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public discourse today. Pacific Free Press provides a new venue for
disseminating hard news and insightful, fact-based analysis of the
harsh realities too often ignored or distorted by the mainstream press.
Airport Gestapo
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 airport, 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 Washington
Legislative Office.
And this is America, not Nazi Germany?
How can Airport “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.
Paul
Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan
administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal
editorial page and Contributing Editor of National Review. He is
coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at:
paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
Writings 
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. 
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