“Terror Stalks U.S!” So screamed the printed edition of New York’s Daily News last weekend — and it wasn’t a forecast of Tuesday’s election. Rather, it concerned the Yemeni “mail-bombs” and thus inexplicably lacked an exclamation mark; given the report’s hysteria, I showed enormous restraint adding only one.
If we didn’t take the point from this propaganda masquerading as news, a columnist on the tabloid’s fourth page (rather than in the editorial well closer to the paper’s middle) helpfully emphasized, “Be wary, they want us dead.”
I’d agree were he talking about the psychopaths on the Potomac who continue invading other countries, massacring people, and provoking the survivors to retaliate. But he’s not. He means instead the “terrorists” who fight back against American imperialism. “We are facing a multitude of murderous mutts,” Michael Daly quavered in paroxysms of alliteration, “and the day is sure to come when a monumentally deadly threat comes our way again. Keep your eyes open. And give thanks for those who watch over us.”
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Even if they grope your daughters at airports and entrap innocent people in bogus criminality.
There was a time when so shameless a display of sycophantic fear would have bought Daly scathing ridicule if not worse. Now a major daily in the country’s largest city proudly and prominently posts his cowardice to readers’ applause. Along with freedom, the War on Terror has finished off what was left of masculinity and maturity.
No wonder skepticism has long since vanished, at least when it comes to politicians. Americans who are convinced Big Business is out to get them (and it is, primarily by lobbying for laws that make it all but impossible to launch cheaper competitors), who suspect new technology or genetically modified foods of causing cancer (which they very well may), nonetheless swallow whatever baloney their rulers feed them. Far be it from most folks to ask “Cui bono?” after each new “terror alert” — despite the pattern these incidents follow, with obvious advantages and timing that’s incredibly convenient for the Feds.
“Airline passengers in New York welcomed stricter safety rules that went into effect Monday, especially in light of last week’s interception of U.S.-bound parcel bombs sent from Yemen,” begins an article that Prison Planet or even The New American might have published. Instead, it appeared on MSNBC. The difference is that MSNBC’s audience probably doesn’t assume a cause-and-effect relationship.
Why not? The same sequence happened with the Underwear Bomber last Christmas.
Recall that when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to detonate his diaper aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 253, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was introducing its pornographic whole-body scanners at airports. And Americans were furious. Many refused outright to cooperate. Even Congress, which normally winks at the TSA’s abuses, was upset: Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) famously observed that “Nobody needs to see my wife and kids naked to secure an airplane.” Then he sponsored a bill to “[prohibit] the TSA from using WBI [whole-body imaging] machines for primary screening” (TSA-speak for the warrantless search to which it unconstitutionally subjects every passenger). His colleagues passed it 310 to 118 and sent it to the Senate. There it died with Abdulmutallab’s attempt to emasculate himself.
Intriguing, isn’t it, that just when the TSA wanted to quash a serious threat to its gizmos, along comes a “terrorist” who does exactly that. A lot of politically powerful Americans are waxing wealthier thanks to the thousands of strip-search machines ($150,000-$180,000 each, excluding installation and maintenance) the TSA has ordered; the ol’ bank account takes a hit when legislators restrict the scanners’ use so that an airport buys only one rather than many. If Abdulmutallab hadn’t happened along, the Feds would have invented him.
Or did they?
Had Abdulmutallab truly wanted to bring down his flight, there were plenty of easy and effective ways to do so. He could have packed explosives in his bags and taken his chances that the TSA’s buffoons would miss them as they do 60-75 percent of the contraband undercover investigators smuggle. Or he and some buddies could have booked the same flight with 3.4 ounces of gasoline each, then pooled the bottles to set the plane afire. If he weren’t choosy about which flight crashed, he could simply have mailed a package to Chicago, ala the supposed Yemeni bombers. Instead, he chose precisely the method best calculated to scare Americans into the TSA’s smutty contraptions.
Meanwhile, suspicions about Abdulmutallab surfaced immediately. Everyone knows his father repeatedly warned authorities that his son had “become radicalized” because the mainstream media reported that: it fit our rulers’ paradigm that the only thing wrong with American intelligence is not its utter unconstitutionality but its various bureaucracies’ failure to interact. They need centralizing and consolidation, with even more powerful databases, if we expect them to stop bombers whose fathers snitch on them.
What quickly sank from view, however, were “unofficial” reports (which we used to call “eyewitness accounts” and trust far more than we did governmental spin) of a well-dressed man escorting Abdulmutallab onto his flight. Without a passport. But perhaps with a colleague: once the plane landed, the FBI arrested Abdulmutallab and another suspect. Indeed, passengers named Kurt and Lori Haskell saw the arrest clearly enough to describe the second prisoner as “appearing to be of Indian descent.” The FBI insists he was a figment of the Haskells’ imaginations.
Now, with Chaffetz’s bill dead and buried almost a year, the TSA has continued converting the nation’s airports into strip-joints. As of October 22, it had foisted 300 smutty scanners on 61 airports, with many more coming. And everyone from pilots to passengers is revolting. To overcome their resistance, the TSA threatened those who refused to pose for its perverts with sexual assault. That only inflamed passengers further. What to do? Another Abdulmutallab trying to blow up his [you pick the place; I am sick of dwelling in the TSA’s sewer] would be just too coincidental. Instead, we allegedly have Yemeni bombs.
Can I prove my suspicions? No. Or perhaps I should say “not yet”: it may be that honest folks like the Haskells are even now trying to publicize what they know despite the Feds and the corporate media’s hostility. But even if not, too many coincidences consistently benefit our rulers.
Something’s rotten in the police-state.
Becky Akers, an expert on the American Revolution, writes frequently about issues related to security and privacy. Her articles and columns have been published by Lewrockwell.com, The Freeman, Military History Magazine, American History Magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, the New York Post, and other publications.
