Andy Bacevich Again

Consider the following claims, each of which in Washington circles has attained quasi-canonical status.

* The presence of US forces in the Islamic world contributes to regional stability and enhances American influence.
* The Persian Gulf constitutes a vital US national security interest.
* Egypt and Saudi Arabia are valued and valuable American allies.
* The interests of the United States and Israel align.
* Terrorism poses an existential threat that the United States must defeat.

For decades now, the first four of these assertions have formed the foundation of US policy in the Middle East. The events of 9/11 added the fifth, without in any way prompting a reconsideration of the first four. On each of these matters, no senior US official (or anyone aspiring to a position of influence) will dare say otherwise, at least not on the record.

Yet subjected to even casual scrutiny, none of the five will stand up. To take them at face value is the equivalent of believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy — or that John Boehner and Mitch McConnell really, really hope that the Obama administration and the upcoming Republican-controlled Congress can find grounds to cooperate.

Let’s examine all five, one at a time.

The Presence of US Forces: Ever since the US intervention in Lebanon that culminated in the Beirut bombing of October 1983, introducing American troops into predominantly Muslim countries has seldom contributed to stability. On more than a few occasions, doing so has produced just the opposite effect.

Iraq and Afghanistan provide mournful examples. The new book Why We Lost by retired Lieutenant General Daniel Bolger finally makes it permissible in official circles to declare those wars the failures that they have been. Even granting, for the sake of argument, that US nation-building efforts were as pure and honorable as successive presidents portrayed them, the results have been more corrosive than constructive. The IS militants plaguing Iraq find their counterpart in the soaring production of opium that plagues Afghanistan. This qualifies as stability?

America’s New War in the Middle East

And these are hardly the only examples. Stationing US troops in Saudi Arabia after Operation Desert Storm was supposed to have a reassuring effect. Instead, it produced the debacle of the devastating Khobar Towers bombing. Sending G.I.’s into Somalia back in 1992 was supposed to demonstrate American humanitarian concern for poor, starving Muslims. Instead, it culminated in the embarrassing Mogadishu firefight, which gained the sobriquet Black Hawk Down and doomed that mission.

Even so, the pretense that positioning American soldiers in some Middle East hotspot will bring calm to troubled waters survives. It’s far more accurate to say that doing so provides our adversaries with what soldiers call a target-rich environment — with Americans as the targets.

The Importance of the Persian Gulf: Although US interests in the Gulf may once have qualified as vital, the changing global energy picture has rendered that view obsolete. What’s probably bad news for the environment is good news in terms of creating strategic options for the United States. New technologies have once again made the United States the world’s largest producer of oil. The US is also the world’s largest producer of natural gas. It turns out that the lunatics chanting “drill, baby, drill” were right after all. Or perhaps it’s “frack, baby, frack.” Regardless, the assumed energy dependence and “vital interests” that inspired Jimmy Carter to declare back in 1980 that the Gulf is worth fighting for no longer pertain.

Access to Gulf oil remains critically important to some countries, but surely not to the United States. When it comes to propping up the wasteful and profligate American way of life, Texas and North Dakota outrank Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in terms of importance. Rather than worrying about Iraqi oil production, Washington would be better served ensuring the safety and well-being of Canada, with its bountiful supplies of shale oil. And if militarists ever find the itch to increase US oil reserves becoming irresistible, they would be better advised to invade Venezuela than to pick a fight with Iran.
Does the Persian Gulf require policing from the outside? Maybe. But if so, let’s volunteer China for the job. It will keep them out of mischief.

Arab Allies: It’s time to reclassify the US relationship with both Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Categorizing these two important Arab states as “allies” is surely misleading. Neither one shares the values to which Washington professes to attach such great importance.
For decades, Saudi Arabia, planet Earth’s closest equivalent to an absolute monarchy, has promoted anti-Western radical jihadism — and not without effect. The relevant numbers here are two that most New Yorkers will remember: 15 out of 19. If a conspiracy consisting almost entirely of Russians had succeeded in killing several thousand Americans, would US authorities give the Kremlin a pass? Would US-Russian relations remain unaffected? The questions answer themselves.
Meanwhile, after a brief dalliance with democracy, Egypt has once again become what it was before: a corrupt, oppressive military dictatorship unworthy of the billions of dollars of military assistance that Washington provides from one year to the next.

Israel: The United States and Israel share more than a few interests in common. A commitment to a “two-state solution” to the Palestinian problem does not number among them. On that issue, Washington’s and Tel Aviv’s purposes diverge widely. In all likelihood, they are irreconcilable.
For the government of Israel, viewing security concerns as paramount, an acceptable Palestinian state will be the equivalent of an Arab Bantustan, basically defenseless, enjoying limited sovereignty and possessing limited minimum economical potential. Continuing Israeli encroachments on the occupied territories, undertaken in the teeth of American objections, make this self-evident.
It is, of course, entirely the prerogative — and indeed the obligation — of the Israeli government to advance the well being of its citizens. US officials have a similar obligation: they are called upon to act on behalf of Americans. And that means refusing to serve as Israel’s enablers when that country takes actions that are contrary to US interests.
The “peace process” is a fiction. Why should the United States persist in pretending otherwise? It’s demeaning.

Terrorism: Like crime and communicable diseases, terrorism will always be with us. In the face of an outbreak of it, prompt, effective action to reduce the danger permits normal life to continue. Wisdom lies in striking a balance between the actually existing threat and exertions undertaken to deal with that threat. Grown-ups understand this. They don’t expect a crime rate of zero in American cities. They don’t expect all people to enjoy perfect health all of the time. The standard they seek is “tolerable.”

That terrorism threatens Americans is no doubt the case, especially when they venture into the greater Middle East. But aspirations to eliminate terrorism belong in the same category as campaigns to end illiteracy or homelessness: it’s okay to aim high, but don’t be surprised when the results achieved fall short.

Eliminating terrorism is a chimera. It’s not going to happen. US civilian and military leaders should summon the honesty to acknowledge this.

