Measuring the "Success" of American Foreign Policy

The Americans blindly go around the world making bad situations worse while slapping themselves on the back and congratulating themselves about "spreading democracy" and "American values" throughout the world. The poor American public has no idea and little interest in the failed policies of their political leaders.

Here is a bit from an excellent article in the UK's Guardian newspaper giving an example of how Iraq has been "lifted up" from the horrors of Saddam Hussein's dark torture state to the light of a... what? a new torture state...

The walls of Um Hussein's living room in Baghdad are hung with the portraits of her missing sons. There are four of them, and each picture frame is decorated with plastic roses and green ribbons as an improvised wreath for the dead.

Um Hussein had six children. Her eldest son was killed by Sunni insurgents in 2005, when they took control of the neighbourhood. Three of her remaining sons were kidnapped by a Shia militia group when they left the neighbourhood to find work. They were never seen again.

She now lives with the rest of her family – a daughter, her last son, Yassir, and half a dozen orphaned grandchildren – in a tiny two-room apartment where the stink of sewage and cooking oil seeps through a thin curtain that separates the kitchen from the living room.

Um Hussein looks to be in her 60s and has one milky white eye. She is often confused and talks ramblingly about the young men in the portraits as if they are alive, then shouts at her daughter to bring tea. She told the Guardian how she had to fight to release Yassir from jail.

Yassir was detained in 2007. For three years she heard nothing of him and assumed he was dead like his brothers. Then one day she took a phone call from an officer who said she could go to visit him if she paid a bribe. She borrowed the money from her neighbour and set off for the prison.

"We waited until they brought him," she said. "His hands and legs were tied in metal chains like a criminal. I didn't know him from the torture. He wasn't my son, he was someone else. I cried: 'Your mother dies for you, my dear son.' I picked dirt from the floor and smacked it on my head. They dragged me out and wouldn't let me see him again.

"I have lost four. I told them I wouldn't lose this one."

Afterwards, the officers called from prison demanding hefty bribes to let him go while telling the family he was being tortured. Um Hussein told the officers she would pay, but they kept asking for more. First it was 1m Iraqi dinars (£560), then 2m, then 5m.

George Bush was an idiot whose ideology blinded him and allowed him to create horrors under the flag of "nation building" and "bringing democracy to the Middle East".

Obama is a much more sophisticated thinker who actually understands foreign policy, but sadly Obama continues the blunder and outrages of American "policy". It is clear that these horrors go deeper than just an "administration". What the US is doing around the world is obviously driven by a cynical need to control the world for the benefit of the rich elites in the US. The veneer of ideology or the cynical use of worlds like "freedom" and "democracy" and "women's rights" are rolled out to plaster a veneer of respectability to what is in fact a horror story passing for "foreign policy".

Obama's Persecution of Whistleblowers

Here is a talk given by whistleblower Jesselyn Radack:



As Racack points out in the video, the chilling fact is that "supposed left-leaning" Obama has brought more charges against whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined. With "friends" like Obama, the political left has no need for enemies.

Take a Tour Through Airport Security Theatre

Here is a bit from an article in Vanity Fair in which the reporter takes a walk through Reagan National Airport with security critic Bruce Schneier who points out the security weaknesses and the incredible expense to achieve this "security":

Since 9/11, the U.S. has spent more than $1.1 trillion on homeland security.

To a large number of security analysts, this expenditure makes no sense. The vast cost is not worth the infinitesimal benefit. Not only has the actual threat from terror been exaggerated, they say, but the great bulk of the post-9/11 measures to contain it are little more than what Schneier mocks as “security theater”: actions that accomplish nothing but are designed to make the government look like it is on the job. In fact, the continuing expenditure on security may actually have made the United States less safe.

...

Two months after 9/11, the Bush administration created the Transportation Security Agency, ordering it to hire and train enough security officers to staff the nation’s 450 airports within a year. Six months after that, the government vastly expanded the federal sky-marshal program, sending thousands of armed lawmen to ride planes undercover. Meanwhile, the T.S.A. steadily ratcheted up the existing baggage-screening program, banning cigarette lighters from carry-on bags, then all liquids (even, briefly, breast milk from some nursing mothers). Signs were put up in airports warning passengers about specifically prohibited items: snow globes, printer cartridges. A color-coded alert system was devised; the nation was placed on “orange alert” for five consecutive years. Washington assembled a list of potential terror targets that soon swelled to 80,000 places, including local libraries and miniature-golf courses. Accompanying the target list was a watch list of potential suspects that had grown to 1.1 million names by 2008, the most recent date for which figures are available. Last year, the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed the T.S.A. in 2003, began deploying full-body scanners, which peer through clothing to produce nearly nude images of air passengers.

Bruce Schneier’s exasperation is informed by his job-related need to spend a lot of time in Airportland. He has 10 million frequent-flier miles and takes about 170 flights a year; his average speed, he has calculated, is 32 miles and hour. “The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.”

...

Terrorists will try to hit the United States again, Schneier says. One has to assume this. Terrorists can so easily switch from target to target and weapon to weapon that focusing on preventing any one type of attack is foolish. Even if the T.S.A. were somehow to make airports impregnable, this would simply divert terrorists to other, less heavily defended targets—shopping malls, movie theaters, churches, stadiums, museums. The terrorist’s goal isn’t to attack an airplane specifically; it’s to sow terror generally. “You spend billions of dollars on the airports and force the terrorists to spend an extra $30 on gas to drive to a hotel or casino and attack it,” Schneier says. “Congratulations!”

What the government should be doing is focusing on the terrorists when they are planning their plots. “That’s how the British caught the liquid bombers,” Schneier says. “They never got anywhere near the plane. That’s what you want—not catching them at the last minute as they try to board the flight.”

To walk through an airport with Bruce Schneier is to see how much change a trillion dollars can wreak. So much inconvenience for so little benefit at such a staggering cost. And directed against a threat that, by any objective standard, is quite modest. Since 9/11, Islamic terrorists have killed just 17 people on American soil, all but four of them victims of an army major turned fanatic who shot fellow soldiers in a rampage at Fort Hood. (The other four were killed by lone-wolf assassins.) During that same period, 200 times as many Americans drowned in their bathtubs. Still more were killed by driving their cars into deer. The best memorial to the victims of 9/11, in Schneier’s view, would be to forget most of the “lessons” of 9/11. “It’s infuriating,” he said, waving my fraudulent boarding pass to indicate the mass of waiting passengers, the humming X-ray machines, the piles of unloaded computers and cell phones on the conveyor belts, the uniformed T.S.A. officers instructing people to remove their shoes and take loose change from their pockets. “We’re spending billions upon billions of dollars doing this—and it is almost entirely pointless. Not only is it not done right, but even if it was done right it would be the wrong thing to do.”

The article is well worth reading. Go read the whole thing.

A Summary of America's "Effort" In Iraq

Here is a bit from an opinion piece in the NY Times by Maureen Dowd that nails down the idiocy of US policy in Iraq:

You’d never know it, given Republicans’ churlish silence and unseemly sniping, but the president and the vice president have stumbled and bumbled their way to an acceptable ending to the war that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney so recklessly started. It was a magnificent miscalculation that Obama warned in 2002 was “a dumb war.”

Funnily enough, Obama has found it easier to wrap up Bush’s foreign policy blunders than his domestic ones.

Vice President Joseph Biden spent so many hundreds of hours hashing things out with Iraqi officials that he knew the names of their grandchildren — just as Bill Clinton could reel off street names during the peace effort in Northern Ireland.

In the painful calculation of what’s “good enough,” as we end our two attenuated wars, the White House sees it this way on Iraq: The baby is born. The gestation period couldn’t be 18 years; eight years was bad enough. The midwife had to leave.

The spectacular error that Bush, Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made was feeling we needed a post-9/11 demonstration of war to prove our toughness. If they had merely pushed along the Arab Spring, they could have saved a trillion dollars and the lives of 4,500 American troops.

It would have been more of a boon to our national security to finish off the Afghanistan mission and kill Osama bin Laden sooner. Instead, the Bush team let itself get distracted with nation-building in Iraq when our own nation was falling apart, and President Obama ended up surging and withdrawing in Afghanistan at the same time, which made no sense.

