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It was great relief last week when I read that we have a
new Office of Security and Preparedness which will operate
under Sue Mencer, an expert on terrorism and a former FBI
agent. As Gov. Bill Owens explained it, they want to do
everything possible to make Coloradans feel safe and
secure.
It's about time. When I woke up Thursday morning, white powder covered everything in sight, and more was falling from the sky -- perhaps being dropped by one or more airliners that had been commandeered by unfriendly forces.
As usual, the authorities were telling us that there was no reason to panic. But in past attacks, this stuff has killed friends who had the misfortune to be caught outdoors when the deadly white powder suddenly came at them.
And I certainly wasn't feeling safe and secure,
since I was supposed to go to Breckenridge that night, and
this white powder can thoroughly disrupt our transportation
systems. Drivers can find themselves suddenly blinded by
it, or totally disoriented by a collateral effect known as
a white out.
Road surfaces that are normally stable can quickly force vehicles into spins and plunges. Customary travel routes are often closed as a result of these attacks, and even when they are open, they can be constricted so that travelers face long and frustrating delays.
Clearly this disruptive and sometimes lethal white powder is a threat to our safety and security, and we can all hope that our state government and aggressively protects us from this noxious white powder and those who profit from it.
That's just one threat. Our communications system is also under attack. For example, last summer the state government spent millions of dollars laying fiber-optic cable along various rural highway corridors. The plan, we were told at the time, was to improve communication between courthouses and the like, but this secure high-speed broad-band system would also be available to the general public once it had been connected to our local telephone systems.
At the time, our local telephone provider planned to sell our exchange, along with 16 other rural Colorado exchanges, to a company called Citizens Communications, based in Stamford, Conn. Citizens had agreed to invest $20 million in improving the rural exchanges, and there was talk that the fiber-optic link was part of the improvements.
But Citizens pulled the plug, charging that the seller had misrepresented the assets.
The seller who is accused of lying? The company that isn't cooperating with the state's desire to improve the speed and security of our vital telecommunications infrastructure? It's an outfit named Qwest.
I don't want to sound bigoted, but we do have to be
alert these days, and it's a fact that words of Middle
Eastern origin -- words like qat
and al Qaida
and qirsh
-- employ a Q
without a U.
I hope our state's new Office of Security and Preparedness
will look into this connection, and arrest anyone there
who's been standing in the way of speedy and secure
communications in Colorado.
And while they're at it, I've got to admit that I've often felt rather frightened -- perhaps even terrorized -- when I've received certain items of mail. To tell you the truth, I'm often afraid to even open them.
These scary letters bear the return addresses of either law firms that might be attempting to stifle my constitutional rights of free expression, or of governmental revenue agencies which appear to be extorting money to pursue their dubious schemes.
I'm sure I'm not the only Coloradan who would feel safer if our Security Office would just ban such frightening correspondence, and for those letters that did somehow sneak through, the state could send around a truck to collect those letters, unopened, and arrange for their safe destruction in one of those high-temperature incinerators that vaporizes whatever you through into it.
Until Sept. 11, many Americans had believed they were safe from invasion while they were on American soil. I can't speak for the rest of the country, but I do know that around here, the invasion had already begun.
Many of the invaders talked in a peculiar way -- sort of
like the characters on the cartoon King of the Hill
-- and they flew a foreign flag that had only one star.
Some of them have been constructing gated compounds, so as
to keep their activities secret. They also tend to
undermine American security by driving huge gas-guzzling
vehicles that increase our need to import petroleum from
unstable regions.
These invaders certainly seem worthy of further investigation. And when you combine that potential menace with the other threats like the white powder and the scary mail and the deliberate decay of our telecommunications system, then we can only hope that the new Colorado Office of Security and Preparedness goes right to work to eliminate these dangers so it will be ready to face the new challenges that will inevitably confront us.
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