My friend M has put his finger on a problem that is much larger than he grasps. Here’s hoping that when he gets his degree he lands an academic job. It’s certain he’ll never find employment in our nation’s capital. As a soldier-turned-scholar, M inhabits what one of George W. Bush’s closest associates (believed to be Karl Rove) once derisively referred to as the “reality-based community.” People in Washington don’t have time for reality. They’re lost in a world of their own.  Source

Boston is the Rest of Us

 Boston is going bananas with preparation for next Monday's marathon. But you know what I think? Two things: first, there won't be any bombs in Boston at the marathon ever again; it was a one-time event, like 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, and the murder of Archduke Frances Ferdinand. And second, all this police presence and spy cameras everywhere, and agents lurking and who knows what else? That's all about how the "terrorists have won." (Remember when Bush was all about stopping that ever happening?)

Don't doubt for a minute that the terrorists have won. We're a nation gripped in terror. We're ruled by it. We've sacrificed just about everything precious on the promise of being kept safe: our civil liberties, our privacy rights, our freedom to be live normally. (You get inspected going into a ballpark!) We're a police/national security state, folks. Get used to it.

So all those hot-and-cold running cops, spys, and scared-to-death people in Boston? They're just the rest of us.

Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 2

Have you noticed where all the lamestream media attention is going on this NSA snooping story? The inevitable villain, Edward Snowden, the spook contractor with a conscience, has become half the story. Boehner called him a "traitor." Mitch McConnell is calling for his blood. The Justice Department is after him, and the majority of the country thinks he's a criminal. The other half is a large discussion about the merits of the policy. Is it really in our best interest as a nation to have the National Security Agency recording and keeping terabytes of metadata on every American using one of the major telephone companies to make calls? I submit that both of these issues are bogus. Completely. The real issue is secrecy. All the things that the security apparatus of this country is doing in the dark, out of sight and purview of the American people.

What's really the problem the NSA and the rest of the federal government has with Snowden? You don't think it's that these two NSA programs--the phone listening and PRISM--that are the issue, do you? As if the terrorists aren't aware of what the U.S. is doing to combat them? You think anybody with half a brain can't figure out that the U.S. is engaged in electronic snooping to some degree? You think Snowden let some kind of really gigantic cat out of the bag when he went public? Are you kidding me? No, brothers and sisters, the real sin is that Snowden told the whole population of America what was going on. He told the people who are being snooped on, who are paying for all of it, and who were not consulted about this program that wasn't even debated in their hearing. That's the problem. NSA got caught treating every American citizen as a potential enemy. If these programs are so good for the country, if they're protecting everybody, then why the hell are they secret? Why are they locked away under layers of classification.

So don't let all this smoke screen jabber about Snowden and all the other peripheral issues distract you. The issue is SECRECY and how it makes a mockery of Obama's promises of transparency. Things are more Orwellian under him than George W. Bush. The issue is the creeping massive power accruing to the police and security agencies of the government.

I heard today on NPR that George Orwell's 1984 is and has been the best selling book on Amazon since this spying on Americans story broke. Don't doubt it. 

This CNet story explains all about PRISM. Wikipedia already has a pretty expansive article on Snowden here.

Related articles

• Edward Snowden: Saving Us from the United Stasi of America (commondreams.org)
• Protesters Worldwide Rally to Support Whistleblower Edward Snowden (commondreams.org)
• Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 1 (whatpowderfingersaid.blogspot.com)

Our Defunct Fourth Amendment, Part 1

I cannot say I'm really surprised by the bombshell revelation that the National Security Agency has a gargantuan (and growing daily) database containing the phone and electronic records of every person in the country. I worked for the Fed in the military long enough to know how these people who are purportedly concerned with "protecting our freedoms"--that of course would include the entire "security" establishment, law enforcement, and the Dept of Justice--don't really care about constitutional protections of those same freedoms, not when they get in the way of what they want to do, which in the context of the paroxysms of paranoia launched and nurtured by the Bush and Obama administrations is by definition intrusive, drastic, and dangerous to civil liberties. Moreover, the attitude is to use the latest technology can offer (and remember, always at a handsome, if not obscene, profit to the government contractor) to the greatest extent possible. Believe me when I tell you that monolithic focus on the "bad guys" simple blots out concern for our basic constitutional liberties. And of course, this is all cloaked from the American people by classifying the programs, the technology, the locations, everything, under blankets of secrecy. 

Related articles

• Why NSA's defense is so weak (salon.com)
• Fourth Amendment Restoration Act - Rand Paul Introduces Anti-Snooping Bill (patdollard.com)
• An Orwellian Paradise (theburningplatform.com)
• Everything is terrible. (jwz.org)

Encouraging News of a Sort

Results of some recent polls (source)

A Fox News poll : “Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?”

45 percent said NO, which is good. But 43 percent said yeah, OK. Be glad. This is a great improvement on a month after the 9/11 attacks when 71 percent of Americans were willing to sacrifice their liberties for the promise--not the actuality--of safety from terrorists. This is also the first time since 1996 that more people are saying NO than are saying OK.
 
A separate Washington Post poll: Almost half (48%) of Americans are worried that the government has gone too far in investigating terrorism. 41% don't think it's gone far enough! Who in the hell are these people? Logically enough, 57 percent of people don't have a great deal of faith in the government's ability to halt terrorism. But 15 out of a hundred have a high degree of confidence. Again: who in the hell are these people?

Related articles

• Americans troubled more by governmental abuse than terrorism (rt.com)

Things Happen Ridiculously Fast

In my first glance at the news today, to my astonishment, the suspected terrorists in the Boston Marathon explosions have been identified as two brothers recently here from Chechnya. Pictures of them went out worldwide yesterday. And today already one of has been killed by police and the other is on the loose still but there's a gargantuan manhunt in progress. A cop's been killed, a security guard at M.I.T. who apparently was just sitting in his cruiser. This second guy doesn't have a chance of getting away. I hope they take him alive, but my guess is they won't. It would be helpful to find out what the motive for the bombing was. Both these guys in their mid-20s.

Update I: Turns out these guys were not recently from Chechnya, but have been living in this country for a number of years. They caught the second guy, alive. He's all shot up from the first encounter with the cops when his brother was killed. I cannot believe that the city of Boston was literally shut down for the entire day. Somebody told me it cost them over $600 million to do that. Wonder if it's worth it?

