It is difficult to imagine New Yorkers being porno-screened and sexually groped on crowed subway platforms or showing up an hour or two in advance for clearance for a 15 minute subway ride, but once bureaucrats get their teeth in the bit they take absurdity to its logical conclusion. Buses will be next, although it is even more difficult to imagine open air bus stops turned into security zones with screeners and gropers inspecting passengers before they board.
Will taxi passengers be next? In those Muslim lands whose citizens the US government has been slaughtering for years, favorite weapons for retaliating against the Americans are car and truck bombs. How long before Pistole announces that the TSA Gestapo is setting up roadblocks on city streets, highways and interstates to check cars for bombs? That 15 minute trip to the grocery store then becomes an all day affair.
Indeed, it has already begun. Last September agents from Homeland Security, TSA, and the US Department of Transportation, assisted by the Douglas County Sheriff's Office, conducted a counter-terrorism operation on busy Interstate 20 just west of Atlanta, Georgia. Designated VIPER (Visible Inter-mobile Prevention and Response), the operation required all trucks to stop to be screened for bombs. Federal agents used dogs, screening devices, and a large drive-through bomb detection machine. Imagine what the delays did to delivery schedules and truckers' bottom lines.
There are also news reports of federal trucks equipped with backscatter X-ray devices that secretly scan cars and pedestrians.
With such expensive counter-terrorism activities, both in terms of the hard-pressed taxpayers' money and civil liberties, one would think that bombs were going off all over America. But, of course, they aren't. There has not been a successful terrorist act since 9/11, and thousands of independent experts doubt the government's explanation of that event.
Subsequent domestic terrorist events have turned out to be FBI sting operations in which FBI agents organize not-so-bright disaffected members of society and lead them into displaying interest in participating in a terrorist act. Once the FBI agent, pretending to be a terrorist, succeeds in prompting all the right words to be said and captured on his hidden recorder, the "terrorists" are arrested and the "plot" exposed.
The very fact that the FBI has to orchestrate fake terrorism proves the absence of real terrorists.
If Americans were more thoughtful and less gullible, they might wonder why all the emphasis on transportation when there are so many soft targets. Shopping centers, for example. If there were enough terrorists in America to justify the existence of Homeland Security, bombs would be going off round the clock in shopping malls in every state. The effect would be far more terrifying than blowing up an airliner.
Indeed, if terrorists want to attack air travelers, they never need to board an airplane. All they need to do is to join the throngs of passengers waiting to go through the TSA scanners and set off their bombs. The TSA has conveniently assembled the targets.
The final proof that there are no terrorists is that not a single neoconservative or government official responsible for the Bush regime's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Obama regime's slaughters of Pakistanis, Yemenis, and Somalians has been assassinated. None of these Americans who are responsible for lies, deceptions, and invasions that have destroyed the lives of countless numbers of Muslims have any security protection. If Muslims were capable of pulling off 9/11, they are certainly capable of assassinating Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Libby, Condi Rice, Kristol, Bolton, Goldberg, and scores of others during the same hour of the same day.
I am not advocating that terrorists assassinate anyone. I am just making the point that if the US was as overrun with terrorists as empire-building bureaucrats pretend, we would definitely be experiencing dramatic terrorist acts. The argument is not believable that a government that was incapable of preventing 9/11 is so all-knowing that it can prevent assassination of unprotected neocons and shopping malls from being bombed.
If Al Qaeda was anything like the organization that the US government claims, it would not be focused on trivial targets such as passenger airliners. The organization, if it exists, would be focused on its real enemies. Try to imagine the propaganda value of terrorists wiping out the neoconservatives in one fell swoop, followed by an announcement that every member of the federal government down to the lowest GS, every member of the House and Senate, and every governor was next in line to be bumped off.
This would be real terrorism instead of the make-belief stuff associated with shoe bombs that don't work, underwear bombs that independent experts say could not work, and bottled water and shampoo bombs that experts say cannot possibly be put together in airliner lavatories.
Think about it. Would a terror organization capable of outwitting all 16 US intelligence agencies, all intelligence agencies of US allies including Israel's Mossad, the National Security Council, NORAD, air traffic control, the Pentagon, and airport security four times in one hour put its unrivaled prestige at risk with improbable shoe bombs, shampoo bombs, and underwear bombs?
After success in destroying the World Trade Center and blowing up part of the Pentagon, it is an extraordinary comedown to go after a mere airliner. Would a person who gains fame by knocking out the world heavyweight boxing champion make himself a laughing stock by taking lunch money from school boys?
TSA is a far greater threat to Americans than are terrorists. Pistole has given the finger to US senators and representatives, state legislators, and the traveling public who have expressed their views that virtual strip searches and sexual molestation are too high a price to pay for "security." Indeed, the TSA with its Gestapo attitude and methods, is succeeding in making Americans more terrified of the TSA than they are of terrorists.
Make up your own mind. What terrifies you the most. Terrorists, who in all likelihood you will never encounter in your lifetime, or the TSA that you will encounter every time you fly and soon, according to Pistole, every time you take a train, a subway, or drive in a car or truck?
Before making up your mind, consider this report from Antiwar.com on November 19: "TSA officials say that anyone refusing both the full body scanners and the enhanced pat down procedures will be taken into custody. Once there the detainees will not only be barred from flying, but will be held indefinitely as suspected terrorists . . . One sheriff's office said they were already preparing to handle a large number of detainees and plan to treat them as terror suspects."
Who is cowing Americans into submission, terrorists or the TSA Gestapo?
Reader Comments
The terror groups have done what they set out to do.They have put the United States on the same list of the countries that have to watch everything they do.
