Monday, April 17, 2006

Have we forgotten Oklahoma City?

There is an article on Yahoo news that discusses the effect of Oklahoma City bombing and whether the American people forgot about these events. The article can be viewed in this webpage: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060416/ap_on_re_us/bombing_anniversary

I brought up a point in class that all the big cities i.e. NYC, Washington D.C., L.A. among others receive all of the funds for combat of terrorism. It is understandable because attacks, especially from foreign sources are more likely to happen at places like this, but domestic attacks can happen anywhere. As Dr. Farley said, the largest terorrist attack before 9/11 in the U.S. was in fact in Oklahoma City. It was done by a domestic source.
In a recent movie I watched, a CBS original. I do not happen to remember the name of the movie (if somebody knows feel free to name it), but terrorist planted a bomb in a football game in D.C. The terrorist demanded money and the release of an Arab guy actually. Everybody thought that it was an attack by foreign terrorists, Arab guys were targeted in the stadium, but it turned out that the terrorists were depressed American guys working for an organization. While this was obviously a movie, but it is realistic that there are domestic threats of terrorism. In my opinion money needs to be allocated to more places in the U.S., because attacks can happen in New York City, Oklahoma City, and it can happen in cities we do not expect like Lexington.
I also currently think that Americans now do not think about domestic threats but instead focus only on international threats. According to the article there are 803 hate groups in the U.S. Some of these people are capable of anything.
I also think that there need to be better public education all over the U.S. regarding terrorism. In Israel, young kids are taught how to detect a suspicious behaivor or suspicious objects, etc... It definetely helped prevent attacks. While the threat in U.S. is considerable lower, there is still a threat and it is important to educate everybody, not just law enforcement.
While I do think that U.S. is better equipped to deal with terrorism after 9/11 and there is more public awareness. However,I do think that more could have been done in the past 4.5 years to lower the risks of terrorist attacks, either domestic or from international sources. We simply can not ignore the domestic risks that exist, in every city, not just the biggest 5 or 10 cities in the U.S.

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