Very interesting, though not surprising…
Accidentally Revealed Document Shows TSA Doesn’t Think Terrorists Are Plotting to Attack Airplanes
… apparently a clerk at the 11th Circuit appeals court forgot to file the document under seal, allowing them to find out what was under the redactions… Included in there is the following, apparently quoted from the TSA’s own statements:
“As of mid-2011, terrorist threat groups present in the Homeland are not known to be actively plotting against civil aviation targets or airports; instead, their focus is on fundraising, recruiting, and propagandizing.â€
Elsewhere, the TSA appears to admit that “due to hardened cockpit doors and the willingness of passengers to challenge hijackers,” it’s unlikely that there’s much value in terrorists trying to hijack a plane these days (amusingly, that statement is a clear echo of Bruce Schneier’s statement criticizing the TSA’s security theater — suggesting that the TSA flat out knows that airport security is nothing more than such theatrics).
So we’re using tools that bend (or break) the bill of rights under the guise that they’re preventing terrorism. Right.
Amazingly, it appears that the government forced Corbett to redact the revelation that the TSA’s own threat assessments have shown “literally zero evidence that anyone is plotting to blow up an airline leaving from a domestic airport.” Corbett argues that this shows why the searches are not reasonable under the 4th Amendment. Corbett also points out that about the only thing the machines seem useful at catching are illegal drugs — but, as he notes, that’s “irrelevant to aviation security.” Sure, the government may like the fact that it catches illegal drugs with these machines, but the TSA can’t argue it needs the machines for “terrorism” when it knows that’s not true, and then tries to keep them just because it finds some narcotics…
As so often is the case, the war on terror and the war on drugs are not about their stated purposes.
Long before my military service I was interested in things political. I’d read, for example, that the main goal of terrorism was to make the government so tyrannical in its’ efforts to fight terrorism that the people rise up and overthrow The State via revolution, thus doing the terrorists’ work for them.
But what if the terrorists were the government, itself? What goals would there be in such a scenario? The accretion of powers not granted to it legally and the subjugation of the populace under a false flag of manufactured threat quickly comes to mind.
Not conjecture; read about OPERATION NORTHWOODS. And then ruminate on what’s happened since the Joint Chiefs first promoted the idea of murdering Americans in the 1960’s.
Mencken, bless his soul, was all too right when he said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Been way too much of that, lately.
But if the hobgoblins are real, occupy the highest seats of government, and they are all in hysterics, wildly gesticulating, foaming at the mouth and screaming at the top of their lungs about the approach of a mythical boogeyman in order to distract attention from their own activities? Then a little more scrutiny should be paid to who is saying what, for it should be obvious their motives are suspect…
Security theatre, but the Kap’n is right. There’s a man behind that curtain, and the great and powerful Oz is telling us to pay him no attention.
It’s the new American version of “Show us your papers, schnell!” The Nazi’s who uttered this sentence innumerable times likely had no idea what authentic identity papers looked like, or how to spot a phony. They detained who they wanted, and sent the ones they didn’t like away forever. It was a sentence uttered to intimidate, to subjugate, and to show the common rabble their place, as workers and slaves. Welcome to O’Hare International Airport. Please proceed to passenger screening.
If the sheeple were smart enough and willing to inconvenience themselves slightly for just a little while, it would only take about 1/3 of us opting OUT at the TSA for it to cause major havoc.
Late/missed flights, airport chaos etc. Same with the internal ‘immigration’ checkpoints.
The problem is nobody wants to be inconvenienced or be that ‘guy’ to step out to the ‘man’ in front of everyone.
On a good note, my state supreme court case win regarding transportation here in Hawai’i is causing a group to ‘step out in front’ and forcefully open a ‘transfer station’ for MMJ.
It’s based on the legalese of my ruling stating transportation, distribution and acquisition are not adequately addressed in the law.
I like the term ‘transfer station’. Sounds better than ‘dispensary’ IMO.
This should be interesting….
Every federal agency is corrupted and spend most of their budget trying to show how necessary they are. Every allotment program is filled with unqualified recipients with a minimum of oversight or repercussions for falsely applying for benefits and the ones that yell the loudest when budget cuts threaten their golden egg are the scammers.
Right now there are only 1 million VN vets that served in-country alive of the three million that actually served in VN but the VA has 9 million people claiming VN veteran status and as far as I have seen no effort is being made to remove the bogus claimants which in the end results in billions of dollars for healthcare and resources that could have been used on veterans instead going to scammers.
That is just one of the federal programs,,every program has the same rates of corruption but if we end those programs the people that actually qualify for them will be the first to go because the scammers will be the loudest protesters of ending them.
The same thing is happening in the war on drugs,,the loudest protesters of ending it are the people that participate in the least beneficial part of the policy.
OT
return of the gateway theory. desperate measures for desperate times?
“Steckler previously signed onto a letter along with other law enforcement organizations that stated the “failure of the Federal government to act in this matter is an open invitation to other states to legalize marijuana in defiance of federal law,” and warned that marijuana could cause suicidal thoughts, impair driving and be a “gateway drug.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/21/eric-holder-marijuana_n_4138579.html
“‘Every single person I booked and interviewed who was not just a meth addict but a heroin user or a coke-head had started on some seemingly innocent drug like alcohol or cannabis.
‘Everyone experiments at college or school and I want… to show kids that everyone in those pictures started on cannabis, they didn’t just dive head first into heroin.
‘So I ask the students at schools to look at these people and think about their actions, otherwise that could end up being you,’ said deputy King.”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2470991/Meth-effects-Mugshots-users-hard-drug.html
“seemingly innocent drug like alcohol”
Wow, just wow. Deputy King is truly stupid if he really believes that crap he’s spouting.