Before W. tried to outdo his daddy, we were a country that usually had to take a punch before we went to war. We didn’t unilaterally start wars.

In her new memoir, Condoleezza Rice has a sentence so stunningly lame it makes you want to scream — or cry. “The fact is,” she writes, “we invaded Iraq because we believed we had run out of other options.”

I’m not a National Security Council adviser, but I can think of about a hundred other options we had with Saddam.

At least Condi admits that one of the inflated and improvised rationales for war wasn’t true: “We did not go to Iraq to bring democracy any more than Roosevelt went to war against Hitler to democratize Germany, though that became American policy once the Nazis were defeated.”

The real tragedy is that in 2008 Americans voted to change policies but got a Bush "lite" in Obama. Obama promised to get out of the war, stop torture, and get out of Guantanamo. Once in office he "surged" in Afghanistan and dragged his feet on all these commitments. He may have stopped torturing prisoners, but he has upped the ante with a lot more drone-based killings. Rather than arrest Osama Bin Laden he sent in a killer elite to "terminate" rather than capture. There is something indescribably sinister in a policy of death rather than justice.

If You have a Rocketry Hobby, You are a "Terrorist"

Here is an article in The Toronto Star along with an hour long interview with the police of Byron Sonne, a person arrested in 2010 for "plotting" against the G20 meeting in Toronto. He has been held in jail for 329 days because (a) he had been spotted taking a picture of the fence constructed around the G20 site from which they got a warrant and raided his house and (b) found "explosives" which are in fact propellant for the rockets.

He belongs to the Canadian Association of Rocketry. Having a hobby of shooting rockets has become the "foundation" of the case for arresting him as a "terrorist".

If you watch the video, you should find it absolutely incredible that the cops have held this guy in jail. He is obviously innocent:



I find it really sleazy how this cop pretends to be empathic with Byron. It is pretty clear to me that this guy is manipulating Byron.

To give you an idea of the "quality" of the police work going behind holding this guy for over a year in jail is shown by this bit in the article:

Giggles arose from the body of the court when Bui asked Sonne about a mysterious powder.

“And this white substance in the fridge?”

“That is almond flour,” Sonne replies.

Sonne’s judge-alone trial is expected to begin in earnest sometime next week.

It is incredible that the legal system in Canada lets the police hold people when the policing is obviously that incompetent!

Here is a bit from Maclean's magazine, one of the premier news magazines in Canada:

Byron Sonne is a shlemiel and a shlemazl. He is clumsy and unlucky. But he is not a terrorist.

Driven by curiosity, hubris, and a genuine desire for social justice, Sonne poked and prodded the $1.2 billion “security apparatus” of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. He wanted to know if it was in fact just “security theater”–an expensive display of pomp and barbed wire that would never thwart an actual terrorist. Simultaneously, he wanted to know if it was too effective, if the heightened atmosphere around the summit meant that police were forgetting people’s rights. And he wanted us to know too, so he documented everything he did.

Sonne, who goes by TorontoGoat on Twitter, offered himself as a sacrificial lamb–a hapless animal who pooped on the cops via the Internet. His experiment was scattershot–he uploaded incendiary political texts of every nature to test if he was being surveilled. He flexed his freedom of speech by calling police “bacon” on Twitter. He tweeted about how the $9.4 million security fence could easily be climbed, but did not exactly say that it should be. All of this would likely have gone unnoticed if @torontogoat hadn’t clomped around the fence perimeter, shooting video. Taking pictures is not a crime, so the cops, unable to charge him with anything, threatened to take him in for jaywalking as an excuse to see his I.D. He complied with this “ruse,” as the authorities themselves have since described it, and that’s what brought the full force of law enforcement down on his head. When the cops finally googled Sonne, they went to town on him. He was surveilled, searched, arrested, questioned for 12 hours without a lawyer, and thrown in jail. Sonne spent 11 months locked up, awaiting bail. During that time his wife (also arrested, charges since dropped) left him.

So there’s your shlemiel–Byron the clumsy. As for the unlucky shlemazl, let’s consider the most serious charges Sonne faces during his trial, which continues today: four counts of “possessing explosive materials.” During their search of his Forest Hill home, police found chemicals that can be used to make explosives. That’s not so unusual–most of us have chemicals in our homes that can be used to make explosives. But actually whipping them up into something volatile may get you into serious trouble. It’s hard to imagine a good reason to do so, unless you’re trying to make some homebrew rocket fuel.

Sonne’s hobby? Model rocketry.

And from Maclean's, some questions about the police "case" against Byron Sonne:

Details of the courtroom proceedings in Sonne’s case are subject to a publication ban. As such, coverage of his case has been limited. Toronto Life published a cover story giving many details of Sonne’s life and activities leading up to his arrest. But once the ban is lifted, the real questions won’t be about what Sonne did—they’ll be about how the police and the Crown have behaved in this extraordinary case.

Here are some I’ll be asking:

-Why was Sonne, who has no prior criminal record, twice denied bail and held for over 10 months?

-Was he considered a flight risk or a danger to anyone?

-If so, what’s different now?

-Before his arrest, did the police trick Sonne into handing over his I.D. by threatening him with a jaywalking charge?

-Why was Sonne’s (now-estranged) wife also arrested and charged?

-Did the weapons charges (since dropped) refer solely to Sonne’s homemade potato gun?

-If so—really?

-Do the explosives charges refer solely to legal substances Sonne bought for gardening and toy rockets?

-If so—really?

-Why was Sonne hit with the obscure charge (since dropped) of ”intimidating justice system officials,” which is meant to prevent accused criminals from stalking or threatening judges, lawyers and jurors?

-Did it refer to Sonne’s online description of police on bicycles as “bacon on wheels”?

-If so—really?

-If it turns out that Sonne was simply a provocateur and geek who never posed a threat to anyone, at what point did the police and Crown learn this?

-If they knew this all along, why did they continue to imprison and prosecute him?

-And if so, who will answer for the loss of his freedom, the destruction of his career, and the dissolution of his marriage?

Byron Sonne may well turn out to be a guy who taunted and teased a starving, unchained guard dog to see how it would react. Maybe a guy like that is a fool, maybe he is brave—maybe he’s both. Maybe it’s not important.

The real questions are about the dog: why was it starving for meat? Why was it unchained? Thanks to Sonne, we may soon find out.

If you want a sense of how "guilty" Byron was of being a "mad bomber", consider this pointed comment in an article by Denise Balkissoon in OpenFile:

We're happy to tell you that this week, when speaking about the search-and-seizure in Sonne's home, Byrne referenced the computer security consultant's interest in science. One of the police officers on the stand, Alvin Maniquis, spoke about authorizing his team to take books on physics and chemistry.

"Essentially," said Byrne,"[Sonne]'s got a home lab, related books and documentation. He's got chemistry equipment....admittedly, they had not been put together."

So, now you know: three days before the start of the G20 summit, when arrested for possessing explosives meant to disrupt that summit, Sonne hadn't set up his beakers and bunsen burners.

That's all for now.

Yep... the police have "caught" a mad bomber with intent to blow up half of Toronto, but 3 days before the event, this "bomber" hasn't yet put any chemicals together. Funny. It would require an almost industrial scale operation to generate the hundreds (if not thousands!) of pounds of high explosives needed to seriously disrupt a G20 conference. But here is a "bomber" who hasn't mixed any chemicals and has nothing stockpiled. There is no proof that he ever tried to mix up an explosive batch. So the government's case is that he "had the books and come equipment and some chemicals". Well... under those stringent requirements the RCMP should have arrested every professor in all the universities and colleges in Canada in early 2010. They certainly had books, and equipment, and materials.

