Terrorist’s Plot Foiled in Dallas, Texas

What happened in Dallas, Texas yesterday, September 24, 2009, made me realize just how vulnerable to terrorists attacks we really are.  All Americans unfortunately became aware of that fact when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon where attacked. But you really don’t get it, I can see now, until it comes very close to home, like down the road.

I live in Waxahachie, Texas, my hometown. There is a tiny town about 10 miles south of here called Italy, Texas. What do you think I felt when I learned that Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, a 19-year-old Jordanian who was living in Italy, Texas and working illegally as a clerk in a convenience store there, intended to blow up Fountain Place, the biggest building in downtown Dallas? What is that word everyone uses now days to describe something you can’t wrap your brain around; surreal? Yeah, that’s how it felt, surreal. And scary as hell.

Here is the full story from the Dallas Morning News.

The story is being covered all over the news and the internet, and you can read the Dallas, Texas version at the link above, so let’s talk about some of the details instead, like the fact that it is much easier now to see why conservatives across America, and Republicans in Congress, are throwing such a fit about illegal immigrants.

But before I get into that, I just want to say what a sense of peace it gave me, watching this on the news last night, and knowing how hard our national security works and what a fantastic job they are doing of protecting us from terrorists.  We never knew a thing until the threat was over.

Here’s a short recap of what happened: Undercover security agents have been talking to Hosam Maher Husein Smadi online since March of this year. He was a member of a radical online group, and agents joined, befriending him and learning of his plans to blow up the Dallas skyscraper. They tried repeatedly to talk him out of it. When he refused to change his mind, agents set up a sting operation and caught him red-handed, pushing the button he thought would blow up the building, when in fact, the material he believed to be lethal was not, thanks to our National Security.  That’s pretty much it in a nutshell.

This incident made me see that this is probably going on across our nation much more often than we would like to think. And that’s scary. Which brings me to the issue of illegal immigrants.  Hosam Maher Husein Smadi was working in American as an illegal alien. And what makes this so damn frustrating is that it’s our own fault in a sense. We have allowed every Tom, Dick, and Harry foreigner to enter our country, still trying to hang onto that 200-year-old sentiment, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free. ” That WAS what our country was founded on. I guess we should somewhere along the way have added,  ”So I can hire them to work cheap.”

The above paragraph is a huge deal to me. For I have been pointing out our country’s original take on immigrants to many conservatives who were yelling about the situation with illegal immigrants in America. Now I see that there needs to be a major overhaul of the way we deal with immigration. That could even mean an overhaul of the principles our country was founded on. Well, if that’s what it takes.

Don’t make me turn Republican!