The principal achievement of the liberal politicians during the last three years is their crippling of our internal security. The result, whether they intended it or not, has been to make our country safe for terrorists and unsafe for law-abiding citizens.
Such an unremitting smear campaign has been waged on the FBI and the memory of J. Edgar Hoover that Director Clarence Kelley has warned that the FBI’s effectiveness is threatened. The CIA has been neutralized from protecting American interests abroad, while CIA station chiefs are identified and exposed to danger and death.
The Subversive Activities Control Board, the House Committee on Internal Security, and the internal security division of the Justice Department have all been eliminated. Congressional liberals are now closing in on the Senate Internal Security Sub committee.
The assault on our intelligence-gathering and security agencies is based on the twin fallacies that surveillance and snooping have been too energetic in the past, and that there isn’t any danger from subversives to justify such invasions of our privacy. Both propositions are false.
The two assassination attempts on President Ford and the recent bombing of LaGuardia airport are only the most dramatic examples of the hundreds of terrorist episodes that have taken place in the last couple of years. In 1974 there were 2,041 bombing incidents in the United States, many of them linked to terrorists.
The FBI estimates that there are about 15,000 terrorists in the United States, organized into 21 different groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, and the Manson group.
It is not going to help the eleven people killed at LaGuardia to know that the criminals are eventually arrested. We need in ternal security agencies to discover terrorists before they plant their bombs, not afterwards. This can be done by the infiltration of subversive groups, wiretapping, stop-and-frisk laws, and sur veillance of suspicious conspiracies.
I am much more concerned about my right to stay alive while traveling through airports than I am about law enforcement agencies eavesdropping on my telephone conversations. I don’t mind in the least having my purse and baggage searched and X-rayed. I don’t even mind a body search before boarding — if that is the price to pay for freedom from hijackers. I prefer my disasters in the movies, not in real life.
Supreme Court decisions have already relieved terrorists from worry about capital punishment. Now the liberal politicians have freed them from detection by our security agencies.
The plain fact is that there are terrorists, nuts, criminals, and subversives walking around loose with sticks of dynamite and other weapons, and we need internal security agencies to discover them before they start the explosion timer.
