A "blue-ribbon" commission on terrorism issued its report this weekend, just in time for the Sunday morning wonk-fests and top-slot status in the newspapers. These bright folks said that it's really, really frightening that one person might enter the U.S. with a nuclear bomb in a suitcase and obliterate the better part of Houston in a flash.

Okay, so most of us wouldn't miss Houston. But I'll agree with the basic premise. The prospect of a nuclear terrorist action would scare the hell out of me. Or it would, if I, or anyone, could really do anything about it.

Back in the days of the Cold War, I was convinced that the world would end in a nuclear cataclysm. Instigated by us, not by the Russians. The Russians never scared me. How can you be scared of people who would pay a year's salary for a pair of Levi's? But when Reagan and his cowboys hit the White House, I was sure the bombs would fly at any time.

And so were a lot of other people. There was "The Day After" and a thousand other apocalyptic "movie events." Survivalist fiction morphed into nuclear winter McGyver tales. Yeah, that stuff spooked me. So did the "we might as well strip mine the earth, since Jesus is coming again real soon" statements from some of the most important people in the country. Those folks were crazy. They would drop a bomb, particularly if they thought it might bring about Armageddon and the Rapture.

But that didn't happen. It could have, but people aren't that crazy. And while I would guess there are plenty of people committed enough to act as suicide nuclear bombers, even Osama bin Laden wouldn't approve of such a thing. He saw how we reacted to the conventional bombings of a couple minor embassies. Imagine if he nuked Cedar Rapids. We'd send a few million troops and a few billion bombs over to the Middle East and pave the Earth trying to wipe the bastard out. Yes, nuking east Iowa would be one hell of a bang. But if the result is enslavement or death for all of your people, well, that's an action that doesn't make sense.

Still, it's always possible that someone is nutty enough to attempt such a thing on their own. Take Timothy McVeigh and his band of merry pranksters. I'm sure there are more folks like him out there.

That's where the remedies proposed by this commission get silly. The commission suggested, among other things, monitoring the activities of every foreign student (there's more than a million) and allowing the CIA to give money to anyone it wants without vetting them first.

How would you like to win a Rhodes Scholarship and head over to England, only to have to file a piece of paper every week promising never to steal any English brewing technology? Oh, and submit urine and blood samples. Not to mention having your course schedules examined by M.I.5.

Not a chance. Americans don't have to stand for that, right? Well, see, not if this commission gets its way.

Civil libertarians and Arab-Americans are justifiably outraged by this reports ideas. But these "remedies" don't fall apart at the civil liberty level. It's more basic than that. We can't afford to do all of this monitoring. Oh, the CIA will do whatever it wants (in the most inept fashion possible, of course), but we just have no need for a foreign student oversight bureaucracy. After some 30 years, we're finally questioning the war on drugs. This goes into the same territory. We're fighting an enemy that might be no larger than a single person.

A government can watch all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but it can't watch all of the people all of the time. And it shouldn't even try. I'm not saying we should bury our heads in the sand, but let's not destroy America while trying to keep it "safe." That's just dumb.

Jon Worley is closely watched by store personnel every time he shops in Dilliards. Which is why he hasn't stepped foot in one of those stores in five years.