This is a completely daft case where the police have a vendetta against a guy who decided to beard the police by showing up the billion dollars of Canadian citizens money had not bought any real security but instead funded a lot of "security theatre" and a lot of booty for politicians to build stuff in this constituencies during this time period and stamp it as "security". From Wikipedia:

Members of Parliament Olivia Chow and Mark Holland labelled the initially claimed budget of $1.1-billion for hosting the summits as "obscene" and "insane" while others argued that the money could have been used for long-pending municipal projects in Canada, such as Toronto's Transit City. The security cost for the two summits was believed to be more expensive than the combined security costs of the 2010 Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Vancouver and Whistler, British Columbia, which were $878 million. However, according to final calculations from the House of Commons of Canada as of October 2010, the exact cost for holding both summits was $857,901,850.31, making it less expensive than the security costs for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

If the RCMP wanted to go after some criminals, they should have arrested Prime Minister Harper, his cabinet, and most of his caucus. They have robbed Canadians of nearly $1 billion in order to put on a big wing-ding party for big-wigs. Meanwhile, there is unemployment, poverty, and underdevelopment in Canada. That money would have been better spent feeding the hungry, providing free education for pre-schooler and college kids, and day care for working parents. Instead, it was criminally wasted. And a pook patsy like Byron Sonne has been absolutely crucified as a "criminal". His only "crime" was his ignorance about the depth of corruption and mean-heartedness in the politicians and the police, and the cold-heartedness and suspicious minds of old farts sitting as judges and acting a Crown prosecutors.

How to Successfully Live in a Police State

Here is yet another example of the West's descent into a police state under the "War on Criminality" (or was that a "War on Terrorism"?) initiated by George Bush but vigorously prosecuted under Barack Obama. From a post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing:

Scottish mall-cop: it's illegal to take pictures in the mall; Scottish cop: photographers can have their devices confiscated under terrorism laws

by Cory Doctorow

A security guard in Braehead shopping centre near Glasgow questioned a man who was taking pictures of his young daughter looking cute while eating an ice-cream. The guard told him that photography in the mall was "illegal" and demanded that he delete any photos he'd taken while there. When the man told him he'd already posted the photos to Facebook, the guard summoned a policeman, who said that he could confiscate the phone under the UK's terrorism laws. The policeman took his details and "he was eventually allowed to leave."

The official statements from the mall and the police are maddeningly bureaucratic and every bit as stupid as the original incident: "a full review of the circumstances surrounding the incident and the allegations made is under way" say the police; "Our priority is always to maintain a safe and enjoyable environment for all of our shoppers and retailers," says the mall.

Just a reminder: pretty much everything that's legal on the public street is legal in a private store. A store or mall can have a policy saying "You can't wear purple here" or "You must enter the premises backwards" or "No photography allowed," but those are policies, not laws. A store's representatives can ask you to leave for violating their policies, but that's pretty much it (of course, if you refuse to leave, that's a different matter).

The "War on Terrorism" is like America's "War on Drugs". It has no end. There will always be drugs. There will always be terrorists. To start a war that has no end is very George Orwellian and reminds us that governments are not our friends. They are power mad crazies who will use any excuse to aggrandize power to themselves and ever more tightly circumscribe out lives to turn us into mindless robots "in service to the nation". Nuts!

Al Qaeda was a "police action". If Clinton had had the guts to do the right thing in the late 1990s Bin Laden would have been dead and there would have been no 9/11. If Bush had had the guts to do the right thing and put American boots on the ground in Afghanistan in 2001 they could have killed Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. One good thing I can say: Obama has the guts to use special ops to get the job done. He has taken out a fair amount of Al Qaeda leadership. Good for him. But Obama is no friend of liberty. He has clamped down on whistle-blowers. He has extended the hopeless "war" in Afghanistan. He has kept the torturers going in Guantanamo. He only meekly supported the Arab Spring.

Update... and here is more by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing about the German government ignoring its own laws to spy on its citizens and insert malware that makes their computers vulnerable to attack by anybody.

Chaos Computer Club cracks Germany's illegal government malware, a trojan that spies on your PC and lets anyone off the street hijack it

By Cory Doctorow at 10:11 pm Monday, Oct 10

Germany's Chaos Computer Club published the sourcecode for a piece of malware used by the German government to spy on citizens. The software was discovered in the wild and reverse engineered. It can be used to spy on or control remote PCs. Because of flaws in the software, anyone who was infected with this by German police was vulnerable to spying by "anyone on the street." The German supreme court banned the use of trojans to spy on German citizens in 2008.

The analysis also revealed serious security holes that the trojan is tearing into infected systems. The screenshots and audio files it sends out are encrypted in an incompetent way, the commands from the control software to the trojan are even completely unencrypted. Neither the commands to the trojan nor its replies are authenticated or have their integrity protected. Not only can unauthorized third parties assume control of the infected system, but even attackers of mediocre skill level can connect to the authorities, claim to be a specific instance of the trojan, and upload fake data. It is even conceivable that the law enforcement agencies's IT infrastructure could be attacked through this channel. The CCC has not yet performed a penetration test on the server side of the trojan infrastructure.

"We were surprised and shocked by the lack of even elementary security in the code. Any attacker could assume control of a computer infiltrated by the German law enforcement authorities", commented a speaker of the CCC. "The security level this trojan leaves the infected systems in is comparable to it setting all passwords to '1234'".

To avoid revealing the location of the command and control server, all data is redirected through a rented dedicated server in a data center in the USA. The control of this malware is only partially within the borders of its jurisdiction. The instrument could therefore violate the fundamental principle of national sovereignty. Considering the incompetent encryption and the missing digital signatures on the command channel, this poses an unacceptable and incalculable risk. It also poses the question how a citizen is supposed to get their right of legal redress in the case the wiretapping data get lost outside Germany, or the command channel is misused.

Electronic Surveillance Scandal Hits Germany [spiegel.de]

Go read the original post to get the embedded links.

I love anything by Cory Doctorow. He is a smart dude and he is concerned about issues that are close to my heart: intellectual property rights, human rights, technology. I confess I've only read a couple of his fiction pieces. I know that's his "day job". But I love the hobbyist Doctorow more than the career Doctorow.

Successful Anti-Terrorism

Glenn Greenwald writes an article on Salon magazine that explains just why the FBI is so successful at thwarting terrorist attacks within the US:

The FBI has received substantial criticism over the past decade — much of it valid — but nobody can deny its record of excellence in thwarting its own Terrorist plots. Time and again, the FBI concocts a Terrorist attack, infiltrates Muslim communities in order to find recruits, persuades them to perpetrate the attack, supplies them with the money, weapons and know-how they need to carry it out — only to heroically jump in at the last moment, arrest the would-be perpetrators whom the FBI converted, and save a grateful nation from the plot manufactured by the FBI.

...

None of these cases entail the FBI’s learning of an actual plot and then infiltrating it to stop it. They all involve the FBI’s purposely seeking out Muslims (typically young and impressionable ones) whom they think harbor animosity toward the U.S. and who therefore can be induced to launch an attack despite having never taken even a single step toward doing so before the FBI targeted them.

Sounds like a recipe for "sure fire success" to me. I think the FBI should start a similar program in bank robbing, presidential assassination, and urban rioting. They could be on a real roll with this new & improved FBI technique!

The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilence

Flash! News from the front in the war on terrorism...

Here is an account of the incredible heroism of America's front line defense against terrorism. An alert border agent discovered a Canadian miscreant who willfully refused to divulge that she was carrying a know biohazardous material, the foundations of making a terrorist bomb, the well know "Ontario raspberry" in her car while crossing the border. The alert border agent spotted the illegal item and bravely did his duty to protect the American public from this brazen would-be-terrorist: he performed a strip search. Yes, it is an ugly task, but those officers have been trained to carry out all actions from strip search to waterboarding to protect the American public.

What is shocking is that the Canadian thinks she has some "human rights"! Those Canadians are outrageous. They should realize they have no more rights than Americans and the Americans happily gave up all their rights when their Congress passed the Patriot Act (then reaffirmed it and extended it with Patriot Act II). All law-abiding Americans know they have no rights. When the police tell them to strip, they strip. When the police bring out the rubber truncheons to encourage truth-telling, American speak up and spill the beans. Even the truculent Americans who push their police to bring out the big gun, waterboarding, realize this is all in the name of preserving "democracy" and "liberties" for the liberty-loving Americans.

