Thursday - September 20, 2007

2006 Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture

I’ve been listening to Federalist Society podcasts while working. (iPods are great!) Today I heard the 2006 Barbara Olson Memorial Lecture from last November. This was the sixth annual lecture. The first was given by her husband Ted Olson. This time the speaker was Vice-President Dick Cheney. After opening remarks about the Society and Mrs. Olson, he gets on with the topic–the war on terror. (I still hate that name for it.) He gives one of the best descriptions of the enemy I’ve heard.

When you’re dealing with hidden adversaries, you have to spend a lot of time speculating on what their next movements or their targets might be. But when it comes to their beliefs and to their long-term objectives, we have no need to speculate. They have laid it out in detail for the entire world to see.

The terrorists have adopted the pretense of an aggrieved party, claiming to represent the powerless against modern imperialists. The fact is they’re at war with every development of classical liberalism in the past twelve centuries. They serve an ideology that rejects tolerance and denies freedom of conscience. They would condemn women to servitude, gays to death, minority religions to persecution. An ideology so backward, so violent, so hateful, can take hold only by force or intimidation, and so those who refuse to bow to the tyrants face brutalization or murder—and no group or person is exempt.

And it is they, the terrorists, who have ambitions of empire. Their goal in the broader Middle East is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which to launch attacks against governments that refuse to meet their demands. Their ultimate aim—again, one that they boldly proclaim—is to establish a caliphate covering a region from Spain, across North Africa, through the Middle East and South Asia, all the way around to Indonesia. They have proclaimed, as well, the goal of arming themselves with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons, to destroy Israel, to intimidate all Western countries, and to cause mass death in the United States. One of the terrorists believed to have planned the 9/11 attacks said he hoped the event would signal the beginning of the end of America. They hate us, they hate our country, they hate the liberties for which we stand. And they hit us first. And we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.

Later we find out why the Left hates the NSA ‘domestic surveillance program’…

The activities conducted under this authorization have, without any doubt, helped to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against America and saved American lives ... Yet none of these considerations was persuasive to a federal district court in the state of Michigan, which ruled three months ago that the NSA program violated the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The court found, among other factors, that warrantless surveillance of terrorist-related communications would cause irreparable injury to the American Civil Liberties Union…

Having seen the latest bin Laden tape, I can understand that. 

Well worth a read or a listen.

Posted by Christopher     on 09/20/2007 at 07:14 PM   
Filed Under: • Homeland-Security •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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