Boston Bombed

We're never going to hear the end of these stories: two bombs detonated today right near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Considerable carnage since the bombs were placed among the spectators lining the route of the runners. Apparently two people have been killed and scores wounded. At this point nobody knows anything about who did this or why. Pretty much what Obama said in his brief statement about the incident tonight. He did not call it "terrorism," which is probably a good thing. I'm conjuring up visions of some poor Muslim family somewhere in the U.S. trying to make a living in perhaps a little grocery store having their business burned, or their son beat up, by some crazed yahoo who will take the news of this outrage in Boston as a reason to hurt a Muslim. Isn't it sad that just as I've come to expect as "almost normal" periodic terrorist attacks inside the U.S., I've also come to expect as "completely normal" persecution of minorities in this country as a matter of course?

Update I: Casualties have been upped. There are now three dead and over 150 wounded, some very seriously, as in amputations necessary.

Related articles

• Is the Boston Bombing the "Moral Equivalent" of Drone Strikes? (lewrockwell.com)
• American Muslims condemn Boston Marathon bombings (bostonherald.com)

Homeland Security II

This article will have you steaming. I promise you. When you think for just a second or two of all the uses for real needs the money we've poured into this boondoggle could have bought . . . well, it's nothing less than criminal in my opinion. This piece is contained in its entirety in the Tomgram article I mentioned yesterday.

“Homeland Security”
The Trillion-Dollar Concept That No One Can Define
By Mattea Kramer and Chris Hellman

Imagine a labyrinthine government department so bloated that few have any clear idea of just what its countless pieces do.  Imagine that tens of billions of tax dollars are disappearing into it annually, black hole-style, since it can’t pass a congressionally mandated audit.
Now, imagine that there are two such departments, both gigantic, and you’re beginning to grasp the new, twenty-first century American security paradigm.

For decades, the Department of Defense has met this definition to a T.  Since 2003, however, it hasn’t been alone.  The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which celebrates its 10th birthday this March, has grown into a miniature Pentagon. It’s supposed to be the actual “defense” department -- since the Pentagon is essentially a Department of Offense -- and it’s rife with all the same issues and defects that critics of the military-industrial complex have decried for decades.  In other words, “homeland security” has become another obese boondoggle.

But here’s the strange thing: unlike the Pentagon, this monstrosity draws no attention whatsoever -- even though, by our calculations, this country has spent a jaw-dropping $791 billion on “homeland security” since 9/11. To give you a sense of just how big that is, Washington spent an inflation-adjusted $500 billion on the entire New Deal.

Despite sucking up a sum of money that could have rebuilt crumbling infrastructure from coast to coast, this new agency and the very concept of “homeland security” have largely flown beneath the media radar -- with disastrous results.

And that’s really no surprise, given how the DHS came into existence.

A few months before 9/11, Congress issued a national security report acknowledging that U.S. defense policy had not evolved to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.  The report recommended a “national homeland security agency” with a single leader to oversee homeland security-style initiatives across the full range of the federal government.  Although the report warned that a terrorist attack could take place on American soil, it collected dust.

Then the attack came, and lawmakers of both political parties and the American public wanted swift, decisive action.  President George W. Bush's top officials and advisers saw in 9/11 their main chance to knock off Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and establish a Pax Americana in the Greater Middle East.  Others, who generally called themselves champions of small government, saw an opportunity to expand big government at home by increasing security spending.

Their decision to combine domestic security under one agency turned out to be like sending the Titanic into the nearest field of icebergs.

President Bush first created an Office of Homeland Security in the White House and then, with the Homeland Security Act of 2002, laid plans for a new executive department. The DHS was funded with billions of dollars and staffed with 180,000 federal employees when it opened for business on March 1, 2003.  It qualified as the largest reorganization of the federal government since 1947 when, fittingly, the Department of Defense was established.

Announcing plans for this new branch of government, President Bush made a little-known declaration of “mission accomplished” that long preceded that infamous banner strung up on an aircraft carrier to celebrate his “victory” in Iraq.  In November 2002, he said, “The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response.”

Mission unaccomplished (big time).
A decade later, a close look at the hodge-podge of homeland security programs that now spans the U.S. government reveals that there’s nothing “unified” about it.  Not all homeland security programs are managed through the Department of Homeland Security, nor are all programs at the Department of Homeland Security related to securing the homeland.

Federal officials created the DHS by pulling together 22 existing government departments, including stand-alone agencies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency, better known by its acronym FEMA, and the Coast Guard, which came with programs both related and unrelated to counterterrorism.  They also brought into the DHS a host of programs that had previously existed as parts of other agencies like the Nuclear Incident Response Team from the Department of Energy and the Transportation Security Administration at the Department of Transportation.  To knit these disparate parts together, officials built a mammoth bureaucracy over an already existing set of bureaucracies.  At the same time, they left a host of counterterrorism programs scattered across the rest of the federal government, which means, a decade later, many activities at the DHS are duplicated by similar programs elsewhere.

A trail of breadcrumbs in federal budget documents shows how much is spent on homeland security and by which agencies, though details about what that money is buying are scarce.  The DHS budget was $60 billion last year.  However, only $35 billion was designated for counterterrorism programs of various sorts.  In the meantime, total federal funding for (small-h, small-s) homeland security was $68 billion -- a number that, in addition to the DHS money, includes $17 billion for the Department of Defense, plus around $4 billion each for the Departments of Justice and Health and Human Services, with the last few billion scattered across virtually every other federal agency in existence.

From the time this new security bureaucracy rumbled into operation, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Washington’s internal watchdog, called the DHS a “high risk” proposition.  And it’s never changed its tune. Regular GAO reports scrutinize the department and identify major problems.  In March of last year, for instance, one GAO report noted that the office had recommended a total of 1,600 changes.  At that time, the department had only “addressed about half of them” -- and addressed doesn’t necessarily mean solved.