Listen to what this cur, this dispicable Canadian alleges:

An angry and embarrassed Ontario woman who says she was strip-searched at the Ambassador Bridge without justification has sued two U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.

The Detroit Free Press says Loretta Van Beek of Stratford filed the suit in Detroit federal court against the unnamed agents. She says she was en route to her Georgia vacation home last March when one agent strip-searched and groped her while the other one watched.

Van Beek says she was detained for two hours, then sent to a windowless cell and ordered to strip because she neglected to disclose she had raspberries in her vehicle.

The lawsuit claims one agent aggressively groped her breasts and genital area while the other watched. Van Beek says she was then photographed and fingerprinted and sent back to Canada.

Attorney S. Thomas Wienner of Rochester tells the Free Press the experience traumatized Van Beek and “She’s concerned she might not be the only victim.”

Every red-blooded American knows she should be grateful than "extreme measures" weren't taken. But rest assured, if she or her kind, try to bring that bright red fruit across the border, America's heros, the Border Agents, stand ready to take them out back and shoot them dead. As Barry Goldwater so eloquently put it: Extremism In The Defence of Liberty Is No Vice



Thank God for America... that beacon on the hill, that shining light of liberty, those patriots will not tolerate raspberries sneaking across the border!

Only pinkos and sissies go for this sick complaint by pastor Martin Niemöller who wimped out in Hitler's Germany:

First they came for the communists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.

I say:

First they let a woman with a raspberry cross the border,

Then they let somebody with a banana slip by,

Next is was a boy with some blueberries,

Then came those carrying kiwi fruit.

I tell you... we have to draw the line with raspberries. If not, they will be bringing in bombs and rockets, they will be sneaking al Qaeda across the border, and there goes the neighborhood. Property values will fall and the good people will have to flee to the suburbs! So stop them now before it is too late. Strip searches, truncheons, ripping fingernail out raw and bloody, waterboarding... whatever it takes. But don't allow a single raspberry more to cross that border!

Dominic Streatfeild's "A History of the World Since 9/11"

This is an excellent history of our times. I expected a typical history of events, leaders, and themes. But instead this author presents 8 chapters which introduce a policy stance then burrows down to look at a small handful of "ordinary" people affected by the policy. The author's intent is to lay bare just how badly wrong the "war on terror" has gone. Here is a nice summary of the author's view from the Epilogue:

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in the products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There's enough to go round.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn't.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It's one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn't threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

The book has some wonderfuly graphic stories of individuals and the very real effects of 9/11 on them:

• Chapter 1 looks at Bush's dictum that "the rules have changed" and that "we must take the war to them" and that pre-emptive war was necessary. It ties this with a crazy criminal character in Texas who goes unhinged after seeing the towers fall on 9/11 and decides to go after "the enemy". For him this is anybody ethnically Middle Easternish and he ends up killing an innocent immigrant from India, a Hindu. Streatfeild lays out these characters in great detail. The hard struggle by the Hindu to build a life in America and provide a business built on serving his customers. A very nice guy who worked hard but ended up killed by a madman lashing out at "enemies" to pre-empt their attack on his beloved America. A madman with a criminal past and a mind twisted by drug abuse and violence. Tragic.


• Chapter 2 looks at the "gloves are off" and "the rules have changed. It focuses on a family fleeing Iraq prior to 9/11 but who get caught at sea in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and harshly interned by Australia. The Australians tried to turn away the boat but the desperate immigrants tried everything to prevent being turned away. The brutal treatment left many deeply injured, some insane, from the years spent in limbo under vicious treatment by an anti-refugee policy by Australia. Tragic.


• Chapter 3 looks at the idea that the "war on terror" had to be fought viciously and that all deaths were the fault of al Qaeda and not of those in the West responding to having been attacked. This chapter looks at the excited and joyous planning of a wedding in Afghanistan. Unfortunately this was in the home province of Mullah Omar and the Americans with their "too little boots on the ground" incompetent intelligence decide that Mullah Omar will show up at the wedding. So they unleash the hell fire of US weapons on innocent people 48 were killed and 117 wounded. This disturbing story is only one of many, many in Afghanistan over a decade of "mistakes" by Americans in their war against a nearly invisible enemy.


• Chapter 8 looks at the "unintended consequences" of a war. In this case, it focuses on the world-wide program to eradicate polio. This program was within a year or two or three of success when 9/11 happened. Sadly, it now appears the world has utterly failed to eradicate polio and since there is now billions with no experience with the disease and many hundreds of millions of children with no immunity, the disease is poised to strike back worse than it was during the height of the great polio epidemics of the mid-20th century. This chapter focuses on the tale of a very dedicated, wonderful doctor who struggles to complete the fight against polio in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Sadly, the Muslims come to believe that the vaccine is a Western plot to sterilize them and that the drugs given to them are adulterated with female hormones and pig fat, they refuse the vaccine. Worse, they blow up the car in which the vaccine team is traveling and kill several including this doctor. Another tragic "consequence" of the war.

The other chapters focus on big policy themes and make them real by looking at the level of individual lives. It is all very tragic. But it makes this book especially powerful and poignant. Wars have consequences. How you fight them is very important. Sadly, the Bush administration was cavalier (cowboyish?) in its conduct of a war that has now killed hundreds and soon thousands more than were ever killed on 9/11.

One final quote from the book to hammer home the obscenities that have come out of "the war on terrorism":

Meanwhile, most of these nations seized on the exceptional nature of the post-9/11 threat, then used it as a justification for enacting domestic legislation that aped US policy regarding human rights: restrictions of rights for foreigners and asylum seekers; indefinite incarceration of suspects without trial; withdrawal of the right to an attorney; suspension of habeas corpus; enhanced surveillance techniques. The list went on and on.

'I do not underestimate the ability of fanatical groups to kill and destroy,' conceded Lord Hoffmann in a famous judgement on the incarceration of terror suspects without trial in the United Kingdom in December 2004. 'But they do not threaten the life of the nation.' The real threat to the United Kingdom, he warned, 'comes not from terrorism but from laws such as these.'

Five years later, the Human Rights Council's Eminent Panel of Jurists on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism and Human Rights agreed. After an exhaustive three-year study of the effects of the War on Terror on human rights globally, the Panel concluded that human rights protections, assembled over the last sixty years, had been corroded to the point where the international legal order was in jeopardy. Especially worrying was that the nations that had previously argued for the primacy of human rights were the very same nations now busily opting out of them. The result was 'perhaps one of the most serious challenges ever posed to the integrity of a system carefully constructed after the Second World War.'

Everybody should read this book. It will make them sit up and pay attention to the "war" that has been conducted "on their behalf". It will change their way of viewing the world.

America in Now Truly Orwell's Oceania

Obama has just signed an extension of the 9/11 "national emergency" for its 11th year. America is truly into the perpetual state of war that George Orwell foresaw as the organizing principle of the state:

Because the terrorist threat continues, the national emergency declared on September 14, 2001, and the powers and authorities adopted to deal with that emergency must continue in effect beyond September 14, 2011. Therefore, I am continuing in effect for an additional year the national emergency that was declared on September 14, 2001, with respect to the terrorist threat.

This is plain nutty. The US has now "fought" a war nearly three times as long as WWII against a ragtag enemy of a few hundred fanatics. This isn't a war. It is a police issue. The US has turned it into "nation building" and occupation of countries. The US has the look and feel of Orwell's 1984 where Oceania was constantly at war with Eurasia. Why? To maintain the grip of the state. There was no real war. It was ideological and it was the cover for a police state.

Earth to Obama: there will always be some kind of terrorism somewhere on earth. You can't "defeat" terrorism. You can only destroy specific groups and contain them or eliminate them. But that doesn't have to be presented as a "war". When the US went after Al Capone or Bonnie & Clyde or the Mafia, they didn't declare war. They beefed up police forces and went after them.

Transparency in Government

You can count on politicians, right and left, to promise "transparency" and deliver lies, obfuscation, and misdirection. But here's an example of how the Republicans go that "extra mile"...

Here's an interesting bit from a post on the Washington's Blog:

The Co-Chair of the Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, previously stated that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here).

