The Hon. Dianne Feinstein
Senator from California
331 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington D. C. 20510
The Hon. Barbara Boxer
Senator from California
112 Hart Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
The Hon. Jane Harman
Congresswoman, 36th District
229 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
Dear Senator Feinstein, Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Harman:
Senator Feinstein, I met you when you were on the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco and I worked on affordable housing projects in Chinatown with CCHC.
Senator Boxer, I similarly met you when you were a Supervisor in Marin.
Congresswoman Harman, we met in Venice at one of the first coffees hosted for your first campaign.
I have followed all your careers with interest, and while we may not agree on all issues, I am thrilled to be represented by three capable and forceful women such as yourselves.
But I am writing all of you today – on September 11th – in response to the anniversary and to what I see we have done and left undone in the intervening year.
Overall, I believe that we are doing a terrible job. We are vacillating between belligerence without real menace and accommodation without action. You – the visible leadership in Washington – appear to those of us at home to be more concerned with political advantage and advancing pre-existing agendas than in securing the safety of our children. No one appears to be taking this with the level of seriousness or commitment that will be necessary to see our way through this.
I expect more.
The money used to kill our people came from the dollars we spent to fill our gas tanks. No one will take us seriously, nor should we be taken seriously, until we do something to reduce our dependence on imported energy and our use of energy overall. A gas tax to encourage reduced consumption has been avoided for decades, as our railroads become rights-of-way for fiber optics and our dependence on trucking and taste for SUV’s increases our thirst for oil. We will have to better exploit our own reserves, and the environmentalist in me is willing to trade away some measure of greater exploration and exploitation for meaningful overall reductions in consumption at the retail end.
We must continue to aggressively support Israel, both because the Israelis represent a model for democracy and development in the Middle East, and because Palestinian and Al-Quieda terrorists are brothers in ideology and in the means they are willing to use against the hated West. But there has to be some light at the end of the tunnel for the average Palestinian, and we should, independent of UNRWA, begin to find our own ways to encourage trade and education in the Palestinian territories, and begin to cultivate, support and protect the moderate people who live there and who are the real hope for peace.
As to Iraq, Senator Feinstein’s speech on September 5 was fine, to a point. I believe that it is important to build and keep alliances where possible, and certainly believe that an effective inspection regime (which we have never had – I will direct you to Charles Duelfer’s article in the September Arms Control Today – online at http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2002_09/duelfer_sept02.asp) should be tried before overwhelming military action. But the reality is that we have allowed a toxic hatred of America to become the platform autocratic, ineffective regimes use to keep themselves in power. And as long as we do that, there will be an endless crop of angry young men and women who can be armed with the weapons purchased with our money recycled, as it were, from gasoline into violence. Iraq is a key and vulnerable link in the team of nations that is forming to oppose our interests in the world…and to do so by brutally oppressing the hopes and dreams of the average citizens who live there. Nothing short of absolute and unfettered access…not the kind of playacting that Scott Ritter saw (before his dramatic and unexplained conversion)…should keep us from enforcing the terms of the ceasefire agreed to by the Iraqi government at the conclusion of the war that they started. And opponents of an immediate invasion should be absolutely clear and resolute that absent such real and useful inspections, the terms of the ceasefire will be enforced by whatever means the Iraqi government makes necessary.
We must implement effective domestic security measures. I am friends with a number of members of the police and military forces, and their opinion, which I echo, is that we have a Potemkin Village of a security system…designed to look good on television or in front of your hearings, but of doubtful effectiveness. We are imposing massive, top-down bureaucratic structures in the hopes of solving critical problems…just as those kinds of structures are being proved relatively ineffective in the corporate world. In this month’s Atlantic magazine is an excellent article by Bruce Schneier on security. A few quotes:

The moral, Schneier came to believe, is that security measures are characterized less by their success than by their manner of failure. All security systems eventually miscarry in one way or another. But when this happens to the good ones, they stretch and sag before breaking, each component failure leaving the whole as unaffected as possible.

and

Few of the new airport-security proposals address this problem. Instead, Schneier told me in Los Angeles, they address problems that don’t exist. “The idea that to stop bombings cars have to park three hundred feet away from the terminal, but meanwhile they can drop off passengers right up front like they always have …” He laughed. “The only ideas I’ve heard that make any sense are reinforcing the cockpit door and getting the passengers to fight back.” Both measures test well against Kerckhoffs’s principle: knowing ahead of time that law-abiding passengers may forcefully resist a hijacking en masse, for example, doesn’t help hijackers to fend off their assault. Both are small-scale, compartmentalized measures that make the system more ductile, because no matter how hijackers get aboard, beefed-up doors and resistant passengers will make it harder for them to fly into a nuclear plant. And neither measure has any adverse effect on civil liberties.

What is needed is not a super-secret security apparatus locked away in bunkers while the rest of us walk through our lives in ignorance. What is needed is a system which empowers and informs the average citizen; the baggage clerk, the ticket agent, the average police officer on the street. Our expensive security apparatus didn’t do anything effective last year, the informed and active citizens on Flight 93 did. Help us all become informed and effective; trust us as we trust you.
I have two teenage sons and one in first grade; it is for their sake that we must sacrifice, must be smarter, and most of all, must be determined to bring these issues to a conclusion in our lifetime, not theirs.
This is a rare time to be in our government. You are each blessed and cursed by being in office now. My thoughts are with you, and my eyes and the eyes of my neighbors are on you.