So rest assured, in the best of all possible homeland security worlds, there are only 800-odd issues outstanding, according to the government’s own watchdog, after we as a nation poured $791 billion down the homeland security rabbit hole.  Indeed, there remain gaping problems in the very areas that the DHS is supposedly securing on our behalf:

* Consider port security: you wouldn’t have much trouble overnighting a weapon of mass destruction into the United States.  Cargo terminals are the entry point for containers from all over the world, and a series of reports have found myriad vulnerabilities -- including gaps in screening for nuclear and radiological materials.  After spending $200 million on new screening technology, the DHS determined it wouldn’t deliver sufficient improvements and cancelled the program (but not the cost to you, the taxpayer).

* Then there are the problems of screening people crossing into this country.  The lion’s share of responsibility for border security lies with part of the DHS, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which had an $11.7 billion budget in fiscal 2012.  But in the land of utter duplication that is Washington’s version of counterterrorism, there is also something called the Border Security Program at the State Department, with a separate pot of funding to the tune of $2.2 billion last year.  The jury’s out on whether these programs are faintly doing their jobs, even as they themselves define them.  As with so many other DHS programs, the one thing they are doing successfully is closing and locking down what was once considered an “open” society.

* For around $14 billion each year, the Department of Homeland Security handles disaster response and recovery through FEMA, something that’s meant to encompass preparedness for man-made as well as natural disasters. But a 2012 investigation by the GAO found that FEMA employs an outdated method of assessing a disaster-struck region’s ability to respond and recover without federal intervention -- helpfully, that report came out just a month before Hurricane Sandy.

* Recently, it came to light that the DHS had spent $431 million on a radio system for communication within the department -- but only one of more than 400 employees questioned about the system claimed to have the slightest idea how to use it.  It’s never surprising to hear that officials at separate agencies have trouble coordinating, but this was an indication that, even within the DHS, employees struggle with the basics of communication.

* In a survey that covered all federal departments, DHS employees reported rock-bottom levels of engagement with their work.  Its own workers called the DHS the worst federal agency to work for.
Those are just a few of a multitude of glaring problems inside the now decade-old department. Because homeland security is not confined to one agency, however, rest assured that neither is its bungling:

* There is, for instance, that $17 billion in homeland security funding at the Department of Defense -- a mountain of cash for defending against terrorist attacks, protecting U.S. airspace, and providing security at military bases. But perhaps defense officials feel that $17 billion is insufficient, since an October 2012 report by the GAO found the Pentagon had outdated and incomplete plans for responding to a domestic attack, including confusion about the chain of command should such an event take place.  That should be no surprise, though: the Pentagon is so replete with oversight problems and obsolete, astronomically expensive programs that it makes the DHS look like a trim, well-oiled machine.

* Or consider the domestic counterterrorism unit at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), which enjoyed $461 million in homeland security funding last year and is housed not at the DHS or the Pentagon but at the Department of Justice.  ATF made headlines for giving marked firearms to Mexican smugglers and losing track of them -- and then finding that the weapons were used in heinous crimes. More recently, in the wake of the Newtown massacre, ATF has drawn attention because it fails one of the most obvious tests of oversight and responsibility: it lacks a confirmed director at the helm of its operations. (According to The Hill newspaper, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) is currently holding up President Obama’s appointment to head the agency.)

Washington has poured staggering billions into securing the so-called homeland, but in so many of the areas meant to be secured there remain glaring holes the size of that gaping wound in the Titanic’s side.  And yet over the past decade -- even with these problems -- terrorist attacks on the homeland have scarcely hurt a soul.  That may offer a clue into just how misplaced the very notion of the Department of Homeland Security was in the first place.  In the wake of 9/11, pouring tiny percentages of that DHS money into less flashy safety issues, from death by food to death by gun to death by car, to mention just three, might have made Americans genuinely safer at, by comparison, minimal cost.

Perhaps the strangest part of homeland security operations may be this: there is no agreed-upon definition for just what homeland security is. The funds Washington has poured into the concept will soon enough approach a trillion dollars and yet it’s a concept with no clear boundaries that no one can agree on.  Worse yet, few are asking the hard questions about what security we actually need or how best to achieve it.  Instead, Washington has built a sprawling bureaucracy riddled with problems and set it on autopilot.

And that brings us to today. Budget cuts are in the pipeline for most federal programs, but many lawmakers vocally oppose any reductions in security funding. What’s painfully clear is this: the mere fact that a program is given the label of national or homeland security does not mean that its downsizing would compromise American safety. Overwhelming evidence of waste, duplication, and poor management suggests that Washington could spend far less on security, target it better, and be so much safer.

Meanwhile, the same report that warned in early 2001 of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil also recommended redoubling funding for education in science and technology.

In the current budget-cutting fever, the urge to protect boundless funding for national security programs by dismantling investment essential to this country’s greatness -- including world-class education and infrastructure systems -- is bound to be powerful.  So whenever you hear the phrase “homeland security,” watch out: your long-term safety may be at risk.

Mattea Kramer is research director at National Priorities Project, where Chris Hellman is senior research analyst. Both are TomDispatch regulars.  They co-authored the book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget.

Myriad Dark Lies

I was going to call it some play on "Zero Dark Thirty," because my original intent was to discuss this flick which apparently has the critics swooning from coast to to coast. I had read a long critique of the movie by Glenn Greenwald, which I forwarded to several people. But then I read this piece by Matt Taibbi about the great bailout of 2008 and realized I could not confine my remarks to simply one set of government lies. Hence the rather clunky title which still attempts to play on the movie title, but only not so well.

So the subject is government falsehoods. Plural. Because they never cease. They are the currency of government.Without them, the government doesn't function. And for certain the military/industrial/intelligence nexus breaks down completely. Greenwald makes two main points his piece. First, the movie depicts torture as being instrumental in the discovery of the courier who in turn led the CIA to bin Laden. This is totally incorrect. Which is not to say the CIA doesn't use torture. Oh, no, that's not the point. It's just that they didn't use torture in this particular case to achieve their objectives. So Greenwald objects to the inclusion of torture in the movie. All of the explanations by the movie people, including the celebrated female director, boil down basically to: hey, it's a movie, not a documentary. Greenwald's second point is more telling from my point of view. He indicates the extraordinary level of cooperation the movie makers got from the US government. The point being: "all the better to foist the flag-waving propaganda on the people." Who, like the vast majority of the critics, are going to just swoon in patriotic abandon at this depiction of bare-chested, bare-knuckled American get-um. Only the movie-going public is far less informed and sophisticated than the writers. Which is also something the Pentagon and CIA know . . . This movie is going to seal in people's minds a false accounting of the killing of Osama bin Laden, and they are going to be perfectly fine with it, in fact gloriously happy that we killed the guy by doing whatever was necessary. Greenwald senses great danger in the smooching and petting going on between the CIA and Hollywood. It's every bit as insidious and dangerous as embedding journalists with military units as a way of controlling news. Probably even worse. But nobody cares.

