A Column At The York Daily Record says Ed Meese led to an investigation.
“His statement merited investigation. Just what were librarians doing to fight terrorism? Shushing suspected terrorists for talking too loud in the reference department? Braining terrorists with Tom Clancy novels? Forbidding terrorists from checking out more than three items at a time?”
The author set off for the library to “see whether the librarians were at all interested in fighting terrorism.”
“And sure enough, I saw librarians doing absolutely nothing to fight terrorism. They were doing librarian kinds of things, such as looking stuff up, shelving books, checking out stuff. None of them — none — were doing anything at all to fight terrorism. None were scouring the globe for Osama bin Laden. None were invading Iraq. None were even spying on American citizens to see whether they were reading subversive materials such as Al Franken’s new book.“
this is a ha-ha story…
But it does spread some false stuff, IMHO.
Who’s to say that spreading democracy, freedom, and education does not reduce terrorism? The freer and more just a country is, the less likely it is to have terrorists (one of the reasons you see rising domesti c terrorism in the US).
Librarians support this work.
Having secret police and the like suppresses some terrorist groups, and makes the others more violent, and more highly skilled. The real work comes from making them irrelevant, and making it hard fo r them to recruit, and removing tacit support for the groups from marginalized sections of the population.
Librarians most definitely contribute to removing terrorist threats. But it’s not something you can easily point to: you can’t say, “we arrested a nd shot four terrorists”. Which is the only thing those type of people like to say is ‘fighting’ terrorism. Those type of people also don’t count the fact that they’ve just *created* more terrorists, and terrorist supporters with every imprisonment, and every execution. Directly, those “terrorist”‘s families become hostile to the state. (assuming of course you actually got the right people, and not fall guys, and not agencies out to up their target goals of terrorists, etc). Indirectly, people with b rains begin to see themselves as the people who were executed. And decide they may as well strike back before they are accused, and executed.
So I’d argue those idiots are more interested in the symptoms of terrorism (hey, we can confisticate, have secret police, big brother programs, money to dole out to new organizations (old ones get infiltrated), etc, etc) than to the actual elimination of violence.
— Ender, Duke_of_URL