Profit based paranoia threatens us all
An analysis by Andrew Redmond
The news was meant to be shocking: a 16-year-old boy boarded a Nashville bound Southwest Airlines flight in Los Angeles, armed with handcuffs, duct tape and rope in his carry on luggage. He supposedly was planning to hijack the jetliner and plow it into a Hannah Montana concert in Louisiana. (Hannah Montana is a Disney character played by Miley Cyrus who is popular with preteen girls. Miley Cyrus is the daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus, who was guilty of the hit “Achy Breaky Heart,” a song so annoying that ATF and FBI agents blasted it at multiple decibel volume to torture the Branch Davidians at the 1993 Waco, Texas siege.)
Luckily, the California teen was restrained and is being held for mental observation. “His stated intent was to hijack the airplane and commit suicide,” FBI spokesman George Bolds told the media. “He did indicate he intended to die in Louisiana.” But despite the hoopla, “his plan had a low probability of success,” Bolds admitted. The boy, unidentified because of his age, now faces a charge of “felony terrorism.”
The government has stepped back from the immediate excitement, playing down the original scenario. A raid on the lad’s home found what they call a “replica cockpit” in his bedroom, but despite the clue one problem persists: he was arrested on Tuesday evening and the Hannah Montana concert in Louisiana was planned for Friday night, presenting a timing problem that would, http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3157 males and mass murder, as seen in the numerous school shootings nationwide, the Hannah Montana scare was fuelled by a “Homeland Security complex” that has swept the United States in the wake of 9/11 and is kept going by lucrative profit and policy based agendas. The very real fear of Americans has enabled an astounding level of social control to be injected, especially seen in airports, where long lines of cowed, shoeless travellers meekly undergo treatment that the government would not have dared to even contemplate before 9/11.
Vast budgets in the name of “Homeland Security” have been made available not only to federal agencies, but to state and local government coast to coast, and much of this flows out to private businesses. The waste in the name of “Homeland Security” is astounding.
According to Fred Lucas, a staff writer at CNSNews.com, “Kentucky won a $36,300 grant from the Department of Homeland Security to protect bingo halls from terrorist infiltration, and [in 2006, the federal government granted $46,908 in homeland security funds to protect a limo and bus service that transports New Yorkers to the affluent Hamptons region in Long Island.” Often payouts don’t even have a clear connection with terrorism prevention. Lucas found that in “2004, five days before Christmas, the government announced a $153 million homeland security grant to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and in the last fiscal year, $15.7 million in homeland security funds went for enforcement of child labor laws.” Among other pork, Lucas found “$203,000 for Project Alert, a drug use prevention program in schools; $7.9 million in homeland security funds went to investigate missing and exploited children; $180,000 for a tactical urban combat truck with similar armor to a military Humvee in LaCrosse, Wisconsin.”
Ryan Singel of wired.com found pork being spent on pursuits that sound like something out of science fiction. In July, 2007, Singel wrote that the “Department of Homeland Security is funding the creation an LED flashlight that uses powerful flashes of light to temporarily blind, disorient and incapacitate people. Homeland Security’s Science and Technology arm hopes government agents can use the “light saber” to arrest people…”
Often the waste doesn’t even have much Congressional oversight. The taxpayer watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste “identified 2,658 projects at a cost of $13.2 billion in the Defense and Homeland Security Appropriations Acts for fiscal 2007. Only two of the 11 appropriations bills were enacted by Congress and the remaining nine were subject to a moratorium on earmarks.” But what oversight there is seems to often be a cover for old fashioned pork barrel politics. Consider the “$12,000,000 added by the House for the Rural Domestic Preparedness Consortium in the district of then-House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman Harold Rogers (R-Ky.). This program is supposed to help protect citizens living in rural areas by training rural emergency responder teams… funding for the program has increased by 20 percent from last year’s level.” The list of abuse could go on for pages, as indeed it does, in The 2007 Pig Book put out by CAGW.
Policy dividends also play out in the Homeland Security game, with the potential of a much greater cost than the financial pork. Ever since 9/11, a concerted effort has been made to roll back Constitutional freedoms Americans once took for granted, all carried out in the name of “patriotism” and “freedom.” The Patriot Act is perhaps the best known attack on rights, but so are the wide number of wiretappings, so egregiouusly unconstituional that President Bush is attempting to get a law passed to retroactively protect telecoms who collaborated with the goovernment to spy on their customers. Numerous legal cases have also flouted the law, not least the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3140.
Now the government is floating a “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2519 sees them as opening a Pandora’s Box. “What if our ordinary political speech were defined as a “thought crime,” an incitement to terrorism? The vague language of the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007″ could lead to redefining anyone’s statements about liberty and change,” she asks. “What if those who advocate political change were defined as terrorists?” Already special interest groups are vying to let the government silence their enemies. The Anti Defamation League, which “works closely” with (or on) law enforcement, probably has a lot of say so in who makes “the list.” If we go by their target list, revealed after a raid on its domestic spying operation in 1993, a Rainbow Coalition of targets should expect increased government scutiny: environmentalists, racialists of all races, homosexual activists, animal rights groups, labor unions, conservatives, leftists, Christians and Muslims and pagans, academics and intellectuals have to fear attention fuelled by ideology, ego and enormous financing, all dependent on finding, and perhaps even manufacturing, crises and threats.
Often laws like the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act” are lobbied for, and even written by, private special interest groups who call themselves “experts” and indoctrinate law enforcement personnel with their own agenda. When one researcher enquired about what role some of these groups play in developing government policy, identifying targets, and coming up with various classifications of “radicals,” the researcher was told that this information was secret.
The next “scare” is the Super Bowl, the football extravaganza slated for 3 February at the University of Phoenix Stadium in Arizona. The U.S. Secret Service oversees a slush fund of $2,500,000 to spend on events just like this. This National Special Security Events Fund was added “in conference” to protect sports events as well as conventions and other public events. With that kind of payola to justify, you had better believe a “threat” had to be found. So a PR charge has been launched, highlighting a government “threat assessment” that sounds like something from Black Sunday, the 1970s novel and film about Super Bowl terrorism. “Al Qaeda and other Islamic terrorists may view sporting events as acceptable targets: the al Qaeda Training Manual specifically lists ‘… blasting and destroying the places of amusement, immorality, and sin … and attacking vital economic centers’ as a required mission of the al Qaeda military organization,” the “assessment” says. And remember the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act”? That “homegrown terrorists” agenda gets a nod: “The Super Bowl’s stature as a major media event probably increases its attractiveness to homegrown terrorists, whether acting alone or as part of a group, who understand the economic as well as symbolic importance of the game and surrounding activities to many in the homeland,” the assessment says.
“Among the threats of greatest concern to high profile events like the Super Bowl are the placement of explosive devices in heavily trafficked areas in and around the event site, to include individuals impersonating law enforcement and other security or service personnel and insiders to facilitate attacks.”
Professional sports, like “homeland security,” are recipients of huge corporate welfare handouts, with supposed “private/public partnerships” raking off enormous payoffs in tax dollars for stadiums and the like. Similarly, the “Homeland Security industry” is a serious cash spinner for private interests.
What is especially worrisome about the misuse of public concern and tax dollars is that genuine threats do exist. Terrorism is a threat. But policy driven by private interests and with built in incentives to find (or make up) threats is no policy at all.
Threats are needed, to justify budgets, build careers and personal reputations and advance social and business agendas. The nonexistent Hannah Montana threat is not funny, but a symptom of a hydra headed monster thriving on the manipulated fear and patriotism held by honest people.