The pigs are definitely winning

 Nor do they give much of a crap about the torrent of lies pouring out of Washington about the bank bailout. And that have been pouring out since the program was established four years ago. You thought that was old news, eh? Well, Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone eill disabuse you of the notion that the bailout worked, that it was conducted smartly by the government, that we were told the truth about any of it, that it fixed anything at all, that it was in the slightest way putative on the big banks, and probably most important of all, that everything is going to be fine. In fact, the country now stands at great risk than before of some sort of disastrous financial cataclysm for the very same reason as before: to wit, staggeringly risky investments by the too-big-to-fail banks.

Both of these articles are fairly lengthy, but this in no way detracts from their importance and timeliness. Neither of them is going to make you happy. Both are likely to do just the opposite, plus make you mad. But read 'em anyway. You owe it to yourself to find out about what's really going on. Not being duped and used by the forces of darkness is its own reward. 

10 Years Gone

Everybody in America--well, not literally everybody, but millions--are getting wrapped up in memorials today for the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon that occurred on this date 10 years ago. Thousands of innocent people died. Some of them were Muslims who were not the terrorists in the planes. The victims were all colors, all ages, all religions. The pain of their passing still grips the hearts of us all. Prayers for all of their lives.

But that horrible event ten years ago also marked the beginning of this country's descent into a strange kind of madness. In the ensuing ten years, we Americans have willingly allowed a total transformation of our country. What used to be a place of liberty has become a place of fear, a place . Americans have given over fistfuls of their precious civil liberties; we have allowed creation of a massive, secret bureaucracy that not only gathers information on all of us, all the time, but operates out of oversight by anyone. (The Frontline program "Top Secret America" reports on this development. If it doesn't scare the crap out of you, it's simply a measure of how far you've bought into the government's rationale for depriving us of our liberties and establishing a fearsome, gargantuan police power that didn't exist ten years ago.) All in the name of protecting us from terrorists, which is ultimately a futile task. What powers are we going to hand over to the government when we're subjected to another attack? And guess what, brothers and sisters? This octopus isn't going to go away. It will never go away. Liberties once surrendered are gone forever.

We have willingly allowed our government to engage in torturing people, we have allowed American citizens to be held without charge for days, weeks, on end. We have, in the name fighting terrorism, launched two wars that still continue. They have ignited a conflagration in the Mid-East, they have snuffed out the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghani and Iraqi lives, wreaked untold destruction of property, cost us a trillion dollars, and thousands of American lives dead and wrecked from wounds of body and spirit.

This anniversary will be commemorated all over the country with flags, mournful music and speeches, black crepe . . . but there won't be any mourning for the country that we once were that has been buried under a mountain of fear. We may have killed bin Laden, but he is triumphant from his grave. We are in the grip of terror, we've lost our senses because of it. This is exactly what he wanted to accomplish. And he's succeeded beyond his wildest imagination.

The Decade's Biggest Scam

That's the title of one of Glenn Greenwald's latest articles in Salon. I haven't checked in with Greenwald lately--chalk it up to the ridiculous number of things I try to keep up with on the Web. Fact is, he's almost always better than good, but he tends to write long articles that have a way of discouraging one from perfect attendance. But this one grabbed me.

He takes off on an article in The Los Angeles Times which "examines the staggering sums of money expended on patently absurd domestic 'homeland security' projects: $75 billion per year . . . ." Surely Glenn Greenwald and I cannot be the only people east of the Rockies who find absurd and maddening the ginormous sums of money this country is pissing away on equipment and training that supposedly renders all of us more secure from those big bad terrorists who are lurking out there just out of sight from wherever it is you live. 

The fact is, there's a huge pile of money out there for little bitty locales all over the country, like Keith County, Nebraska, to come sup on. In this case, to protect a lake from terrorist attack, we taxpayers supply the county with a Zodiac boat with side-scar sonar and other items for security to the tune of over $42,000. That's just a drop, a teeny drop, in the bucket. But as we know, absurdity and irrationality in spending far from being a deterrent seem almost to be a requirement for defense and homeland security spending. 

Greenwald takes issue with the LA Times on the reason for all the spending. It's not, he says, vast inefficiency at work with the goal of fighting terrorism. No, it's all about feeding the beast.

National Defense Magazine today trumpets: "Homeland Security Market ‘Vibrant’ Despite Budget Concerns."  It details how budget cuts mean "homeland security" growth may not be as robust as once predicted, but "Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman . . . have been winning more contracts from DHS"; as a Boeing spokesman put it: "You’ll still continue to see domestically significant investment on the part of the government and leveraging advances in technology to stand up and meet those emerging threats and needs.”

Yep, boys and girls, the same people with their immense snouts in the war trough are the ones who have a vested interest in keeping the entire country afraid cause they've got their snouts in the defense of homeland trough as well.

There's a lot more to this story, but the bottom line is situation is normal: the fat cat corporations are getting richer on the backs of all the rest of us blokes who are staggering around trying to keep ourselves from going under. What a boondoggle for them! Almost as good as a nice endless war such as our Afghanistan adventure.

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No Doubt in My Mind

I am always wary of the institutions of power in the U.S. It matters not whether these institutions are corporate, military, or governmental, including and maybe especially, law enforcement, agencies. Power has but one aim, self-perpetuation, and part of that impulse is its imperative to grow. There never was an agency of power that was satisfied with its allotment of power. It always wants more. This is why the massive enlargement of domestic surveillance and monitoring capabilities bestowed upon agencies such as the FBI and CIA in the wake of the attacks of 9/11 is so dangerous. These were not benign agencies to begin with, and especially in the case of the CIA, which was an out-of-control agency from its inception. The CIA has always been involved in sinister activities.

