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Deine Papieren, Bitte!

Did you forget your identification card when traveling by air earlier this year? Congratulations! You were added to the Transportation Security Administration’s terrorist watch list, and your name was shared as that of a potential terrorist with state and local law enforcement agencies. The security of das Heimatland demanded it…

… because that’s the first step toward terrorism, you know, leaving your ID at home. It’s a gateway activity toward broader disruptions of the System upon which you and I lie prostrate depend. The Department of Homeland Security is further recommending that you call the Operation TIPS hotline to report on little old ladies who drop the bananas at the Piggly Wiggly.

Where are they? Where are the big, nasty, evildoing terrorists that have been captured thanks to the passage of the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the Protect America Act and then the FISA Amendments Act? Each of these bills restricting our freedoms was passed with the promise that in exchange for surrendered freedoms, your government would be catching terrorists by the bushel.

So where are they? I’m not talking about the occasional straggling loser without skills or contacts who gets 10 years in prison for talking about how easy it would be to blow something up some day over coffee at some local Starbucks. Most of these were apprehended before the passage of the above laws, anyway. I’m talking about actual, real terrorists with the weapons and the wherewithal. Where are these big, bad terrorists that are not going to talk over coffee but rather kill, kill, kill us all? When were they apprehended? Where are they being held? What are their weapons?

I’ll tell you what the U.S. government has managed to nab thanks to all this hype. The U.S. government has used millions of dollars in counter-terrorism funds to outfit aircraft for senior military and civilian leaders with plush luxurious encapsulated accommodations, complete with stuffed rotating armchairs, polished hardwood desks, big screen TVs, high-fidelity sound systems, beds and full length mirrors — “aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule.” The luxury capsules don’t provide any new tactical or communications capability to the politicians or generals who will ride in them — they’re just designed to make our leaders feel special. The Air Force general in charge of the money and the effort decided that it was time that people like him and his boss in the White House had something better than business class, something that leaders like him deserved.

That’s what this “anti-terrorism” effort has gotten us: No actual terrorists. Luxury aircraft accommodations for political and military leadership.

We need a new acronym for this kind of arrangement. If it were up to me, I’d call it a Special Category Absconsion Mess.

FOX News calls this a “Terrorist Fist Jab”:

It makes perfect sense. And that “terrorist fist jab” makes me think: you know, I always thought Zan and Jayna were Arab-looking. Yes. Alien Arabs from the planet Exon.

With an Alien Arab Blue Space Monkey.

That terrorist space monkey of theirs has been spending a lot of time around Barack Obama lately:

And as you can see there, Obama’s making a terrorist finger jab!

You don’t believe me about all this? Well, I have documentary evidence of the whole thing right here:

You see, Fox News was really onto something there.

This is why America needs habeas corpus.

A McClatchy Newspapers investigation reveals that “dozens and perhaps hundreds of men” have been wrongfully detained at the Guantanamo Bay indefinite detention facility without charge and without the habeas corpus right to challenge the basis for their detention. A review of the cases by McClatchy journalists revealed “fabricated evidence, old personal scores or bounty payments” to be the basis of these detentions.

How botched were the detentions of supposed “terrorists”? Some of those detained actually turned out to have been working… for the Americans. And how shoddy was the collection of evidence regarding these supposed “terrorists”? People were sent to Guantanamo and kept there for years on the basis of the unsubstantiated claims of the people who handed them over for cash. That’s how some of these people ended up in Guantanamo as “terrorists.” Where they were beaten. And subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Federal law and international law call it torture.

Newspaper employees did a better job gathering evidence in these cases than all the Homeland Security apparatus of the Bush administration, which just didn’t bother itself with completing the thorough task.

That’s why simply trusting the government when it tells you it’s got “the terrorists” is a bad idea.
That’s why a review of the evidence, not by a partial military panel but by an impartial judge, is crucial.
That’s why an all-powerful executive is dangerous.
That’s why we need separation of powers in this country.
That’s why we need habeas corpus in this country.

Not to protect the actual terrorists.
But to protect the people our government calls “the terrorists.” Then detains for years. And tortures. When they are nothing of the sort.
Next time around, to protect you.

Under the regime of Homeland Security, America has spent most of this decade at Code Orange Alert. Right now, airports are at Code Orange Alert and the rest of America is at Code Orange Alert.

Code Orange means that there is a high risk of terrorist attack.

Code Yellow means that there is a significant risk of terrorist attack.

Code Blue means that there is a general risk of terrorist attack.

Code Green means that there is a low risk of terrorist attack.

