Amen Lee. Amen.

From Right-Thinking

On the night of Wednesday, August 27, two men dressed as computer technicians and carrying tool bags entered the cargo processing and intelligence centre at Sydney International Airport.

The men, described as being of Pakistani-Indian-Arabic appearance, took a lift to the third floor of the Charles Ulm building on Link Road, next to the customs handling depot and the Qantas Jet Base.

They presented themselves to the security desk as technicians sent by Electronic Data Systems, the outsourced customs computer services provider which regularly sends people to work on computers after normal office hours.

After supplying false names and signatures, they were given access to the top-security mainframe room. They knew the room's location and no directions were needed.

Inside, they spent two hours disconnecting two computers, which they put on trolleys and wheeled out of the room, past the security desk, into the lift and out of the building.

The brazen theft has prompted Australia's top security agencies to conduct emergency damage audits amid fears that terrorists may have gained access to highly sensitive intelligence from the computers.

Note to the rest of the world: you are not safe from terrorism. You cannot appease it away. You cannot wish it away. You cannot cooperate with it or reason with it. It wants you dead. It wants you to beg for Allah's mercy while your wives and daughters are forced to wear the burqa. It wants the destruction of [what] all free men hold dear. Are you going to be up to the challenge?

Australia have bravely stood up to the task, and many will claim that by doing so they have opened themselves up to attacks that would not have otherwise occurred. This is naivety in the extreme, doing what Churchill described as "hoping the crocodile eats you last." Nobody is safe unless this cancer is excised from the world body as expeditiously as possible.

Are you up to the task? Or are your heads in the sand, ass pointed skyward, hoping it will all go away? Choose your place in history. Twenty years from now there will be an accounting. Where will your place be chronicled? I think Patton's famous speech sums up this question nicely.

"There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON'T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, "Well, your Granddaddy shoveled shit in Louisiana." No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, "Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-Bitch named Georgie Patton!"

All too many countries are all perfectly prepared to shovel shit in Louisiana, and that is pathetic.