The link is to this NY Times article:

Senator Accuses Bush of Cover-Up

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence that might have linked Saudi Arabia to the Sept. 11 hijackers.

Mr. Graham made the accusation in a new book and repeated it at a news conference Tuesday arranged by Senator John Kerry's presidential campaign. Republicans called the accusations "bizarre conspiracy theories," and the Saudis said they were unsubstantiated and reckless.

The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.

In his book "Intelligence Matters," Mr. Graham, the co-chairman of the Congressional inquiry with Representative Porter J. Goss, Republican of Florida, said an F.B.I. official wrote them in November 2002 and said "the administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source.'' On Tuesday, Mr. Graham called the letter "a smoking gun" and said, "The reason for this cover-up goes right to the White House."

The report added to suspicions about a Saudi role in the hijacking plot.

As I read the above, I keep hearing that voice from the Watergate scandal: follow the money.

Go read the whole Washington's Blog post to find links to many, many other comments on this ugly cover-up of terrorists by the Bush administration.

The Truth about Al Qaeda and the Arab Spring

Juan Cole is the most insightful observers of the Middle East. Here is a bit from a post by him on his blog Informed Comment:

Al-Qaeda was grossly over-estimated in the wake of the horrific September 11 attacks. It was a relatively small terrorist group that spent less than half a million dollars on the operation. It should have been dealt with as a police matter, not as the enemy in a trillion-dollar “war” conducted by the Pentagon. It did, however, have a clever over-all strategy and political ideology. It adopted a form of pan-Islamism, a dream of making Islam a basis for a national idea, so that an Islamic superpower could be created, in which Egypt and Saudi Arabia would be provinces. This superpower would be a dictatorship, and would come into being through the actions of pan-Islamic guerrillas in each country who would violently overthrow the national government. The point of attacking the United States was only that it was seen to stand behind the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and so forth, making them impossible to overthrow.

All the major assumptions of Bin Laden and his associates have fallen by the wayside in the Arab world. First, it has been shown that dictators such as Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia can be overthrown by peaceful crowd action, emulating Gandhi and Martin Luther King. The cry in Tahrir Square last winter in downtown Cairo was “Silmiya, Silmiya!” — Peacefully, peacefully.

...

Just as the massive crowds of young demonstrators constrained regime members such as Rashid Ammar (chief of staff in Tunisia), Air Marshall Hussein Tantawi of Egypt, and technocrat Mustafa Abdel Jalil of Libya to defect to the reformers, so the same masses could convince President Barack Obama at length to demand the departure of Mubarak and of Qaddafi. Obviously, Western support can only be hoped for in the case of a likely transition to democratic regimes with moderate policies, such that domestic reform through moderation synchronizes with gaining foreign acquiescence in it.

Bin Laden had imbibed through Egyptian radical theorist Sayyid Qutb the Leninist notion that change requires vanguard fighters (tala’i`). But the masses showed that they do not need seedy vanguards to represent and potentially to hijack their movements. They are perfectly capable of asserting their own agency.

...

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush, however, saw the attacks as “an opportunity.” They were an opportunity to assert American dominance of the oil fields of the Middle East, and therefore, they reasoned, of the energy future of the entire world, ensuring the predominance of the American superpower throughout the twenty-first century. They thus followed a successful overthrow of the Taliban in Afghanistan with a disastrous military occupation of that country. They coddled the military dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan. They threw international law into the trash compactor and invaded and occupied Iraq, kicking off a massive insurgency and then a civil war, and leaving the country a political basket case. They left hundreds of thousands dead and some 4 million displaced. In northern Pakistan and then in Yemen and elsewhere, a covert program of drone strikes was carried out lawlessly and with no oversight; because it is done by the CIA and is classified, our elected officials cannot even confirm that it exists, much less conduct a public debate as to its legality, constitutional validity, or wisdom.

...

Some critics trace the debt and budget crisis to the Bush wars, but in a $14.5 trillion a year economy, the $1 trillion spent on the wars over a decade was not decisive. The real cost of the wars of aggression was a decline in the standing of the US abroad, a gutting of the UN Charter and international legal norms, and a de facto repeal civil liberties at home. The American people, however, are resilient and strong. The American system of government is flexible. If we are supine and abject, our children will not be. Already, federal government intrusion into our lives is being questioned on the right and the left alike. With hard work and a bit of luck, perhaps over the course of a generation, we can get our Bill of Rights back. And if government officials drag their feet too much in returning our inalienable rights to us, the Egyptian and Tunisian youth have already shown the way forward.

Sadly, when Obama took office he had a mandate to reject the Bush policies. He had campaigned against them. But he quietly adopted them as his own. He sponsored his own "surge" in Afghanistan. He increased the drone attacks. He kept the secret prisons and Guantanamo but did tone down the official "torture policy" of the US.

I think the post by Juan Cole should be taken to heart. It is an upbeat message for Americans. It is a clarion call to take back their country by rejecting the Republicans and Obama.

Required Reading

Here is a bit from an ACLU report on America and the need to reclaim civil liberties:

Rather than working to allay public fear, our political leaders (with few exceptions) have manipulated it, to the point where it can be difficult to determine whether their expressions of alarm are genuine or merely opportunistic. Is it possible that many members of Congress actually believe that U.S. prisons are not secure enough to hold terrorism suspects? (And is it remotely conceivable that a member of Congress believes his own warning that if Khalid Sheikh Mohamed is brought to the United States for trial, he might be released on a technicality, granted asylum, and be on a path to citizenship?) These are arguments based on cynicism, not strength or resolve.

And that cynicism is emboldened by a political discourse that rewards those who inflate the terrorist threat and marginalizes those who accurately describe it. Thus, those who proclaim that Muslim terrorists represent an unprecedented threat to our way of life; that our existing laws, courts, and institutions—even our prisons—are inadequate in the face of this threat; that we have no choice but to dispense with core principles—including even the prohibition against torturing prisoners—to defeat this ruthless enemy; that, in short, “9/11 changed everything”—are extolled as hard-nosed realists, warriors who are willing to “take the gloves off.” By contrast, those who defend the vitality and viability of our constitutional system, who insist that our existing institutions are equal to the challenges posed by transnational terrorism; who demand that we abide by core principles, including fair trials for and humane treatment of prisoners, even if that means that terrorism suspects must be released and political leaders must be prosecuted; who, in short, do not believe that the threat of terrorism requires us to abandon our core principles—are dismissed as weak and naïve.

...

On May 26, 2011, a majority of the U.S. House of Representatives voted to give President Obama—and all future presidents—more war authority than Congress gave to President Bush two days after the 9/11 attacks: under the House bill, a president would no longer have to show a connection to 9/11, or even any specific threat to America, before using military force anywhere in the world that a terrorism suspect may be found—including within the United States.
The House vote was a discordant spectacle because it sought to place the nation on a permanent war footing at a time when responsible policy-making called for the opposite.

This is must reading for Americans as they allow their civil liberties to be frittered away on endless "wars" against something that will never disappear "terrorism".

The actions of the US since 9/11 have been disreputable... except for the new policies of Obama in the Middle East, particularly in Libya, which have allowed these people to democratically fight for their rights against oppressive regimes.

Here is an article in Salon by Glenn Greenwald that discusses Obama's security state. He notes that the PBS program Frontline: Top Secret America discloses that Obama has continued Bush's obsession and tactics:

Here is one quote they include from Rizzo:

With a notable exception of the enhanced interrogation program, the incoming Obama administration changed virtually nothing with respect to existing CIA programs and operations. Things continued. Authorities were continued that were originally granted by President Bush beginning shortly after 9/11. Those were all picked up, reviewed and endorsed by the Obama administration.

Frontline adds that while candidate Obama "promised a sweeping overhaul of the Bush administration’s war on terror" and "a top to bottom review of the threats we face and our abilities to confront them," Rizzo explains that, in fact, Obama officials during the transition made clear to the CIA that they intended almost complete continuity. And Rizzo was joined in this assessment today by Dick Cheney, who -- as recounted by his long-time faithful stenographer, Politico's Mike Allen -- cites this continuity to (once again) claim "vindication"; said the former Vice President, “[Obama] ultimately had to adopt many of the same policies that we had been pursuing because that was the most effective way to defend the nation.”