Do you think the adjective "sinister" a bit to strong? Well, consider this narrative which appeared today in the Writer's Almanac. It will give you the creeps.

On this day in 1977, the Central Intelligence Agency released 20,000 documents revealing that they had engaged in mind-control experiments. They released the documents after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, and the revelation triggered a Congressional hearing in August. The program was named MK-ULTRA; it began in the early 1950s and ran at least through the late 1960s. 

MK-ULTRA had its roots in Operation Paperclip, a program to recruit former Nazi scientists who had conducted studies on torture and brainwashing. Operation Paperclip spawned several secret government programs involving mind control, behavior modification, hypnosis, and the like. It's not clear whether the CIA's real aim was to produce a "Manchurian candidate" who could be brainwashed to carry out various tasks, or whether these off-the-wall "operations" were a smoke screen to keep attention away from their real mission: to come up with better torture and interrogation techniques. The program received 6 percent of the CIA's operating budget without oversight or accounting. 

Since then-director Richard Helms ordered all the MK-ULTRA documents destroyed in 1973, the investigation had to rely on sworn testimony and the 20,000 remaining documents, which had escaped destruction because they were stored in a different warehouse. The limited information that was available at the Congressional hearings revealed that "chemical, biological, and radiological" methods to achieve mind control were studied. This involved, among other things, administering drugs like LSD, heroin, amphetamines, and mescaline to people without their knowledge or consent; they also used, according to the Congressional report, "aspects of magicians' art." In one project, called Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA set up brothels in San Francisco, gave patrons LSD, and filmed their responses through hidden cameras. They figured that even if subjects got suspicious, they would be too embarrassed to report anything to the authorities. In other experiments conducted at McGill University in Montreal, subjects — who had come to the institute thinking they were to be treated for anxiety or post-partum depression — were put into drug-induced comas and exposed to tape loops for weeks at a time; others were given electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal dose. Many subjects suffered lasting damage. 

The CIA had the assistance of nearly a hundred colleges and universities, pharmaceutical companies, research foundations, hospitals, and prisons in conducting the MK-ULTRA project. Some evidence suggests that Unabomber Ted Kaczynski was one of the subjects; Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, volunteered for the LSD tests at a Veterans Administration hospital when he was a student at Stanford. The official CIA position is that they no longer conduct mind-control experiments, although at least one veteran of the agency has said that the tests continue.

The whole story is appalling. But certain aspect of it are positively chilling. First, there's the fact that the agency effectively has no oversight. The citizenry of this country, which pays who knows how many billions every year for the operations of this agency don't know what it's doing. The fact that it can destroy records of its activities at whim should give us pause immediately. Second, the cooperation of "nearly a hundred colleges and universities, pharmaceutical companies, research foundations, hospitals, and prisons" in conducting the experiments is disheartening, to say the least. It's appalling actually.

Proving once again that there is no limit to what people will do under the impetus of fear. From the late 1940s to the fall of the Soviet Union, our government kept us terrified of the godless communist conspiracy that threatened our existence. Now of course, it's the Muslim terrorist conspiracy. Note that in either case, opposing the conspiracy demands extraordinary governmental powers. And the threat is constant, never-ending. (Who knew the Soviet Union was going to collapse? The CIA, NSA, and all the other intelligence apparatus of the U.S. didn't have a clue.)

Keeping us afraid is the primary tool that the government employs in also keeping us docile. Why else would we put up with the TSA and cameras everywhere and the powers we have handed over to the government under the so-called Patriot Act? There's no doubt in my mind that these same agencies are carrying out any number of illegal activities even as I type this. We will never know.

(The Wikipedia article on MKULTRA has many more details about this horrible program.)

Related articles

• Calls for arrest of former CIA legal chief over drone attacks in Pakistan (guardian.co.uk)
• Is the CIA Helping Run a Secret Prison in Somalia? (globalspin.blogs.time.com)
• Project Paperclip ??? (2012patriot.wordpress.com)
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How Utterly, Utterly American

Buy several! Give 'em to your friends!

"Looks like Osama bin Laden is worth more dead than alive. That is, at least, in the make-a-buck marketing world of souvenirs, collectibles and tchotchkes."*
          --Lead-in to story discussed below

How long did you think it would take American merchants to figure out a way to make money off the killing of bin Laden? If you guessed less than 24 hours, advance to Go and collect $200. This article appeared in USA Today this morning under the headline "Marketers act fast." Between midnight on Sunday and mid-afternoon on Monday literally thousands of people posted Osama-death product ideas on such sites as Zazzle.com and CafePress.com where they could perhaps earn royalties if some company picked up their idea and used it for a consumer product. Executives at both these places say they haven't seen such an outpouring in a long time. This is even bigger than the capture of Saddam Hussein!

Divided into roughly four categories--patriotism, military support, celebration, "justice is served"--you can get T-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs, caps, bumper stickers, neckties, a phone case for your iPhone at $51.40, and, but of course(!), a T-shirt for your dog. One of the marketeers explains that they've always reflected popular culture. "What's more important than personal expression?" (Oh, gee, I don't know. How about civility or taste or virtue?)

I'll let the psychologists explain this. "People wear these things or buy these things in order to inflict the final indignity on bin Laden, says one. "And $25 isn't a lot to pay to gain entry in the national act of ridicule." And while they do their explaining and read their tea leaves, I'll just be disgusted and embarrassed yet again by the accident of my birth to be identified with these idiots.

*Tell me the truth: did you have to look up "tchotchkes"?

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I'm Not the Only One

Precisely!

The editorial cartoon above is brilliant. Capturing without a word the overarching truth about bin Laden's death. An act of vengeance disguised as something that advances the cause of liberty.

I didn't think I would be when I wrote yesterday's piece, but there had not yet been time for others to get out there and say the same kind of things I have been thinking. For example, Phyllis Bennis writing for the Institute of Policy Studies, wonders about Obama's claim that the killing of bin Laden somehow represented justice. And this piece by David Swanson who writes "Nothing is actually resolved, nothing concluded, and nothing to be celebrated in taking away life. If we want something to celebrate here, we should celebrate the end of one of the pieces of war propaganda that has driven the past decade of brutality and death."