If you were to say travel back in time to the 70's and tell the average American that they would in 30 ish years be publicly stripped and searched at random in the effort to stop a non existent "terrorist" threat, that same American would have laughed in your face. Today, he would probably cry. And lets not forget that there were many real terrorists threats at the time.
Gestapo, maybe. More like the KBG or the East German Stasi. The left-leaning Jews, like Michael Chertoff, are the main culprits.
@cardshark & Exceed
Your statements reveal you still believe in terrorism. 99.9% is faked by the states that seek to gain power over the populace. "Terrorists" have not "done this to us", the "terrorists" haven't won, because there aren't any except in the CIA, MI6, Mossad, etc. Webster Tarpley does a good job exposing the so called terrorism of the 70's. See his book 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA.
k, what I was referring to was the Beirut incidents in the 70's, real terrorists bombing people like..for real.
Terrorism is when people use terror to push their agenda. American Government anyone? They are acting like the real terrorists, not by the use of force..(*cough..not going into this right now...*cough)...but by the exploitation of a non existent threat to push their agenda.
In WW2 Jews and others deemed as undesirable were treated as 3rd class citizens. These days, Everyone is being treated as 3rd class citizens, except for those in positions of authority.
If this type of fascism is allowed to continue, there can only be one result. And that result will come only after many are deprived the freedoms that they believed were more than revocable privileges
..Ex
'...The final proof that there are no terrorists is that not a single neoconservative or government official responsible for the Bush regime's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the Obama regime's slaughters of Pakistanis, Yemenis, and Somalians has been assassinated.
None of these Americans who are responsible for lies, deceptions, and invasions that have destroyed the lives of countless numbers of Muslims have any security protection.
If Muslims were capable of pulling off 9/11, they are certainly capable of assassinating Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Libby, Condi Rice, Kristol, Bolton, Goldberg, and scores of others during the same hour of the same day...'
Enough said.
I was about to make a comment but nick got closer to the point than the rest of you. Indeed I have already written 2 posts on my website about what you are NOT being told. I can't tell you neither can I give you my URL.Security reasons. But believe me when the time comes and indeed it's not that far away the TSA will come in handy.
Is TSA's action a threat to American Capitalism as much as it is the American Way? Whoa! Hold your wallets and keep those credit cards secure and unused. Talk it over with fellow employees at work and let the boss know you won't be flying or driving any time soon. See, then, if Pistole's macho can compare to that of Corporate America's.
you hit the jackpot man. That's it but I was afraid teling you.BTW Norton got 2 reds. Never happened before, apparently they found the posts on my website and had to switch browsers!
TSA and Homeland inSecurity are run by the Senior Executive Service (SES) and I am willing to bet anything no one around here has ever heard of this organization and if you have it is only vaguely peripheral.
SES was set up in 1979 under the Civil Service Act of 1978 which essentially 'privatized' government following Britain's lead when Margaret Thatcher began this same process. It was at this time that Private Military Contractors (PMCs) began to be privately placed.
What has happened is that a very well disguised operation has been underway with Britain's lead to privatize government while keeping it well concealed from the public which explains why so few Americans really understand the implications here relative to SES. What happens in Britain is followed very closely in the United States.
The SES is run by approximately 7,000 high level bureacrats many of them being ex-military who hold 'civil service' positions within the SES of a general or admiral equivalent ranking. SES 'executives' are placed between all of the president's cabinet officers and effectively are a choke point of intelligence and information moving up the chain-of-command; it is a government within a government. The SES runs every bureaucratic organization within the government including Homeland inSecurity; TSA; FBI; NASA. I cannot emphasize enough just how much this 'private' government within the government has accumulated power for itself while we continue to operate under the premise there is a responsive government to our needs. Their pay is among the highest within the government 'employees' and in fact, there have been a few good articles discovered calling for the SES to be brought under control.
What makes this particularly grievous is that many of these SES executives come out of the military and intelligence with links to corporations producing much of this technology now being deployed at airports and within the transportation system to not only profit from, but to humiliate and harass Americans. Awhile back President Obama sent a memorandum to the SES (which I have a PDF record of) emphasizing a need to essentially reform itself and become more responsible to the public.
Terrorism is a business and the SES has made it their own personal bureaucratic fiefdom. Don't take my word for it; do an extensive critical analysis and search for the Senior Executive Service and you can determine for yourself the veracity of what I am attempting to relay here.
Here, start with the second in command at the FBI, Timothy P. Murphy, Associate Director at the FBI; he vets all 'executives' at the FBI through the SES. Do a Google search: 'Timothy P. Murphy+Senior Executive Service'.
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People need to start critically examining in much greater detail why it is they spend so much time on the internet reading news and leaving commentary rants when all of this information is open source intel. People instead, need to start seriously examining these organizations and learn where the decisions are originating from more specifically this harassment coming through TSA while TSA's lower level essentially under educated border agents are just doing their jobs.
And I am willing to bet anything you will find SES executives and connections all over Michael Chertoff's firm that apparently sold these X-ray scanners to the airports. John S. Pistole who is at the head of the TSA, was at the FBI in 2004 as Deputy Director being at the FBI for his entire bureaucratic career. This guy wouldn't understand the private sector if it came up behind him and kicked him in the ass. The only thing he understands is the wielding bureaucratic power and conflict (the FBI is a 100 year-old organization run by men who like guns). If you do a thorough search (economic forensic analysis) you will find he was vetted and probably put through SES's 'executive' program.
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Come on folks, exploit the internet to its maximum capacity and potential.
well said.