We are all now in the difficult position of having more to fear from our government than from terrorists, on a statistical basis if nothing else. Our only recourse is to fight back by spying on the government whenever possible, and disrupting its power through the clever use of science, monkey warfare, and political theatre. On the positive side, science proves helpful nearly every day with something new that can be used to counter the police state.
For instance, plagued by infrared light signature leaking from the appliances used in your grow-op? Today from the Harvard applied physics lab comes a new coating that “intrinsically conceals its own temperature to thermal cameras.â€
And in this example, science questions the validity of DEA drug testing hype.
It’s good to know science is hard at work protecting us from our government, and other types of thieves.
I avoid flying because the check-in process is so humiliating. I’d tolerate it if there was a legitimate threat, or even if the procedures were the least but respectful. But this crap is intolerable. A useless exercise in unjust dominion (arbitrary exercise of authority for its own sake). Terrible. Stupid. Wrong. Infuriating.
Beautiful description, divadab. You nailed it!!
I always wondered why my stomach churned and I felt queasy for doing nothing other than trying to get to a destination.
They make me hate them, and I don’t like that feeling.
Even flying outer-island is a degrading experience. I need a 40ft sailboat;)
I smelled shit from day one after seeing stories about the “urgent need” to beef up security on the Canadian border.
Sharing this around:
Legalization was supposed to allow recreational use and sale of cannabis, but the opponents of Medical marijuana want to use it as an excuse to take medicine away from sick people. With only an estimated three percent of the State’s marijuana users doing so under a doctor’s orders, the Medical system doesn’t threaten the State’s revenue stream. Lets be very, very clear here, they want to start arresting patients again. The medical laws were on the books before I-502, and the voters of Washington KNEW that full well when they passed it. The WSLCB was tasked to implement the State’s recreational market, not to fiddle around with the medical laws and insert themselves into the doctor patient relationship. While everyday, new therapeutic uses for cannabis are being studied, the State wants to restrict access and qualifying conditions. Please note that written comments will be accepted by the board until November 8th. http://tdn.com/news/state-and-regional/washington/state-agencies-recommend-reining-in-medical-marijuana/article_cbf5877e-3aa0-11e3-b21f-0019bb2963f4.html
This proves sugar is a dangerous drug. This guy’s life was messed up over possession of Jolly Ranchers:
http://www.alternet.org/police-throw-man-jail-after-mistaking-jolly-ranchers-crystal-meth
We are now at 58% support for legalization of marijuana,,NORML and all advocacy groups are firing rockets into the skies and puffing like crazy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/10/22/support-for-marijuana-legalization-spikes-to-58-percent/
This serves to show that we’re winning when the prohibs are so desperate they pull this kind of crap…and make this kind of admission:
(From the article)
“Humboldt State University sociologist Josh Meisel said he caught a glimpse of the federal government’s new messaging on pot two years ago in a meeting with Tommy LaNier, head of the White House’s National Marijuana Initiative. According to Meisel, LaNier said federal authorities “recognize that public opinion has shifted and they can’t wage this battle on the historic platform of it being an issue of morality.”
“The public doesn’t buy that anymore,” LaNier said, according to Meisel. “We’re aren’t going to win this as a battle of morality. We have to wage it in terms of the environmental destruction.”
and:
“LaNier said in the same podcast: “We need to bring in … the Sierra Club, environmental individuals; we need to bring in as many people, to get them on our side to go to Congress and say, ‘Hey, this is enough. Those are pristine lands that were set aside for the use of the public, not for the production of marijuana.'””
and:
“Meisel added: “There’s nothing about growing dope that has to involve massive amounts of energy, dangerous chemicals, water diversion, disrespect to your neighbors, and killing animal species — just like we don’t have to do that growing tomatoes. And we don’t grow tomatoes in Yosemite. These are unintended consequences of the policy, not the plant.
“My sense is that this has become a tool to break the back of the legalization movement,” Meisel continued, referring to the decision by Drug War enforcers to shift their rhetoric from the supposed dangers of smoking weed to the environmental damage caused by trespass grows in order to gain support among environmentalists for the War on Pot. “It’s a strategy to undermine local growing across the board, as opposed to going after people who are violating environmental laws.” (Emphasis mine – k.)
People who couldn’t have given two sh*ts and a damn about the environment before are trying to sound like the very ‘DFH treehuggers’ they despise…thinking they can con environmentalists into carrying their water for them.
And that’s all drug prohibition is, a big ‘con game’, with the taxpayers as the ‘marks’ in it. And, with this tactic, the prohibs are once more proving themselves nothing but grifters with badges.
The problem is, their intended targets are the very generation they thought to snowjob and propagandize into being dutiful little Orwellian Sheep, and bleat in chorus prohib BS.
Well, the kids back then faked drinking the prohib kool-aid and now they’ve grown up, know the truth from the lies, and aren’t interested, thank you very much.
So Tommy LaNier really believed he and his plan would be welcomed by environmentalists? At least LaNier didn’t waste taxpayers’ money seeking help from anthropologists.
Boy I bet the the AMA has egg on their faces…
Compounds in Cannabis Fight Leukemia,
Kill Cancer Cells Study Finds ecp
CC Oct 21 2013 By Paul Armentano, NORML
In some cases, by using specific dosage patterns,
these agents can destroy cancer cells on their own.
Medical Marijuana Treatment Of Pediatric Epilepsy
Attracts More Parents To Colorado ecp
CC Oct 21 2013 By Andrea Rael, The Huffington Post
FYI, comments are not working on the Gallup poll article.
Thanks. Should be fixed now. Apparently, the software didn’t like the title “58” and was looking for the comments page for year 2013, month 10 and day 58, so I had to change the title of the post to a written-out fifty-eight.