Back from the Caribbean

Well, made it back from Antigua, even saw Eric Clapton's house, and the famous Crossroads Center where Brittany Spears checked in and lasted 24 hours before bailing out. Sounds like her marriage, as our catamaran captain remarked. Now I'm lobster red and serpent like in my skin peeling, I must say I'm feeling very refreshed. If it takes what my wife and I did, i.e. lounge around and be waited on hand and foot for seven days and nights to be refreshed, so be it. It was a special treat for our tenth anniversary. I was thinking a lot while away about liberties and the like and was thinking......do we trust the Jack Bauers to dispense justice for us on their terms, or do we go by the letter of the law? But wait a minute; laws are made by people who do what they think is best for the nation. Is the only difference "checks and balances", or are they the same? Perhaps accountability is the answer. Who are the Jack Bauers accountable to? Well, no-one, it seems. Of course in real life, those of us who have worked in law enforcement (like I did for 22+ years) know that doing the arrest, or operation is the easy part, and the paperwork, lawyers meetings, evidence gathering, witness interviews, consultations and reviews with senior officers and more can take literally several months. This is of course why 24 jumps a year or two between episodes. In that time Jack and his buddies have been writing reports, statements and have been at court hearings. The reason why Jack Bauer doesn't exist in most of real life is that accountability brings with it the need to explain and justify every action. This is why terrorists are so successful. They just meet together, hatch up some nefarious plot over a snack and a hookah and then get some money from a sympathizer. They then just do their mission and don't care how many of them die, or others die, in the process. In Burma in World War II, the British Army suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese in the early part of the war. The British commanding officers got together. How did they lose? Well, the Japanese soldiers were ruthless and fearless, and showed total contempt for human life, their own, and their enemies. The British decided to train their troops to be even more ruthless than the Japanese, and that's how they defeated them. Whatever the Japanese soldiers did, the British did back to the Japanese, with steroids. The Japanese eventually wilted. Is there a lesson for us there with modern day terrorists? I personally think there is.

The Rabbi