Pathetic. Obama promised "hope" and "change you can believe in" and "transparency" in government but he has delivered the economy over to the Wall Street bankers and the endless wars over to the Pentagon and has taken draconian steps against whistle-blowers.

Paul Krugman Notices an Oddity of 9/11

Here is a post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog:

The Years of Shame

Is it just me, or are the 9/11 commemorations oddly subdued?

Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

What happened after 9/11 — and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not — was deeply shameful. Te atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.

A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?

The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it.

I’m not going to allow comments on this post, for obvious reasons.

Paul Krugman takes a lot of flak for telling things as he sees them. He is courageous and modest, and he has stayed in the fight despite being ignored and hated. To me, he is like an Old Testament prophet: reviled in his own land, but one day he will be recognized for his honest, heroic, and prescient stand. He's been dead right on almost every issue.

Meanwhile, for comic relief, there is Michael Moore who has done much to publicize problems and wrongs, but who can't resist putting his own ego front and centre. If you want to read something that is 180^o out from Krugman's quiet stance, read this article by Michael Moore where he turns the focus off the big issue and instead focuses on "me, me, me". I like Michael Moore but I don't like his narcissistic egotism. Krugman stays at his post focused on the issues, while Michael Moore makes sure he is in the shot when he does a documentary or writes up the injustice or tragedy with his own ego front and centre. I prefer the quiet hero.

As for 9/11... here is a post by Barry Ritholtz at his The Big Picture blog that best captures my opinion about the way the media is milking the situation:

Relentless Media Hype

I’ve already had my say about what happened 10 years ago. I do not feel a compelling need to revisit it again and again and again.

MSNBC is replaying their September 11, 2001 broadcast; the WSJ made their entire 9/12 paper available online. Other outlets are doing similar “tributes” if thats the right word.

I don’t know if anyone else feels this way, but the relentless 9/11 coverage and tributes feels both ghoulish and exploitative. Sorry, but this is simply too much, I’ve had more than I can take of this. I do not care to spend the entire day crying, but if I watch any more of this coverage that is what will happen.

To those people who can find some consolation in this, I wish you well. Its a macabre spectacle to me. I need to find something more joyous and upbeat.

Between narcissistic egoism and bathetic maudlinism and commercial exploitation, I'm finding early September to be the doldrums of the year.

Update 2011sep12: Here is an added post by Paul Krugman on his NY Times blog that gives his thoughts about the exploitation of 9/11:

More About the 9/11 Anniversary

It looks as if I should say a bit more about yesterday’s anniversary. So:

The fact is that the two years or so after 9/11 were a terrible time in America – a time of political exploitation and intimidation, culminating in the deliberate misleading of the nation into the invasion of Iraq. It’s probably worth pointing out that I’m not saying anything now that I wasn’t saying in real time back then, when Bush had a sky-high approval rating and any criticism was denounced as treason. And there’s nothing I’ve done in my life of which I’m more proud.

It was a time when tough talk was confused with real heroism, when people who made speeches, then feathered their own political or financial nests, were exalted along with – and sometimes above – those who put their lives on the line, both on the evil day and after.

So it was a shameful episode in our nation’s history – and it’s one that I can’t help thinking about whenever we talk about 9/11 itself.

Now, I should have said that the American people behaved remarkably well in the weeks and months after 9/11: There was very little panic, and much more tolerance than one might have feared. Muslims weren’t lynched, and neither were dissenters, and that was something of which we can all be proud.

But the memory of how the atrocity was abused is and remains a painful one. And it’s a story that I, at least, can neither forget nor forgive.

How the UK Learned from its US Master

The world is well aware of the crimes of George Bush with his secret prisons and torture regime. But with the fall of Gaddafi, the UK is now getting its chance to shuck and jive in the public limelight and offer up excuses and the necessary exculpations for its behaviour. From an article in the UK's Guardian newspaper:

Sami al-Saadi is considering whether to sue the British government after he and his family were 'rendered' in an operation between MI6 and Gaddafi's intelligence services

A Libyan Islamist has told how he and his family were imprisoned after being "rendered" in an operation MI6 hatched in co-operation with Muammar Gaddafi's intelligence services. The rendition occurred shortly before Tony Blair paid his first visit to the dictator.

Sami al-Saadi, his wife and four children, the youngest a girl aged six, were flown from Hong Kong to Tripoli, where they were taken straight to prison. Saadi was interrogated under torture while his family were held in a nearby cell.

"They handcuffed me and my wife on the plane, my kids and wife were crying all the way," he told the Guardian. "It was a very bad situation. My wife and children were held for two months, and psychologically punished. The Libyans told me that the British were very happy."

Saadi says he is now considering whether to sue the British government, making him the second Libyan rendition victim to threaten legal proceedings in less than a week.

The evidence that the family were victims of a British-led rendition operation is contained in a secret CIA document found in the abandoned office of Moussa Koussa, Gaddafi's former intelligence chief, in Tripoli last week.

In London, meanwhile, an official inquiry into Britain's role in torture and rendition since 9/11 says the government has provided information about the UK's role in the affair, and Whitehall sources defended intelligence agencies' actions by saying they were following "ministerially authorised government policy".

It is the first time evidence has emerged that the British intelligence agencies ran their own rendition operation, as opposed to co-operating with those that were mounted by the CIA.

Go read the whole article.

Democracy only works if government is transparent. When governments have secret armies, especially secret torture chambers, carrying out crimes on "behalf of the people" for which the people do not agree and are horrified to discover, then you don't have a legitimate government. Apparently this simple truth hasn't yet registered on the US or UK governments. You can't run secret "wars" and commit "secret crimes" on behalf of a democratic people if you don't tell them what you are up to and get their permission.

How to Build a Terrorist-Proof High Rise Building

Here is a joint PBS NewHour and PBS Nova production that explains the new approach to building high rises that make the buildings resistent to terrorist attacks:



It is fascinating that 1907 technology is still the best for protecting against terrorists bombs & jet planes. But modern technology hasn't gone back to it because of costs and aesthetics.

America Running Scared and Paying Through the Nose

Here is a bit from an article by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine that holds up America's waste of money on "security":

The Los Angeles Times examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic "homeland security" projects: $75 billion per year for things such as a Zodiac boat with side-scan sonar to respond to a potential attack on a lake in tiny Keith County, Nebraska, and hundreds of "9-ton BearCat armored vehicles, complete with turret" to guard against things like an attack on DreamWorks in Los Angeles. All of that -- which is independent of the exponentially greater sums spent on foreign wars, occupations, bombings, and the vast array of weaponry and private contractors to support it all -- is in response to this mammoth, existential, the-single-greatest-challenge-of-our-generation threat:

"The number of people worldwide who are killed by Muslim-type terrorists, Al Qaeda wannabes, is maybe a few hundred outside of war zones. It's basically the same number of people who die drowning in the bathtub each year," said John Mueller, an Ohio State University professor who has written extensively about the balance between threat and expenditures in fighting terrorism.

Last year, McClatchy characterized this threat in similar terms: "undoubtedly more American citizens died overseas from traffic accidents or intestinal illnesses than from terrorism."

...

Despite these increasing economic insecurities -- actually, precisely because of them -- the sprawling domestic Security State continues unabated. The industry journal National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market ‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns."

...

Meanwhile, much of the anti-Terrorism weaponry in the U.S. ends up being deployed for purposes of purely domestic policing. As the LA Times notes: those aforementioned BearCats are "are now deployed by police across the country; the arrests of methamphetamine dealers and bank robbers these days often look much like a tactical assault on insurgents in Baghdad." Drones are used both in the Drug War and to patrol the border. Surveillance measures originally justified as necessary to fight foreign Terrorists are routinely turned far more often inward, and the NSA -- created with a taboo against domestic spying -- now does that regularly.

