is located at http://jimkouri.us