THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, July 29, 1996 TAG: 9607290041
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: 54 lines
One of the more majestic sights the Republic offers is partisan leaders closing ranks against its foes.
As occurred Saturday after an early morning bombing by terrorists of Centennial Olympic Park.
First on TV came a grim-faced President Clinton declaring: ``We will track them down. We will bring them to justice.''
He had phoned Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, who came wheeling into place - Dole calling for support not as Democrats or Republicans but as Americans, and Gingrich crying, ``It takes courage to be free and an obligation to stand up to bullies.''
Only last week Gingrich had denounced Clinton. Now he pronounced the president's message ``very well done, exactly appropriate.''
More wise, nodding heads appeared, elephants massing in a bulky line shoulder to shoulder.
Foremost among them Georgia's U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, expressing trenchant good sense, thereby arousing in listeners renewed regret that he is retiring.
Praising the fusion of federal, state, and local law enforcement, he said that to give up the Games would encourage other terrorists. They would be detected, he pledged, ``sooner rather than later.''
For 45 years Americans had lived under the high risk of nuclear war that would have obliterated the country in an hour and a half.
Now, he said, we had to be just as resolute with terrorists on the home front. In tightening security, we can do better in getting intelligence ``even if we have to get it from very bad folks.'' One way, he said, would be to permit a ``roving wiretap'' to follow an individual rather than confining it to just one phone.
With Sens. Richard Lugar and Pete Domenici, Nunn is working on a bill aimed at containing within the former Soviet Union the means for chemical and biological warfare.
Hearing Nunn, some Americans must have been reminded how they dismissed during the Republican primaries Lugar's warnings of world nuclear annihilation.
If that threat is not removed, America, 10 years hence, might come to look back at the pipe bomb as being of a simpler time.
Sen. Arlen Specter, casting blame in a broad fling, intoned that the anti-terrorism bill had been delayed a year before passage. He failed to note that Clinton's bill had been weakened in the House. One deleted measure, opposed by the gun lobby, would have required manufacturers to put chemical markers in explosive products.
Sen. Patrick Leahy said, quietly, that no country can challenge our country openly, so some will continue to try to do so in stealth, bypassing one well-protected objective to hit another unguarded target elsewhere ``to make a point.''
Congress should block loopholes it left open for terrorists. by CNB