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Anti-Terrorism Officials Are Regulating Us, Not Terrorists
You didn't get a virgin when you drew me as one of your political commentators, for I've been through the fires of Texas politics, including having been elected state agriculture commissioner. Among other duties, this office made me the regulator of such matters as pesticide use, the accuracy of gas pump gauges and even the sizing of eggs.
I can tell you from experience that wielding regulatory authority is both a blessing and a curse for political officials. You can do some real good for the public, but your best efforts can also make fast enemies of the regulatees.
So my general instruction to the staff was that we should not regulate just for the hell of it, just because we could. Rather, any rules we imposed should respond to a real need and should actually work - work in the sense that they would deliver the protection the public needs.
We had a little internal slogan to guide us: "When in doubt, try common sense."
I'd like to loan this slogan to the national authorities in charge of protecting us from terrorist attacks, for they seem determined to restrict the American people rather than actually to stop terrorists. In response to the deranged Nigerian who tried to blow up a passenger jet with his underwear on Christmas Day, they've done a collective regulatory knee-jerk that is kicking us ever deeper into the wilds of security silliness.
This was not their first knee-jerk. Thanks to the fizzled shoe bomb incident aboard a 2001 flight, they still require all of us who fly in our Land of the Free to bow to the gods of global terrorism before entering the terminal by removing our booties and putting our tiny tubes of toothpaste in little zippy bags. This ridiculous ritual, we're told, will fend off another shoe bomber.
But terrorists seem to be somewhat adaptive (gosh, who could've imagined it?), so the latest attack comes not from shoes, but from an al-Qaida guy's shorts.
The only way to stop this, cry the knee-jerkers, is to have authorities peek under every passenger's skivvies.
To allow airport screeners to do just that, corporate profiteers are peddling super-sophisticated x-ray machines with "superman eyes." You will have to stand in the scanner, and spread your legs and raise your arms in the arrest position to give your friendly screener a front-and-back, full-body look right through your clothes. Supposedly, faces will be blurred out, but body contours of every man, woman and child who flies will be on the screen - and some images almost certainly will pop up on Internet postings. "So what?" bark the authorities. Freedom comes at a price, and this new rule is all about us protecting you.
Really? Let's note that one of the big backers of the full-body technology is former homeland security honcho Michael Chertoff. In dozens of interviews he gave after the Christmas incident, Chertoff demanded nationwide deployment of these machines to stop more underwear attacks by terrorists. Now, guess whose Washington consulting firm represents Rapiscan Systems, one of the major contractors selling the machines to the government. Right. Chertoff's firm.
Rather than searching every one of us, officials need to be searching for actual terrorists, using old-fashioned intelligence-gathering and common-sense coordination to stop assailants before they even get to an airport. The Christmas Day bomber should never have gotten near that plane, for he was known by U.S. officials to be a terrorist threat.
How did they know? His own father told our officials about him last November! Yet, in a gross failure of inter-agency communications, no official revoked his visa or put him on the "no fly" list.
Our authorities want us to pay (in cash and liberties) for a whiz-bang technological gimmick that will enrich a couple of corporations, but will do nothing to stop the next thing the terrorists come up with. Let's raise common sense to high places. One group fighting this latest technological silliness can be reached at flyersrights.org.
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27 Comments so far
Show All"When all else fails, try common sense in foreign policy."
All of these troubles are due to AIPAC and jingos.
ALL these problems? How about the role of abject stupidity?
Gary
Humbaba, your comment is spot-on. Stop the unconditional support for Israeli apartheid to stop the “terrorist” attacks. I put the word “terrorist” in quotation marks, even though Hightower doesn’t, because most of the real world outside our blinkered reality regards us as the real terrorists. Therefore, anti-terrorism officials are merely doing what Hightower asks: when they regulate us, anti-terrorism officials are regulating terrorists.
