- It doesn,t take a bureaucrat long to create an empire.
John Pistole, the FBI agent who took over the Transportation Security Administration
on July 1 told USA Today 16 days later that protecting trains
and subways from terrorist attacks will be as high a priority for him as
air travel.
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- 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 the bit in their teeth 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- There are also news reports of federal trucks equipped
with backscatter X-ray devices that secretly scan cars and pedestrians.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The very fact that the FBI has to orchestrate fake terrorism
proves the absence of real terrorists.
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- 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.
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- Indeed, if terrorists want to attack air travelers, they
never need to board an airplane.
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- 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.
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- 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 regim'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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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?
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- 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.
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- Who is cowing Americans into submission, terrorists or
the TSA Gestapo?
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