Groping Granny for Show

Anyone who thinks that the outrageous indignities and Fourth Amendment violations that we are now being made to suffer if we want to travel by air have a legitimate purpose should have a look at the video by Leslie Dutton of the Full Disclosure Network.  What it reveals is that while air passengers are being patted down in personal areas or electronically disrobed by possibly cancer-causing machines, at at least one major American airport, gang members and illegal aliens, as airport baggage handlers and other airport employees, have been allowed virtually untrammeled access to airliners.  The airport employees are poorly screened when they are hired, and they are not subjected to the same meticulous examinations as the passengers when they report to work each day.

Failing to look at the larger picture, though, Ms. Dutton doesn’t draw the most important conclusion from her otherwise excellent report.  The viewer might well believe that what has been revealed is just another example of government incompetence.  “Due to the continuing threats of terrorism,” she begins, “our esteemed authorities are supposedly doing everything possible to protect us in response to a group of radical male Islamics threatening to take over or blow up our airliners...but are they actually doing everything necessary to protect us?”

No, they’re obviously not, but what Ms. Dutton apparently doesn’t realize, or maybe doesn’t want us to know, is that protecting us is not what the increasingly objectionable airport passenger gauntlet is all about.  We citizens and passengers don’t get to see what is being done, or not done, to prevent airport employees from sabotaging airliners, so the authorities don’t have to be so painstaking about that.  Genuinely tightening the security in that element of air travel, you see, would make virtually no contribution toward creating the impression that “radical male Islamics [are] threatening to take over or blow up our airliners” and, most importantly, that those 19 Arabs with their box cutters actually did hijack those planes and fly them into buildings, as we have been told.

It’s all part of the pageantry of the “global war on terror” (GWOT).   The “global” part of it might have begun in the Bush II administration, but we are able to understand its pageantry better by examining its beginnings in the Clinton administration.  Consider the closing of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House that was done in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing.  The White House sits so far back from Pennsylvania Avenue that a bomb in a truck in the street would almost have to be nuclear to threaten the well-being of the house’s occupants.  Can there really be any doubt that the purpose of the street closing was to reinforce the dubious story that Timothy McVeigh parked a truck that blew up in front of the Murrah Federal Building and that the explosion produced all the damage that we saw?

Maybe you still have a bit of doubt that it’s all for the consumption of the tourists.  Well, let’s put an end to it.  Consider the proliferation of “security measures” that have gone up around the tourist magnet of Capitol Hill.  They’re there to protect our (thoroughly replaceable) democratic representatives from those same pesky Islamic or domestic terrorists, we are given to believe.  But wouldn’t the terrorists make just as big or bigger PR splash by blowing up a major Department of Homeland Security (DHS) building on Massachusetts Avenue a scant block from Union Station?  They could hardly fail to know of its existence because it flies the Homeland Security flag right out in front.  But since the building was refurbished and occupied by DHS it has completely lacked external security barriers.  How is it different from those other federal buildings and, say, the FBI building, which also has barriers in abundance?  It’s off the main tourist track. 

I rest my case.

David Martin

December 8, 2010

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