Hitchens

Hitch is his usual excellent self:

One consequence of such clumsiness is to license the sinister rumor of a deliberately alarmist political agenda. This fourth-rate paranoia even made it onto the editorial page of the New York Times a few days ago, with Paul Krugman echoing an article from the New Republic that claimed an al-Qaida suspect would be held until his arrest could take away the spotlight from the Democratic Convention. (Quick—can you name the suspect? But then again—what can you remember about the convention? The two scintillating events seem to have canceled each other out.) Krugman has already defended Michael Moore's right to lie for a good cause, but this is taking emulation a little far.
The problem, as it is so often, is with public opinion itself. For some reason, we are all assumed to be demanding assurances. (We are also supposed to want a "memorial" in New York, for a war that has barely started yet, and to agree that random families of random victims should receive public money and also have more say in the deliberations on policy. Why is this? Who demanded it?) Opinion polls fatuously inquire which candidate's program will "make America safer."
You can see the consequences of this idiocy at any airport, any day. The last time I flew, I had to show my driver's license, and my boarding pass, three times. This tactic handily eliminates all those hijackers who have ever tried to board a plane without ID or without bothering to buy a ticket. (At my hometown airport of Washington Dulles, as a recent video has shown, three hijackers who boarded on Sept. 11 had taken the usual precaution of having tickets and ID but had not bothered to change their names from the ones on the FBI "terrorism watch-list.") The whole thing is done largely in order to create an impression of security, and the worst of it is watching your fellow passengers thanking those who pointlessly pat them down and who incidentally make sure that if there is a hijacker aboard, you have been as far as possible robbed of anything with which to defend yourself.

However, it's not very probable that the jihadists will use that precise tactic again, so an immense amount of expensive effort is now being deployed in deliberately looking the wrong way. Whereas, to search every train and ship passenger and every bridge-and-tunnel user would be, as we know, to bring our commerce and society to a halt and save the murderers the trouble of doing so. Meanwhile, the administration is giving a gigantic hostage to fortune in claiming that its policies at home and abroad are "making America safer." It will take only one atrocity to make that boast seem worse than hollow, and this in turn will tempt many liberals and Democrats into demagogy. ("They couldn't make you safer, but I can. … It's time to bring our boys home.") It's difficult to imagine a state of greater vulnerability, both physically and morally, and both at home and overseas. We can bring "our" boys home, but "their" soldiers are already here and in place, and training, and waiting. There will be further outrages and slaughters, all across this country and Europe, as there already are in the countries of Islamic civilization, and the crucial thing will be how we respond, not how we "predict" what is already certain or rehearse our whinings and complaints for when the blow falls.