Let’s look at the situation rationally: What is the actual risk that there is going to be a terrorist attack today? How about a terrorist attack this month? What about the risk that there will be a terrorist attack this year?

The answers to those questions are all the same: Low, low, low.

There is not a high risk that a terrorist attack will take place any time soon. I can say that with confidence because there hasn’t been a terrorist attack in the United States for a very long time.

If you say to someone that there is a high risk of rain, you mean to be saying, “Hey, you ought to bring your umbrella, because it looks like it’s probably going to rain today.”

A person would not say to someone in the middle of the Sahara Desert, in a place where it rains once every ten years or so, that there is a “high risk” of rain… unless that person were working for the Department of Homeland Security. If that person was working for the Department of Homeland Security, one would issue a Code Orange Alert thunderstorm warning for the Sahara Desert every day of the year for years on end, just because it rained one morning seven years ago.

Still not willing to accept that the USA ought to be at Code Green? Let’s look at this operationally: Did you wake up this morning worrying about how you would deal with the terrorist attack today? Did you even discuss plans with your family just in case there would be a terrorist attack today?

If you did, you’re truly paranoid.

If you didn’t, that means that you’ve decided that the chance that there will be a terrorist attack is low. Low risk means code green.

So why isn’t the USA at Code Green? Hmmm…

In the small village where I live, there has been what they’re calling an “incident”. A middle school kid got upset at adults, and left a couple of bomb threats in the form of notes in a middle school bathroom.

This unknown student, unable to follow through on building an actual bomb, exploded a firecracker in a toilet in a desperate attempt to get attention. Now, lots of attention is being paid.

The State Police came in to search the school with specially trained dogs. Kindergarten students and their parents are being searched for weapons. Adults visiting the school are now required to show their driver’s licenses, as if an adult showing an identification card makes it less likely for a child in the school to play with fireworks. Some parents are proposing constant video surveillance of children. There will soon be security guards patrolling the hallways of not just the middle school, but the high school and elementary school as well.

The Superintendent of Schools declares that, even if the firecracker terrorist is caught, new security measures will not be rescinded, because the “threat” will not be over. Why not? Because there will always be, the Superintendent declared, adults and students from somewhere else in the USA who might come to our village to try to hurt our children.

What will it take for people to calm down, and realize that my first grade son does not have a weapon in his backpack? His crayons are not detonating devices. His shoes are not biological weapons.

This article is not a bomb.

It’s been years now since pilots on commercial airplanes have been allowed to bring guns on board to carry with them in the cockpit. In all that time, what have those guns done to protect Americans flying through the skies? Nothing. Not one gun has been fired in defense of an airplane in all that time. The need has not arisen.

Nonetheless, this weekend, the risk of having a loaded gun on board an airplane became frighteningly clear. A gun brought on board by one of the pilots of a plane flown by US Airways fired a bullet spontaneously, just as the plane was coming in for a landing in North Carolina.

Mike Boyd, head of an aviation consulting group, explains the danger from that misfire: “If that bullet had compromised the shell of the airplane, i.e., gone through a window, the airplane could have gone down.”

So, the greatest violent threat from a weapon to an American commercial flight since the passage of the law allowing pilots’ guns on board airplanes has come from one of those guns. It’s a powerful example of how the extreme measures the Homeland Security regime has taken in order to help people feel safe have actually put Americans in harm’s way.

I admit it. The threat of a terrorist attack in the United States is real.

Of course, the threat of an attack in the United States by grizzly bear, cougar or alligator is also real.

In fact, we know that there are grizzly bears, alligators and cougars inside the borders of the United States right now. Any of those cougars, grizzly bears, alligators could attack and kill an American any day.

There is no evidence that there are any terrorists inside the borders of the United States right now. None.

I’ll bet that, over the history of the USA, more people have been killed by alligators, cougars and grizzly bears than have been killed by terrorists.

We don’t need special legislation to protect us from cougars, grizzly bears and alligators by establishing a spy network of video cameras to watch over every street in every town in the United States. For the same reason, we don’t need the FISA Amendments Act.

The FISA Amendments Act would establish the power necessary to build a constant, secret spy network to read our emails, listen to our telephone calls, watch us on the Internet, and search our homes and offices without any search warrant or reason to suspect that any terrorist event is taking place or being planned. It’s justified by the idea that there is a vast, grave, ongoing threat of terrorist attack.

There is an ongoing threat of a terrorist attack, but the threat is not vast or grave. It is small. We should not accept vast and grave new government spy networks to deal with a small problem.