Common sense in foreign policy will tell you this much: patriots put their own country’s interests first. Israeli politicians put Israeli interests first, and US politicians put Israeli interests first. Glaringly obvious conclusion: US foreign policy is self-defeating because US politicians are disloyal to their own country.
More and more of our liberties fall away as the velocity of our descent increases to a full-blown police state. George Orwell's prescient novel only had the date wrong.
I'm also reminded of that old movie "Cool Hand Luke" where Paul Newman's character tells the sadistic prison-camp superintendent after a particularly viscious beating, "Captain, I wish you would stop being so good to me."
--Tom Joad fka Cavedweller
Terrorists and the military industrial media complex have a symbiotic relationship.
Each terrorist incident creates additional opportunities for the complex to profit.
9/11 gave the Dubya Regime a license to steal, torture and kill, thereby handing terrorism an immediate victory. Nancy Pelosi's November 2006 declaration theat "impeachment is off the table" assured the Dubya Regime and its successors that the license to steal, torture and kill would have no expiration date.
The terrorists ARE winning by taking down the Bill of Rights and restricting those very freedoms we were once told was what the bad guys were seeking to destroy> We are doing it to ourselves in our utter fear.
Run for the Bunker! The enemy is us!
Gary
Not to mention the cost in dollars, productivity and self-esteem.
In our fear, we have come to the conclusion that no amount of money is too much to spend--and no amount of senseless, convoluted security is too much to implement--to chase the impossible dream of keeping us absolutely safe from retaliation by terrorists.
The terrorists have also laid bare how poverty-stricken we are when it comes to brave leadership. Our leaders are afraid, plain and simple. And in their fear, they magnify the fears of the public. Their entire anti-terrorist strategy is fear-based. It seeks to protect us from the dangerous terrorists rather than to seek bold ways to enhance respect for America in the world.
Slowly but surely the agenda of Osama Bin Laden is being systematically emplaced: destruction of confidence, destruction of commerce, destruction of trust in our leaders, the loss of the world's confidence in America, the exposure of America for the negative force it currently plays in the world. They flew a couple of planes into a couple of buildings. We took it from there, as Bin Laden knew we would.
So powerful was that first terror strike that it's no longer necessary for Al Qaeda to follow up with more strikes in order to induce mass panic and a public appetite for greater restrictions on our own freedom. All it takes is the POSSIBILITY of another attack, and the resulting confusion, chaos and panic among our leadership.
Where are our truly strong men? Not the ones who issue imperial edicts to wage war and crush the terrorists, but the courageous ones who would examine our own behaviour and understand that we started all this in the first place with our innate belief that we own the world and that our role in history is to dominate?
>>Where are our truly strong men?<<
Muzzled by MassStreamMedia.
Gary
"Land of the free and home of the brave"
Indeed. Looks like you're batting .000 with that little ditty.
"Anti-Terrorism Officials Are Regulating Us, Not Terrorists"
Uh, I think that was the idea from the outset, genius.
Thank you Clovis...you make a point most observers ignore.
The next time you see a grandmother in a wheelchair holding her arms out while being "screened" think about what's happening. It's extremely unlikely she's a threat to anyone. But every person who sees this obscenity is aware that the "authorities" have control of you and your body.
You are no longer a free and independent person. You are a subject and your ability to go about your business is dependent on the good will of a group of people who claim to themselves the exclusive right to violence.
Yes Clovis has it correct. It looks like Bin forgotten and the terrorists that "hate us for our freedoms" are acheiving their goals as all U.S. citizens are losing their freedoms every day.
I think the government is/was happy about the Christmas Day event. Now, we can all be more scared and waste more money making war on innocents because of one stupid kid. It would not surprise me at all if it were discovered that the CIA or some other tax-supported leech was the one who put the kid up to the task of doing what he did.
Yea, I wonder just how many of these guys are "Manchurian Terrorists," with Langley being the heart of Manchuria.
