by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
November 23, 2010
from
GlobalResearch Website
It doesn’t take a bureaucrat long to create an
empire.
John Pistole, the FBI agent who took over
the
Transportation Security Administration on July 1 told USA Today 16 days
later that protecting trains and subways from terrorist attacks will be as
high a priority for him as air travel.
It is difficult to imagine New Yorkers being porno-screened and sexually
groped on crowed subway platforms or showing up an hour or two in advance
for clearance for a 15 minute subway ride, but once bureaucrats get the bit
in their teeth they take absurdity to its logical conclusion. Buses will be
next, although it is even more difficult to imagine open air bus stops
turned into security zones with screeners and gropers inspecting passengers
before they board.
Will taxi passengers be next? In those Muslim lands whose citizens the US
government has been slaughtering for years, favorite weapons for retaliating
against the Americans are car and truck bombs.
How long before Pistole
announces that the TSA Gestapo is setting up roadblocks on city streets,
highways and interstates to check cars for bombs? That 15 minute trip to the
grocery store then becomes an all day affair.
Indeed, it has already begun.
Last September agents from Homeland Security,
TSA, and the US Department of Transportation, assisted by the Douglas County
Sheriff’s Office, conducted a counter-terrorism operation on busy Interstate
20 just west of Atlanta, Georgia.
Designated VIPER (Visible Inter-mobile
Prevention and Response), the operation required all trucks to stop to be
screened for bombs. Federal agents used dogs, screening devices, and a large
drive-through bomb detection machine. Imagine what the delays did to
delivery schedules and truckers’ bottom lines.
There are also news reports of federal trucks equipped with backscatter
X-ray devices that secretly scan cars and pedestrians.
With such expensive counter-terrorism activities, both in terms of the
hard-pressed taxpayers’ money and civil liberties, one would think that
bombs were going off all over America.
But, of course, they aren’t. There has not been
a successful terrorist act since 9/11, and thousands of independent experts
doubt the government’s explanation of that event.
Subsequent domestic terrorist events have turned out to be FBI sting
operations in which FBI agents organize not-so-bright disaffected members of
society and lead them into displaying interest in participating in a
terrorist act. Once the FBI agent, pretending to be a terrorist, succeeds in
prompting all the right words to be said and captured on his hidden
recorder, the “terrorists” are arrested and the “plot” exposed.
The very fact that the FBI has to orchestrate fake terrorism proves the
absence of real terrorists.
If Americans were more thoughtful and less gullible, they might wonder why
all the emphasis on transportation when there are so many soft targets.
Shopping centers, for example. If there were enough terrorists in America to
justify the existence of Homeland Security, bombs would be going off round
the clock in shopping malls in every state.
The effect would be far more terrifying than
blowing up an airliner.
Indeed, if terrorists want to attack air travelers, they never need to board
an airplane.
All they need to do is to join the throngs of passengers waiting to go
through the TSA scanners and set off their bombs. The TSA has conveniently
assembled the targets.
The final proof that there are no terrorists is that not a single
neoconservative or government official responsible for the Bush regime’s
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and
the
Obama regime’s slaughters of Pakistanis, Yemenis, and
Somalians has been assassinated.
None of these Americans who are responsible for
lies, deceptions, and invasions that have destroyed the lives of countless
numbers of Muslims have any security protection. If Muslims were capable of
pulling off
9/11, they are certainly capable of
assassinating Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Libby, Condi Rice, Kristol,
Bolton, Goldberg, and scores of others during the same hour of the same day.
I am not advocating that terrorists assassinate anyone. I am just making the
point that if the US was as overrun with terrorists as empire-building
bureaucrats pretend, we would definitely be experiencing dramatic terrorist
acts.
The argument is not believable that a government
that was incapable of preventing 9/11 is so all-knowing that it can prevent
assassination of unprotected neocons and shopping malls from being bombed.
If Al Qaeda was anything like the organization that the US government
claims, it would not be focused on trivial targets such as passenger
airliners. The organization, if it exists, would be focused on its real
enemies.
Try to imagine the propaganda value of
terrorists wiping out the neoconservatives in one fell swoop, followed by an
announcement that every member of the federal government down to the lowest
GS, every member of the House and Senate, and every governor was next in
line to be bumped off.
This would be real terrorism instead of the make-belief stuff associated
with shoe bombs that don’t work, underwear bombs that independent experts
say could not work, and bottled water and shampoo bombs that experts say
cannot possibly be put together in airliner lavatories.
Think about it.
Would a terror organization capable of
outwitting all 16 US intelligence agencies, all intelligence agencies of US
allies including,
...put its unrivaled prestige at risk with
improbable shoe bombs, shampoo bombs, and underwear bombs?
After success in destroying the World Trade Center and blowing up part of
the Pentagon, it is an extraordinary comedown to go after a mere airliner.
Would a person who gains fame by knocking out
the world heavyweight boxing champion make himself a laughing stock by
taking lunch money from school boys?
TSA is a far greater threat to Americans than are terrorists.
Pistole has given the finger to US senators and
representatives, state legislators, and the traveling public who have
expressed their views that virtual strip searches and sexual molestation are
too high a price to pay for “security.” Indeed, the TSA with its Gestapo
attitude and methods, is succeeding in making Americans more terrified
of the TSA than they are of terrorists.
Make up your own mind. What terrifies you the most...,
Terrorists, who in all likelihood you will
never encounter in your lifetime, or the TSA that you will encounter
every time you fly and soon, according to Pistole, every time you take a
train, a subway, or drive in a car or truck?
Before making up your mind, consider
this report from antiwar.com on November
19:
“TSA officials say that anyone refusing both
the full body scanners and the enhanced pat down procedures will be
taken into custody. Once there the detainees will not only be barred
from flying, but will be held indefinitely as suspected terrorists...
One sheriff’s office said they were already preparing to handle a large
number of detainees and plan to treat them as terror suspects.”
Who is cowing Americans into submission,
terrorists or the TSA Gestapo?