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A Great Day for America?

USA! USA! USA!

Late tonight word came that the U.S. military had killed Osama bin Laden, the supposed mastermind of the attacks that brought down the twin towers in New York City a decade ago, the man who has been the symbol and face of terrorism ever since then. The focus of the country's hatred for a decade. A troll in the eyes of millions. Surely the top of the most-hated list in this country. (Here is the AP account of the attack that succeeded in killing the guy. Along with links to other aspects of the story: the celebrations, the unit that carried out the killing, etc.) The president went on television to announce the news. It was "a good day for America," he said. He went on to say "Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we cannot do." The country's reaction to the news is well illustrated in the picture above. Frenzied flag waving and manly chest-beating and celebrations like the team just won the Super Bowl would about sum it up. I read that the number of tweets on Twitter about bin Laden's death set records.

Well, at the risk of being the only person in America to say this or have these feelings, I will state that I have doubts about this being "a great day for America." And I categorically reject the notion that this military operation proves that as a nation "there is nothing we cannot do." I was from the beginning, from the very day of the attacks, against employing the US military in what I regarded then and still regard as a police matter, that is, the capture of criminals who carry out murders. The rest of the world which has also been victimized by terrorists, with the exception of Israel, I suppose, deals with attacks on its civilians as matters for the police to handle. But that is not the way the vile little pretender who occupied the White House from 2001-2008 handles things. He immediately called for vengeance and embarked on a course of war. We are still yet on the course he put us on, a trillion dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives later.

A great day for America? I have always stood for peace. Peace first. Always. So we should wave the flag and bellow "USA! USA!" at anything that in any way vindicates what we've been doing for the past ten in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya? No way am I celebrating that. How can I possibly cheer an event that excites the blood lust of people and stirs up frenzies of so-called patriotism in millions of people? the idea that whatever this country does is right by definition? that wars we initiate are just by definition? that the killing of enemies is a path to glory? that it's an event worthy of flooding out onto the streets as if it were a carnival? No. I'm not going to cheer that. Summary execution does not get my approval either.* This country is supposed to be a nation of laws. In my humble estimation, the legality, not to mention morality, of our ventures in the Middle East over the past decade are at the minimum questionable.

And as for the ridiculous notion that this killing somehow proves that the US is in the same category as God Almighty--"there is nothing we cannot do"--this is the kind of nonsense that Obama should be ashamed of himself for propagating. The fact is plainly that we cannot do many, many things as a nation, things far more important to our national welfare than a revenge killing which in the long view of history will simply be another death in a the carnival of death we as a nation have visited on that region. We cannot decently educate the vast majority of our citizens; we cannot insure equal justice under our laws; we cannot pass essential legislation to fight the warming of the globe; we cannot devise a health care system that is fair and effective; we cannot exist without war. Nothing we cannot do? This is not even a beginning of a complete list of everything that would fit that description.

Is it a good thing that bin Laden is gone? Yes. Is the price we have paid as a nation worth his death? No way. And one other thing. What do you think will change because of what's happened?

*Update I: The news reports Monday evening say that the mission against bin Laden was instructed to take him alive if possible. It's also reported that the CIA ordered that he be killed. Which version do you believe?

Update II: According to corrections made by the White House today, Tuesday the 3rd, bin Laden was not armed as first reported. But he was shot twice: once in the chest, once in the head over the left eye.

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And Now the Nopes

Continuing from yesterday with the same source, here's a list of predictions of science fiction writers for 2010 that did not come to pass. Just as an aside, you could probably list 100 things here. These guys are wrong more than they're right.

• Flying cars--possible technically, but not socially
• A Moon base (supposed to have this before the turn of the century or a couple of years later. The new target date for such a base is now 2069. I'll be 126 years old then, so I don't think I'll be around to see it.)
• Anti-ageing pills (I'm not sure I would want to take them, if they existed. Little teeny repair robots courtesy of nanotechnology may be coming, but would you trust them messing around in your aorta?)
• Trips to Jupiter (a long way off, at best)
• Nuclear holocaust (This is the one I'm most happy about seeing on the list. The possibility of a general exchange of these weapons between the forces of light (USA) and the forces of darkness (USSR) is no longer with us, but now we have to be concerned about little gaggles of madmen [and women] terrorists who are itching to get hold of a nuke. And then use it.)
• Virtual reality (We're a long way from Neuromancer.)
• AI robot butlers and self-driving cars (Would be nice, don't you think?)
• Computer overlords (no apparent danger of this for a long, long time. Humans will probably make the planet uninhabitable before something like this comes to pass. But maybe if not, the world will be perfectly habitable for them.)
• Commercial supersonic air travel (My God! Can you imagine the airport and security hassles that this would cause? Actually we had this at one time--the Concorde. But the return of such elegant, hyper expensive birds is to say the least, not likely soon.)
• Cheap, clean, unlimited energy (" Nikola Tesla’s dream of free and unlimited electricity seems even more impossible today than when he first proposed it in the early 20th century. Many of the wars on this small blue marble we call home are in large or small part over energy resources. Global climate change is intrinsically linked to the ways in which we produce energy. Whether it’s gas for your car or electricity for your house, we all spend a lot of money on energy. A limitless, non-polluting, inexpensive (or even free) energy source could completely transform humanity, taking us out of the energy dark age we live in now, and leading to a true peace on Earth and good will between all mankind. That’s my wintertime wish for the future. Do you have one?")

Yeah, I have one. World peace. If we did not spend such staggering amounts of money devising ways to kill fellow human beings, resources would be ample to hurry a lot of these unfulfilled predictions into reality.

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Now Here's Some Comforting News

You don't have to worry anymore, brothers and sisters, the largest corporation in the world is firmly on your side. Wal-mart has joined the front ranks of the anti-terrorist army! The secretary of homeland security (doesn't that strike you as a real creepy name ? I can hear goose-stepping whenever I encounter it.) announced that it has entered into a partnership with the giant retailer to cast millions more eyeballs on everything "suspicious."