A little right wing publication called The Conservative Voice expresses the paranoia with which George W. Bush and the Republican Party are pushing for extraordinary search and spy powers for the government to use against American citizens with the passage of the FISA Amendments Act. Their headline: “FISA Expiration Means American Deaths”.

They couldn’t get it more wrong. First of all, FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) has not expired. The Protect America Act, an effort to destroy the FISA courts, expired.

Secondly, what deaths are they talking about? When The Conservative Voice wrote its headline, “FISA Expiration Means American Deaths”, what dead Americans were they referring to?

Have any Americans actually died, or even gotten a paper cut, because the Protect America Act expired? No. There has been no terrorist attack in the United States since the expiration of the Protect America Act, and the chances are that there will not be another attempted terrorist attack within the United States for years, if not generations.

In their entire article, The Conservative Voice can only say the following: “Without a doubt, American people will now likely be killed on American soil.”

Without a doubt, likely? That’s an interesting choice of combined modifiers. Here’s what that statement actually means: No Americans have died as a result of the expiration of the Protect America Act. However, we are unable to doubt that it is likely that Americans will be killed here in the United States - NOW.

Now? Okay, let’s talk about now. That article over at The Conservative Voice was written by right wing ranter Kevin Roeten over 23 hours ago.

Where I come from, “now” means now, not tomorrow, or next week, or next month, or maybe ten years from now. When I say, “I’m coming over to your house now,” it doesn’t mean I’ll come over tomorrow, or maybe in the summer time, or in the year 2047.

However, there is no terrorist attack now. There wasn’t a terrorist attack yesterday. There almost certainly won’t be one tomorrow. Kevin Roeten and his ilk are just plain wrong when they claim that there will be a terrorist attack “now”.

Yet, it is on the basis of just this sort of flimsy political panic attack that George W. Bush is pressuring Democratic members of Congress to approve the extreme spy powers against American citizens contained in the FISA Amendments Act. As J. Clifford pointed out earlier this morning, there are over 40 Democrats in the House of Representatives who have proven themselves stupid enough to give in to these scare tactics.

I repeat his call to action. Call the Congressional Switchboard now (yes, now now, not The Conservative Voice’s idea of now) at (202) 224-3121, and get connected to one of the 40 Democrats in the House who was stupid enough to get us into this mess in the first place by voting to pass the Protect America Act last year. Tell them to vote NO on the FISA Amendments Act.

Be prepared to spell the word “no” for them. It’s like “now”, only without a W.

American travellers are suffering yet another blow to their constitutional rights, as Amtrak announces that it will begin random searches of people traveling on trains. Government agents in “mobile security teams”, armed with guns and accompanied by police dogs will now confront people boarding Amtrak trains.

Fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America declares, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

What is the probable cause that Amtrak officials cite in their searches of the personal property of people who are suspected of doing nothing more sinister than getting on board a train? Well, there was a terrorist attack on a train two years ago… in India. But, there also was another terrorist attack on a train three years ago… in England. Further substantiating their claim of probable cause to suspect that Amtrak passengers have bombs in their bags is a terrorist attack on a train four years ago… in Spain.

There have not been any terrorist attacks on trains in the United States, although there were some very dramatic robberies of trains… back in the 1800s. There is no specific or credible evidence of any plan by any terrorists to attack any train anywhere in the United States.

Yet, Amtrak officials are sending armed government agents to search through the bags of Amtrak passengers. That’s plainly against the Constitution. But then again, the American government has made it plain that it regards the Constitution as fit for any use other than serving as kindling for watchfires against that terrorist attack that it insists is going to come… any time now…

President Bush has suggested that we are in danger of being attacked on American soil by terrorists this week because the House of Representatives declined to rush to pass a conference version of the FISA Amendments Act, a law that, when passed, will give George W. Bush the power to spy against any American’s electronic communications, as well as the power to search through Americans’ homes and businesses without any search warrant.

The FISA Amendments Act makes the totalitarian powers of the Protect America Act permanent, and even extends them.

But, if we’re really in danger, where are the terrorists? It’s day 3 now of George W. Bush’s week of terrorist peril, and there has been no terrorist attack. Osama Bin Laden hasn’t even released a video or anything. Oh, there was another bombing, but that was in Afghanistan.

You remember Afghanistan. That was the place where the war was supposed to have been won six years ago.

So far, it looks like we can do without the Protect America Act or the FISA Amendments Act. While we’re at it, why doesn’t the House of Representatives get to work at the task of repealing the Military Commissions Act and the Patriot Act?

It’s time for a return to freedom, and an abandonment of fear. It is time for Congress to come out of its bunker.