'Security is Worth the Hassle'

Bull$#!7.

The terror attacks of September 11th 2001 were made possible by a lax domestic, not international, security regimen.

Since then, thousands of people have been hired to make your air travel and airport visit experiences as unpleasant as possible.

In the name of "security"--that all-important objective against which the Bill of Rights, Constitution, and any other civil liberties must crumble--the United States has forsaken its birthright and become not merely a sponsor of tyranny, but has become a nation of slaves who must present papers to the proper authority and comply with the demands of pettifogging badge-wearers not because it does any damn good, but because it makes someone, somewhere, feel "safer".

The enormous amount of money wasted on these federal gravy trains for people who have proven unemployable as prison guards would have been better spent on flannel blankies and demonstrations of thumb-sucking techniques.

The only likely accomplishment of the Department of Fatherland Insanity is to ensure that when another attack comes (an inevitability, given the policies of the current administration, and one which Dubya's unfortunate successor is far more likely to have to deal with), it will not be in a commercial jetliner.

But, and this is the good bit, there's not a damn bit of evidence that any of this has "made America safer". It has decreased the determinatinon of her enemies not a bit. The rabid conduct of the current president has alienated almost all of America's allies foreign and domestic (at least, the ones he's not bribing with nuclear technology--and how great an idea was that?).

Eventually, some sufficiently determined maniac will slip through. It's possible that he may only machine-gun a shopping mall. Oh yeah--George? Country under terror "threat", and you let the restrictions on automatic weapons lapse? Not prudent.

But let's assume the killer doesn't in fact take advantage of gun laws that permit a monkey to buy an M-1. There are other options: The maniac may bring dynamite onto a bus. The terrorist may park a five-tonne fertilizer bomb outside a federal building.

And for none of these activities will he be required to deal with the twin Orwellian miseries that are the TSA and the Department of Fatherland Insanity.

He will buy his diesel fuel and ammonium nitrate legitimately, at a feed and farm supply store. He will rent a truck with a US driver's license, or Canadian. He will park legally, and walk away.

And all the paranoia, all the anger and fear that has been channelled into grey-faced bureaucratic obstructionism and the denigration of citizens into suspects, the elevation of civil servants to civil masters, the blind, angry, abuse of foreigners or new Americans, the insults to America's neighbours and friends and above all the precious Wars--on terror and on Iraq--will have done not one damn thing to stop him.