At least 200 Wal-Mart stores will roll out security announcements within 24 hours, Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said. By month's end, 588 stores in 27 states will be participating in the program. A short video featuring Napolitano will appear on TV screens at select checkout lanes, asking Wal-Mart shoppers to contact local law enforcement to report suspicious activity.

"If you see something suspicious in the parking lot or in the store, say something immediately," Napolitano said in the video. "Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff. If you need help ask a Wal-Mart manager for assistance."

And while you're hunting up the store manager, you might just take advantage of the low, low prices. By the way, this idea is going over like a lead balloon with a vast majority of people who've been asked about it. But you can bet that's not going to deter the crazies who are protecting us from the terrorists all around.

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We've Been Here Before

x

Who among us remembers the Pentagon Papers? This was a top-secret history of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam from right after World War II until the mid-1960s. The New York Times got hold of them and began publishing excerpts in 1971. What this document showed was the depth of the duplicity that had been and was still being practiced by the government to conceal the fact that early on in the war, it was determined that it could not be won. The hero of that hour who made sure that the document got out to the public was Daniel Ellsberg.*

A similar hero, as yet unnamed, has been responsible for leaking 92,000 documents on our present war in Afghanistan. These documents, and apparently there are yet hundreds of thousands more, have been put on the Net via Wikileaks simultaneously with articles in the New York Times, The Guardian, and the German magazine Der Spiegel. What these are telling us is that Pakistan, our erstwhile ally in the war, has been working with the Taliban to kill American troops. They are also documenting a lot more killing of civilians by US troops. In general, this vast collection of mostly boots-on-the-ground reports verifies that the war in Afghanistan is not being won and probably cannot be won.

What's the most disturbing about this document dump is that it is essentially causing a huge collective yawn in the mainstream media. As in: oh, the war in Afghanistan is not going swimmingly? Tell us something we don't know. But as one writer asked, "Am I alone in thinking that the fact that this document dump has prompted so many in the media to simply admit that the war in Afghanistan is not going well is an extraordinary development in itself?"

Oh, no. You're not alone, sir.

*Ellsberg was brought to trial under the espionage act, but when it came to light that the Nixon administration had carried out a systematic campaign to discredit him--raiding his psychiatrist's office for files, tapping his phone--the judge dismissed all the charges.

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UPDATE:

I've just lifted the following from the ever perceptive Glenn Greenwald over at Salon. 

• NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen has some extremely insightful observations about WikiLeaks and why it frightens so many officials and their media spokespeople.  
• The New Yorker's Amy Davidson has a very perceptive analysis explaining the significance of these documents, along with how and why they reveal clear official deception about the war. 
• In terms of what we're "accomplishing" there, compare this recently released study documenting that our killing of civilians is what causes Afghans to take up arms against the U.S. with this morning's report that a NATO airstrike in Southern Afghanistan last week killed 45 innocent civilians, many of them women and children.

Two Bon-Bons

Two of my most favorite guys in the whole wide world have hugely enjoyable and informative columns out. Of course neither is going to make you shout "Hooray! Things are going to be so much better in 2010! A new decade is just what we need!" No, these reports are not likely to spur that kind of reaction. What they will do, however, is impress you with the quality of the writing and reporting still possible in the swamp of mediocrity and mendacity that the once-honorable profession of journalist has sunk into. These pieces--and you should definitely treat yourself to reading them in their full glory--will probably stir a welter of different emotions, none of them happy, at the state of the nation. I guess it's my job to keep you posted on these things, lest someone in a burst of hallucination gets the idea that matters in the good ole US of A are improving and that we can look forward to a return to "normal" any time soon. Indeed, what is "normal" is in the process of being redefined. And we don't know what it's going to be yet.

Matt Taibbi first, on the ongoing financial catastrophe. There's more than enough blame to go around, he says, and trying to pin the mess on Fannie and Freddie, as some are now attempting is simply wrong. But before the details, he's got this wonderful description:

. . . what we’ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.

And now Glenn Greenwald on the general subject of the corrosive fear of terrorism and what it's doing to the country. Here's the general thesis:

Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive.  Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens:  please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe. . . .

What matters most about this blinding fear of Terrorism is not the specific policies that are implemented as a result.  Policies can always be changed.  What matters most is the radical transformation of the national character of the United States.  Reducing the citizenry to a frightened puddle of passivity, hysteria and a child-like expectation of Absolute Safety is irrevocable and far more consequential than any specific new laws.  Fear is always the enabling force of authoritarianism:  the desire to vest unlimited power in political authority in exchange for promises of protection.

Not a pretty picture at all, is it? But that's where we are now and where we're going, friends. Read this piece. It's scary.

Scam Update

Of course, this would have been as easy to predict as the sun rising tomorrow in the eastern sky. What do you think the right is going to suggest in the wake of the Christmas Eve would-be terrorist bomber on the flight landing in Detroit? If you guessed a ramping up of intrusive and draconian security measures, well, a gold star for you. Let's begin with the retired Army general, obviously a prototype of his kind, who suggests that what we need is more screening, and if you're a Muslim male between 18-28, you should be strip searched.

Beginning tomorrow, they are ratcheting up the screening of everybody coming into the US,

All passengers flying into the United States from abroad will be subject to random screening or so-called "threat-based" screens, the Transport Security Administration said in a statement.

But it further mandated that "every individual flying into the US from anywhere in the world traveling from or through nations that are state sponsors of terrorism or other countries of interest will be required to go through enhanced screening."

So God help you if you're flying in from a state the US has deemed is a state-sponsored terrorism country--or, be it noted "other countries of interest." Because if you're coming from one of these places, you're going to go through "enhanced" screening. That's those machines that see through your clothes if they are available. If they aren't we're talking full body pat-down. Real nice if you're a Muslim, much less if you're a Muslim woman.

It's all crazy, of course. Has been from the beginning. (See this piece from the New York Times from 2007, for example.) Making life more miserable for air travelers is not doing a damn thing to make us safer. It's a huge--HUGE--scam, brothers and sisters. Because if a terrorist wants to attack us, he will despite the security measures. These people are not stupid. They are going to circumvent whatever security procedures we devise. We're constantly guarding against the last attack. Unfortunately, I can say without too much fear of it being untrue: just wait and see.