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And I took the time to type the freakin' thing, here are some of my favorite quotes from that book. The second set is especially chilling because it sounds like Kerry is talking about 9/11, even though he wrote this stuff in 1997.
Anyone who thinks he's going to be soft on terrorism just ain't paying attention.
SELECTED QUOTES FROM “A NEW WAR” by John Kerry
My investigation of BCCI, a $23 billion international financial institution, played a key role in shutting down the bank and exposing how dirty money and corruption flowed together in North American and European capitals, as well as in the developing world. The BCCI investicgation took me deeper into the clandestine world of money launderers, drug traffickers, arms merchants, terrorists, and covert nuclear programs. During the dozens of hearings I held, I was able to expose a lot about this hidden world. But I felt that in the day-to-day headlines, some of the scope of what I was seeing had yet to be adequately described.
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We were not sufficiently prepared for the first real wave of terror that broke out in America and we are not yet prepared for the next. Along with crime, commerce, and communication, terror is going global.
The terrorists of the late ‘90s and early twenty-first century will use more sophisticated means and thus pose a more virulent threat to the health of democratic societies by increasingly forcing them to trade liberty for security.
Though this country will continue to face danger from religious extremeists, homegrown anarchists, and perennial lone-bomber types, they are all in some sense “old news.” The terrorists of tomorrow will be better armed and organized. It will take only one mega-terrorist event in any of the great cities of the world to change the world in a single day. As we shall see, that event could be nuclear or could just as easily occur on the Internet, but whether our sense of secure well-being ends with a bang or a whimper will not be the cause of debate.
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On the clipper chip:
As Wired, a magaziine for aficionados of technology, has declared, “Trusting the government with your privacy is like having a Peeping Tom install your window blinds.” But one would be hard-pressed to find a single grieving relative of those killed in the bombings of the World Trade Center in New York or the federal building in Oklahoma City who would not have gladly sacrificed a measure of personal privacy if it could have saved a loved one.
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Illegals poison the political admosphere for legal immigrants. In the United States, they have been responsible for increasingly punitive laws against all immigrants, laws that would deny immigrant children schooling and health care. We must continue to refuse to punish those who come to the United States legally, and separate them from those who come in uninvited and in violation of our laws. But we must also be much more tough-minded regarding the illegals. Although children, whoever they are, must be educated, fed, and housed while they are here, if illegal they must all be sent back, along with the rest of their families, to the land from which they have come; that is the only means of protecting the legal immigration system and our law itself.
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Had I written this book even four years ago, my warning about crime and terrorism might have been dismissed as a jeremiad. Unfortunately, the bombings of the World Trade Center, the federal building in Oklahoma City, and the complex in Dhahran have provided me with examples I wish I did not have so readily at hand.
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Just as it is abundantly clear that America cannot go it alone against global crime and terrorism, it is equally obvious that only America has the power and prestige to champion that cause, forge the alliances, lead the crusade.
We’ve done it twice before -- in World War II and in the fifty-year struggle against communism. and we must do it a third time, and for the same reasons as before, so that those who would impose their will through deception and violence are vanquished or defanged.
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Democracies are notoriously slow to rouse. But one roused, their ability to cooperate with one another, to unify their will, intelligence, and resources, can never be rivaled by that of their enemies, wheter political or criminal, for their enemies’ alliances are always founded on fear, compulsion, and temporary advantage. But the war we are fighting now is unlike wars of the past. Nondemocracies must join with us in this effort.
The most serious task of all, however, remains ours alone. The reason is clear. The greatest deficit in our fight against crime is our demand for drugs. Almost 70 percent of all our crime is drug related. Put simply: We are not losing the war on drugs -- we have yet to fight a war!
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