Exaggerating, manipulating and exploiting the Terrorist threat for profit and power has been the biggest scam of the decade; only Wall Street's ability to make the Government prop it up and profit from the crisis it created at the expense of everyone else can compete for that title. Nothing has altered the mindset of the American citizenry more than a decade's worth of fear-mongering So compelling is fear-based propaganda, so beholden are our government institutions to these private Security State factions, and so unaccountable is the power bestowed by these programs, that even a full decade after the only Terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, its growth continues more or less unabated.

What is truly tragic is that the billions spent of "security" is happening while teachers, police, and firemen are being laid off, libraries closed, parks and recreation facilities closed, and people hunker down in a new Dark Ages secure in the knowledge that billions are being spent to "protect" them from the big bad bogeyman Al Qaeda while their bargain with the Devil has turned America's future into ashes.

How TSA Has Brought Security Theatre to a Boil

The US airlines did the one thing that should have been done before 9/11 only after 9/11. They installed hardened doors between the cockpit and the rest of the plane. Everything else in American aviation "security" is pure eyewash and a waste of money and a huge burden on people an a humiliation to many. It is simply security theatre.

Here is an example from Vance Gilbert's blog. This is a letter he wrote after a humilating and expensive "incident" with TSA:

To Whom It May Concern,

My name is Vance Gilbert.

I live in Arlington, MA.

I am a homeowner, having been here 10+ years, I have a partner, and we have two 52lb Standard Poodles.

I am a 6 foot tall, bespectacled, slightly greying, 52 year old, 230 lb African-American male with a close hair cut.

On August 14, 2011, I boarded United Airlines Flight UA #3483 from Boston to Dulles on time and was seated in an isle seat #9C on an Embraer 170. I was dressed in shorts, baseball hat, t-shirt, hiking boots, and unbuttoned Jimmy Buffett Hawaiian shirt (covered with airplanes). As the door was being closed, we were told it was a full flight, meaning 70 - 80 people. I had my backpack under the seat in front of me, and my fanny pack/wallet behind my heels.

After the doors were closed the flight attendant came down the isle checking security buckling, bag clearance etc., and asked if she could put my fanny pack above me in the overhead bin. I replied to her that I'd be fine just stuffing it next to my back-pack under seat in front of me as it contained my wallet etc and that I'd rather have it near. She seemed fine with that resolution. All that was done without consternation or belligerence, and I thought nothing of it.

Now, I am a musician by trade and an amateur aviation historian, studying mostly European transport aircraft between WW1 and WW2, and some after. I was on my way to two different music festivals. When I travel I delve into reading about this era of aviation. I had taken out and was reading a book of Polish Aircraft circa 1946 and I was also looking at views of an Italian aircraft from 1921.

I think you see where this is going...

The plane went all the way out to the take-off point, in the queue for take-off. All the while I noticed a lot of phone pinging back and forth between the flight attendants. The young woman flight attendant was also crouched next to and conversing seriously to a dead-heading pilot about 4 seats up on the other side. The plane then proceeded to turn around and head all the way back to the gate. Once at the gate, the jet bridge was positioned. The Captain announced, "We have a minor issue, and we will continue our departure once it's resolved." He left the aircraft.

After about 5 - 10 minutes, 2 Mass State Policemen, 1 or 2 TSA Agents, and the bursar for the flight come down the isle and motion me to get off of the plane. I do not remember if they called me by name. We stepped out into the breezeway where one of the State policemen asked how I was doing that day.

I replied, "Sir, I think you're going to tell me I could be doing much better..."

Policeman: "Did you have a problem with your bag earlier?"

Me: "No sir, not at all. The flight attendant wanted it secured elsewhere other than behind my feet, and I opted to put it under the seat in front of me. It's my wallet, even though there's only 30 bucks in it…And all that was done without belligerence, or words for that matter…it was all good.

A few beats...

Policeman: "Sir, were you looking at a book of airplanes?"

Me: "Yes sir I was. I am a musician for money, but for fun I study old aircraft and build models of them, and the book I was reading was of Polish Aircraft from 1946."

Policeman: "Would you please go get that book so that i can see it?"

I go back onto the plane - all eyes are on me like I was a common criminal. Total humiliation part 2.

After a couple of minutes he says, "Why, this is all Snoopy Red Baron stuff..."

Me: "Yes sir, actually the triplane you see is Italian, from 1921 a little after World War 1..."

Policeman: "No problem here then, you can go on back on to the plane, sorry to inconvenience you...and have a nice flight".

We were now at least, after re-queuing, over an hour late. No one looked me in the eye, flight attendants, passengers. I missed my next connection, and had to cancel that portion of the flight (fair $ value equaling ??) and rent a car ($270) plus fuel ($30) to my work (lost 1/2 wages = $100), and I was afraid to read for the next two flights.

I silently wept the whole flight to DC. I've never been so frightened or humiliated. I'm shaking even writing this.

How much money was lost between the airline, the other travelers? - I couldn't begin to calculate.

How damaged am I from this experience? I'm not feeling particularly American. I'm angry, dumbfounded, frightened.

Would this have happened to the 30-ish Caucasian woman sitting across the aisle from me (who left her seat, water bottle, and book, never to be seen for the rest of the "completely full" flight)? Is it now against the law to be dark and read a book about historic aircraft?

What's my take-away from this experience as a taxpayer, United Airlines patron, Black Man, teacher, mentor, American? I was broken hearted and speechless as I overheard my friend's wife try to explain to her kids what happened and what he and I were talking about over dinner. They never did get why.

What do I tell your children?

Enough.

What do I do now - please advise?

Please contact me at the email above

Thanks in advance,

Vance Gilbert
Arlington, MA

There was nothing in this "incident" that common sense would identify as a "threat". This was pure over-reaction and stupidity and it was fueled by racism. Not violent, aggresive, mean racism, just an "uneasiness" with "the other" that plays into the hands of security theatre. What a tragedy.

Update 2011aug27: Here is a post on the On Liberty blog at the Boston Globe newspaper.

The ACLU is always concerned about ways in which ordinary Americans get inconvenienced by "security" measures that actually make us no safer, and less free. TSA's unpopular and invasive scanners and "pat-down" searches, which began frustrating travelers at Logan and nationwide last year, are a perfect example.

Recent reports of what happened to Arlington-based musician Vance Gilbert, who was questioned after reading a book about vintage airplanes on a flight out of Boston, seems to bear out that concern. Mr. Gilbert made it past TSA scanners and screeners, but then found himself being questioned after boarding his flight. We are reposting here Mr. Gilbert's open letter to the ACLU about what he experienced. He titled it "Racial Profiling First Hand".

That this kind of petty harrassment is "invisible" reminds me of how "decent" Germans after WWII claimed they had seen nothing of the internment and massacre of Jews (and gypsies, and homosexuals, and socialists, and handicapped, etc.). Funny... millions were dispossessed and killed and nobody noticed. Americans are undergoing their own mini-"holocaust" and nobody is noticing. Amazing. (It is there to be seen, buy you have to be attentive and remember and connect the dots. Most people couldn't be bothered. Like pastor Martin Niemöller noted in WWII:

First they came for the communists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Update 2011sep03: Here is more material on reaction to the Vance Gilbert case. This comes from a James Fallows blog at The Atlantic and it includes his own recent run-in with obnoxious TSA heavy-handedness. Here is a bit:

In three previous installments -- first, second, and third -- readers have discussed the implications of a recent case in which a Boston-area musician, Vance Gilbert, caused an airline crew to panic and abort the departure of a plane. Gilbert is black. How much difference did that make?

This is newly on my mind because, when starting on the first leg of a long overseas trip today, I had the most unpleasant encounter in years with TSA officialdom, at Dulles Airport. (I am now at LAX, waiting for the connecting flight.TSA Officer Z*** of Dulles, I will remember you!) This encounter was a reminder that regardless of race, getting crosswise of security-officialdom can lead to a lot of trouble. It was also a reminder that asking "Why?" or "What is the reason for that?" to a uniformed official of the wrong temperament can be the first step down a path that is difficult to retrace.

Go read the James Fallows post to get all of the material including the readers' comments he has brought into the post and the links he provides to relevant materia.

