http://www.lewrockwell.com/roberts/roberts254.html
Making Americans Unsafe
by Paul Craig Roberts
The Bush Regime’s "terrorist" protection schemes have reached the height
of
total incompetence and utter absurdity. According to the American Civil
Liberties Union, a private organization that defends the US Constitution
that
inattentive Americans neglect, there are now one million names on the
"terrorist" watch list.
One of them is that of former Assistant US Attorney General Jim Robinson,
whose top security clearances are current. Every time Mr. Robinson flies
away
on business, he is delayed by a totally incompetent "terrorist" protection
racket that cannot tell a person named Jim Robinson, who served in the
highest
echelons of the US government, from a Muslim terrorist.
What confidence can we have in a regime that is incapable of
differentiating
an Assistant US Attorney General from a terrorist?
Mr. Robinson said: "If I were convinced that America is a safer place
because
I get hassled at the air****t, I might put up with it, but I doubt it. I
expect
my story is similar to hundreds of thousands of people who are on this
list
and find themselves inconvenienced."
"Hundreds of thousands of people" on a watch list that they have no
business
being on?
Yes. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious
characters,’
with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the
Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said
Caroline
Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Wa****ngton Legislative Office.
And this is America, not Nazi Germany?
How can Air****t "Security" possibly protect anyone when the idiots cannot
differentiate a high-level American government official from a terrorist?
Do you really believe there are one million terrorists and nothing has
blown
up in the US since September 11, 2001 (assuming you believe the
government’s
account of that episode)?
How can there possibly be 1,000,000 terrorists and America still be in one
piece? If there were 1,000,000 terrorists, America would be in ruins.
According to the Bush Regime’s line, it only took a handful of terrorists
to
destroy America’s tallest skyscrapers and a section of the Pentagon and to
send the President of the United States scurrying to a hiding place.
One million terrorists could bring America to its knees, and they wouldn’t
need to fly on airplanes to accomplish this.
What we are witnessing with the one million person "watch list" is
bureaucracy
run amok. One Million Terrorists makes the danger seem overwhelming. Such
overwhelming danger rationalizes the aggressive behavior of the bullies
and
thugs attracted by the power of confiscating your toothpaste and bottled
water
and riffling your belongings in your luggage.
Show your ID.
Take off your shoes.
Take off your belt.
Take off your jacket.
Empty your pockets.
Don’t complain about being searched without a warrant or you will miss
your
flight. You might be arrested, handcuffed, kicked and otherwise abused –
the
fate of many American citizens.
The morons who comprise the US government call the "watch list" one of the
government’s "most effective tools in the fight against terrorism."
What an effective tool it is! It cannot tell the difference between Jim
Robinson and a Muslim terrorist.
The "watch list" has not apprehended a single terrorist, but thousands of
American citizens have been inconvenienced and arrested.
The ACLU says that "putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee
that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel
of
innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources
on
bureaucratic wheel-spinning."
It is worse than that. What the "watch list" or "no-fly list" is doing is
training Americans to submit to warrantless searches, to abandon their
constitutional rights, and to submit to humiliation by thugs and bullies.
A
Gestapo is being trained to have no qualms about searching and
intimidating
fellow citizens, using any excuse to delay or arrest them. Americans are
being
taught to use arbitrary power and to submit to arbitrary power. In the
false
name of "safety from terrorists," Americans are being made the least safe
people on earth.
July 18, 2008
Paul Craig Roberts [send him mail] a former Assistant Secretary of the US
Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been
re****ting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new
edition
of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence
Stratton, a do***ented account of how Americans lost the protection of
law,
has just been released by Random House.
2008 Creators Syndicate
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