As usual, follow the money. It's like requiring all almonds to be irradiated after piss poor handling of the product made a very few people sick. Owing to the filthy practices of agribusiness, now spinach is irradiated. The makers of these machines get big contracts. I think peanuts are going to be next, and I knew it the minute I heard the first news story about problems with peanuts at one factory. A set up?
If our privacy and our civil rights are curtailed a little bit more by implementing contracts to scan every single traveler, who cares? There's money to be made! Does anybody even care if an occasional real terrorist gets through?
There were lots of red flags about the Christmas day incident. It's easier to give out big contracts and open another roll of red tape than to actually practice intelligence.
But you said it better than I ever could, Jim, "when in doubt, try common sense".
I had this in response to another article, but it fits here, as well.
Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if Abdulmutallab were a plant, a hapless oafish dupe of some MIC agency behind the scenes. Maybe one of Chertoff's clients. Maybe something to prepare the public to accept another military campaign somewhere. Maybe to scare us into accepting war on the citizenry (we're well on the way already). The mistakes were too obvious, the plan too amateurish to have been missed except deliberately, except as a manipulative ploy.
And actually I agree with those who observe that the main intent of all this scaremongering is to tighten controls on the people in preparation for riots, revolts, and rebellions that surely must not be far off.
"Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if Abdulmutallab were a plant, a hapless oafish dupe of some MIC agency behind the scenes. Maybe one of Chertoff's clients." Or Cheney's? Kinda like 9-11? Welcome to AmeriKKKa!!!
i'll post this again as the flavor of this article fits
here. my friend works for the mayors office in nyc.
here is how he accesses the stupidity he encounters every
day "these people are so stupid that you have to take
them by the hand and bring them inside when it rains
because their to stupid to do it by themselves! and when
you work your way to the fed level it must manifest itself
exponentially. the old the asshole becomes the boss theory!
What happens when they just start sticking explosives up their asses? Cavity searches or X-rays for all? The irony is, as a popular TV comic stated, that a pattern consistent with past experience was there for the detecting. But hey, we can buy our way out of this, right?
They then bring in the BOSS, due for implementation around 2015.
http://www.boss3chair.com/Associated_Content_Press.html
Warning: Civil Libertarian Commercial follows:
Guys,
How's this huge Federal Government working out for you? Every day it gets bigger and more powerful dolling out your money to subcontractor buddies.
It's just a matter of time until all our cities turn into Bagdad.
Even if you're left wing, can't you entertain the idea of starting from a fresh slate? ALL big gov agencies are now ENTRENCHED with "church of the poison mind" Cultures. It doesn't matter anymore if we fire the bosses. The Federal Reserve Bank, the CIA and the MIC can''t be fixed. They look at the people with disdain, as they enjoy good benefits and authority over the UNREPRESENTED citizens.
Cut the government cancer down by 90 percent, and then we'll start over, building libraries, solar panels and hospitals. We have a right, as voters and taxpayers to insist the government live within it's means.
TJ
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." - Thomas Jefferson
"...Chertoff demanded nationwide deployment of these machines to stop more underwear attacks by terrorists."
Will they detect bombs in the anus and vagina, too?
It will be about a month after these put in before a Google search shows 3 million hits of...
"Pictures of Angelina Jolie Naked at Airport!"
...and then another month before a TSA agent is arrested for having kiddie porn on his home computer.
How will airport security stop intentionally infected individuals from coming into or going out of a country?
One person infected with small pox, plague, ebola or other highly contagious diseases will be in the nation spreading the disease weeks before the authorities figure out something is happening.
All these "security" measures are giving paranoia a bad name.
CNN and FIX NEWS were running around the airport circuit the last several days talking to people waiting in the very long lines, asking them what they thought about the new restrictions being put into effect. Unfortunately, the basic answer was that it, "made them feel safer".
Gee, wouldn't it be ironic if due to the airlines corporate masters wish for higher profits, these peoples planes feel out of the sky due to a lack of preventative maintenanace! Wouldn't you call that economic terrorism? Or just desert?