As a Canadian, I found this reader comment to have the greatest resonance:

From a reader in Canada:

>>After travelling through different airports in different countries, I must say that security screens in the US are the worst, but an incident in Canada demonstrated to me how their authority can be abused. On this occasion, during a plane change in Calgary, I saw that the security services everywhere hold an inordinate amount of power that is can be abused for any of the very personal reasons a screener may hold.

It was very early morning, before the coffee shops opened. Because there were a few hours between plane change I decided to leave the secure area and get some fresh air. As I was leaving the airport a nearby coffee shop was in the process of opening, so I rushed over, and waited by the counter, to get that much needed morning coffee.

As I waited for the server to serve me, a woman wearing a security uniform, came up to the counter, stood behind me, calling out to the server, "Elsie, can I have a black coffee". The server "Elsie" gave her the coffee and I started to give my order. Then, six more security people came up behind me and each called out their order. Elsie served all of them leaving me standing there. I was annoyed but let it go thinking that they were in a rush to get to their duty stations.

After Elsie served them, I gave her my order. Elsie picked up the cup and pot to pour my coffee, when a lone straggler wearing a security uniform appeared and called out her order to Elsie.

Elsie put down my cup and started to serve this lone person when I blurted out, "Do you mind giving me my coffee please". By this time I started to have visions of spending the entire time waiting in a line and never getting my coffee. Elsie served me before she served this security person.

I got my coffee, went outside and then returned to go through security.

When I went through security, every single person in that coffee line up was working the area. I was searched, scanned, patted down, had my carry-on torn apart, by 3 different security personnel, all in sequence. I swear I saw the last one smirk at someone behind me.

Could I prove I was singled out? No. Could I prove they were abusing their power? No. Do I believe that security personnel were abusing their power? Certainly Yes. Do I believe Gilbert? Absolutely Yes!

And BTW. I'm a white 66 year old, grey haired grandmother.

Update 2011sep12: Here is yet another example of "guilt by looking ethnic". Here is a bit from a post by another victim of security theatre, Shoshana Hebshi, in her blog Stories from the Heartland:

Someone shouted for us to place our hands on the seats in front of us, heads down. The cops ran down the aisle, stopped at my row and yelled at the three of us to get up. “Can I bring my phone?” I asked, of course. What a cliffhanger for my Twitter followers! No, one of the cops said, grabbing my arm a little harder than I would have liked. He slapped metal cuffs on my wrists and pushed me off the plane. The three of us, two Indian men living in the Detroit metro area, and me, a half-Arab, half-Jewish housewife living in suburban Ohio, were being detained.

The cops brought us to a parked squad car next to the plane, had us spread our legs and arms. Mine asked me if I was wearing any explosives. “No,” I said, holding my tongue to not let out a snarky response. I wasn’t sure what I could and could not say, and all that came out was “What’s going on?”

No one would answer me. They put me in the back of the car. It’s a plastic seat, for all you out there who have never been tossed into the back of a police car. It’s hard, it’s hot, and it’s humiliating. The Indian man who had sat next to me on the plane was already in the backseat. I turned to him, shocked, and asked him if he knew what was going on. I asked him if he knew the other man that had been in our row, and he said he had just met him. I said, it’s because of what we look like. They’re doing this because of what we look like. And I couldn’t believe that I was being arrested and taken away.

When the Patriot Act was passed after 9/11 and Arabs and Arab-looking people were being harassed all over the country, my Saudi Arabian dad became nervous. A bit of a conspiracy theorist at heart, he knew the government was watching him and at any time could come and take him away. It was happening all over. Men were being taken on suspicion of terrorist activities and held and questioned–sometimes abused–for long periods of time. Our country had a civil rights issue on its hands. And, in the name of patriotism we lost a lot of our liberty, especially those who look like me.

I never had any run-ins with the law. Since 9/11, though I felt a heightened sense of how my appearance would affect my travel plans, I never had any concrete reason to think I would be targeted.

...

Eventually a female uniformed officer came in. She looked like a fat Jada Pinkett Smith, and in a kind but firm voice explained what was going to happen. I was to stand, face the wall in a position so the camera above the toilet couldn’t see, and take off my clothes. I complied. She commented on my tattoo, saying, “Oh you have one of those things–good and evil, right?”

“Yin and yang. Balance,” I said, grabbing my clothes to redress.

“You understand why we have to do this, right? It’s for our own protection,” she told me.

Because I am so violent. And pulling me off an airplane, handcuffing me and patting me down against a squad car didn’t offer enough protection. They also needed to make sure all my orifices were free and clear.

She apologized for having to do the strip search, and I asked her to tell me what was going on. She said she didn’t know but someone would come and talk to me. She put my handcuffs back on and left. The other officer stood guard outside. I told him I needed to call my husband. He said I could use the phone later.

...

In the aftermath of my events on Sept. 11, 2011, I feel violated, humiliated and sure that I was taken from the plane simply because of my appearance. Though I never left my seat, spoke to anyone on the flight or tinkered with any “suspicious” device, I was forced into a situation where I was stripped of my freedom and liberty that so many of my fellow Americans purport are the foundations of this country and should be protected at any cost.

I believe in national security, but I also believe in peace and justice. I believe in tolerance, acceptance and trying–as hard as it sometimes may be–not to judge a person by the color of their skin or the way they dress.

...

I feel fortunate to have friends and family members who are sick over what happened to me. I share their disgust. But there was someone on that plane who felt threatened enough to alert the authorities. This country has operated for the last 10 years through fear. We’ve been a country at war and going bankrupt for much of this time. What is the next step?

You can read more about the ordeal from this AP report: http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2011/sep/11/us-airline-passengers-detained/

When will Americans wake up and demand their country back from the fanatics who see a "terrorist" behind every tree. From the crazies who want to live in a police state because they are scared of their own shadow? The attack on 9/11 was by a tiny handful of fanatics. It was a police action. Not a 10 year war with nearly 7,000 Americans killed, two countries invaded, and half a dozen others subject to drone strikes. Somebody wanted the big show, costly war. Think about who had what to win from making a big deal about "getting Bin Laden dead or alive" but when it came to actually getting him in the Tora Bora mountains, just couldn't see committing many US troops and decided to use Afghani mercenaries instead. Surprise! Bin Laden outbid the Americans and got away. So much for "dead or alive". So much for a serious "war on terrorism". The whole thing is a big Hollywood production to cover up another agenda: getting access to oil, use of fear to win elections, settling accounts with a guy who tried to kill your Daddy, etc.

Understanding How 9/11 Happened

Here's an excellent video to explain the mysterious "non-cooperation" between CIA and FBI. This makes sense to me.



This is typical bureaucratic infighting and bureaucratic ass covering. The tragedy is that these guys are supposely sworn to protect the US, but their loyalty to their own careers/reputation and their bureaucracy, the CIA, is higher than their loyalty to their country. Sad.

What I find funny is that Obama, as a new leader from "the other party", had a chance to come in after George Bush and do a complete house cleaning. He didn't. He continued Bush's policy of bailouts for the banks, he continued Bush's "too big to fail" and refuse to re-implement the Glass-Steagall act, he failed to reverse Bush's war policy, he in fact doubled down on Bush's "nation building" in Afghanistan, he failed to close Guantanamo, he didn't bring charges against Bush administration hacks for lying to Americans about Iraq, he didn't restart the 9/11 commission with a new mandate to get at the truth... he didn't change course. Obama is just a "kinder gentler" version of George Bush. He ran as "change you can believe in" but he has delivered more George Bush.

Time to Throw in the Towel

Here is an interesting interview with retired admiral and former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair. Until recently, he was in charge of the entire American effort to find, track, and take out terrorists. Now, he’s calling for that campaign to be reconsidered, and possibly even junked.



The video is taken from a Wired article.

Denis Blair is bringing rationalism to "the war on terror". he is calling for a cost-benefit analysis. Sadly most Americans would say "if you can save one life, it is worth any amount of money". But that is nutty. Nobody has the infinite sums required to stop every death. People accept risk in all aspects of life. He mentions car accidents. Nobody is calling for the spending of billions and trillions to "stop the slaughter on the highways". Nobody thinks it is realistic to call for "not one more death from accidents on the highways".