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09.25 State Elections Boards Seeks Volunteers to Help Process Unprecedented Number of Voter Applications

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09.18 Reviewing Danny Schechter's "Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal"

Letters

Ref. : Letters to the editor

Open Letters:

09.30 To Joe Biden: Time for Confession

09.28 Open Letter to Senator Barack Obama

09.26 Bailout Package Must be Transparent to the American People

09.18 Possible $2 Million Donation to Support Md. Slots Sends Wrong Message

Health & Environment
Media Watching

10.10 Ayers = Keating?

10.02 Project Censored's Media Democracy Advocacy

09.23 Satire: Louella Reads the Baltimore Sun

09.22 CBS Cheats on Tax Coverage

09.10 Post's Post-Convention 'Balancing' Act

09.10 McCain/Palin Campaign Relies on Lazy Thinking and Prejudice to Win

09.10 The Rising Cost of the Iraq 'Surge'

US Politics, Policy & Culture

10.09 McCain-Palin Put 'Country Last'

10.07 GOP Judges Aid White House Cover-up

10.07 Voting the Fate of the Nation

10.07 Alaska GOP's Last-Ditch Palin Defense

10.07 Election '08: Here Comes the Sludge

10.02 John McCain v. The Truth

10.02 Drinking at the Public Fountain

10.01 Who won the Mississippi debate? Obama—but for different reasons than you think

09.30 The Shadow of the Pitchfork: Elite Panic Attack as Bailout Goes Bust

09.29 The Resurrectionists: Beltway's Big Money Cultists Bail Out the Dead

09.29 We Have the Money

09.27 Debate Evades Dark Realities

09.26 Alaskan Officials Allege Palin Cover-up

09.24 Don’t Worry, Be Happy

09.24 Text of Draft Proposal for Bailout Plan

09.24 Hey, Government! How About Calling on Us?

09.23 Coming Attractions: War Without End, Amen

09.22 The Evolution of John McCain

09.21 Palin's 'Troopergate' Battle Rages

09.19 Burning the First Amendment

09.15 Subverting Democracy Through Electoral Fraud

09.15 Military Industrial Complex 2.0

09.13 Acceptable Sacrifice: For the Right to Endorse

09.13 Why More Soldiers from Alaska?

09.12 Experience is Over-Rated

09.10 Obama Must Call for Palin's Removal from the Ticket

09.10 9/11 Plus Seven

09.10 Palin's Strange Probe of a Trooper

09.10 Dear Democrats: Integrity Won’t Win this Election

US “High Crimes”

10.09 The Surge That Failed

10.08 The Orwellosphere: Anglo-American Drive to 'Total Security State' Rolls On

10.08 Justice for Yemini Sheik

10.06 The Wounded Shark: 'Good War' Lost, But the Imperial Project Goes On

10.02 U.S. Army Troops To Serve As U.S. Policemen?

09.25 Life on the Ledge

09.16 "Awakening" Into Nightmare: Seeding More Sectarian War in Iraq

Economics & Business

10.06 Thinking About Treason

10.06 The Fleecing of America

10.03 Can a bailout succeed?

10.02 Empire of Greed

10.02 No Surprise in the Senate Bailout Vote

10.02 How Wall Street Can Bail Itself Out Without Destroying The Dollar

10.02 The Specter of Wall Street

10.01 We Need to Demand Hearings!

09.30 Surprise! Congress Listened to the Voting Public!

09.29 Thinking About Gyrations

09.29 Grand Theft America

09.26 Seizing America by Withholding the Mother’s Milk of Politics

09.26 Framing the $700 Billion Question

09.26 Bail Out NO, Buy Out YES

09.26 Just Say "No" to Any Immediate Bailout

09.26 Has Deregulation Sired Fascism?

09.25 Don't Fuel the Fire: Fire the Arsonists

09.25 America Pays the Piper, Big Time

09.24 Just Thinking Aloud Here

09.23 What Nobody's Saying: The Bailout Will Kill the Dollar

09.22 Thinking About Escalations

09.18 US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling From Direct Hits

09.18 US Economy: Rudderless and Reeling From Direct Hits

09.17 Creative Destruction: The Solid Core Behind the Financial Crisis

09.16 You Can't Feel Blue About the Economy If You Want To. There Are No Blue Chips Anymore

09.15 Thinking About Spotlights

09.15 U.S. Economy—Temporary Respite, Permanent Decline

International

10.10 Another Israeli West Bank Land Grab Scheme

09.26 Annals of Liberation: Sex is Death in a Darkened Land

09.25 New Coup D'Etat Rumblings in Venezuela

09.22 Remembering Edward Said Five Years On

09.20 Filter Tips: Distortion and Demonization on the Iran Beat

09.11 Wall Street and Washington

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  Making Americans Unsafe
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COMMENTARY:

Making Americans Unsafe

by Paul Craig Roberts
In the false name of "safety from terrorists," Americans are being made the least safe people on earth.

July 18, 2008—The Bush Regime’s "terrorist" protection schemes have reached the height of total incompetence and utter absurdity. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, a private organization that defends the US Constitution that inattentive Americans neglect, there are now one million names on the "terrorist" watch list.

One of them is that of former Assistant US Attorney General Jim Robinson, whose top security clearances are current. Every time Mr. Robinson flies away on business, he is delayed by a totally incompetent "terrorist" protection racket that cannot tell a person named Jim Robinson, who served in the highest echelons of the US government, from a Muslim terrorist.

What confidence can we have in a regime that is incapable of differentiating an Assistant US Attorney General from a terrorist?

Mr. Robinson said: "If I were convinced that America is a safer place because I get hassled at the airport, I might put up with it, but I doubt it. I expect my story is similar to hundreds of thousands of people who are on this list and find themselves inconvenienced."

"Hundreds of thousands of people" on a watch list that they have no business being on?

Yes. "Members of Congress, nuns, war heroes and other ‘suspicious characters,’ with names like Robert Johnson and Gary Smith, have become trapped in the Kafkaesque clutches of this list, with little hope of escape," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office.

And this is America, not Nazi Germany?

How can Airport "Security" possibly protect anyone when the idiots cannot differentiate a high-level American government official from a terrorist?

Do you really believe there are one million terrorists and nothing has blown up in the US since September 11, 2001 (assuming you believe the government’s account of that episode)?

How can there possibly be 1,000,000 terrorists and America still be in one piece? If there were 1,000,000 terrorists, America would be in ruins. According to the Bush Regime’s line, it only took a handful of terrorists to destroy America’s tallest skyscrapers and a section of the Pentagon and to send the President of the United States scurrying to a hiding place.

One million terrorists could bring America to its knees, and they wouldn’t need to fly on airplanes to accomplish this.

Roberts' bookWhat we are witnessing with the one million person "watch list" is bureaucracy run amok. One Million Terrorists makes the danger seem overwhelming. Such overwhelming danger rationalizes the aggressive behavior of the bullies and thugs attracted by the power of confiscating your toothpaste and bottled water and riffling your belongings in your luggage.

  • Show your ID.
  • Take off your shoes.
  • Take off your belt.
  • Take off your jacket.
  • Empty your pockets.

Don’t complain about being searched without a warrant or you will miss your flight. You might be arrested, handcuffed, kicked and otherwise abused – the fate of many American citizens.

The morons who comprise the US government call the "watch list" one of the government’s "most effective tools in the fight against terrorism."

What an effective tool it is! It cannot tell the difference between Jim Robinson and a Muslim terrorist.

The "watch list" has not apprehended a single terrorist, but thousands of American citizens have been inconvenienced and arrested.

The ACLU says that "putting a million names on a watch list is a guarantee that the list will do more harm than good by interfering with the travel of innocent people and wasting huge amounts of our limited security resources on bureaucratic wheel-spinning."

It is worse than that. What the "watch list" or "no-fly list" is doing is training Americans to submit to warrantless searches, to abandon their constitutional rights, and to submit to humiliation by thugs and bullies. A Gestapo is being trained to have no qualms about searching and intimidating fellow citizens, using any excuse to delay or arrest them. Americans are being taught to use arbitrary power and to submit to arbitrary power. In the false name of "safety from terrorists," Americans are being made the least safe people on earth.


Paul Craig RobertsPaul Craig Roberts is an economist who served as an Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy: The Collapse of the Socialist Era and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice.

This article is published in the Baltimore Chronicle with permission of the author.



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This story was published on July 18, 2008.

 


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