Down with the TSA! Down with DHS! And dwn with ever other alphabet soup "national security" agency created under GWB in the wake of the terror attacks of 9/11/2001! Bush used these tragic events to create a climate of fear that continues to this day, more than a decade later. He sold the panicked Congress and a goodly portion of the American public on the idea that terrorist-fighting agencies will eliminate the threat of a repeat of the 9/11 attacks. In truth, even if all of the clowns who ended up in the extremely costly agencies that were created to combat terrorism on US soil were rigorously trained to do the jobs they were hired to do, they would be doomed to failure, but perhaps not as spectularly as we've seen to date. By its very nature, terrorism cannot be stopped until every nation wipes them from the face of the Earth, though it can be stemmed. If a determined, well-funded terrorist "cell" (which can be as few as ONE person) with a well-thought-out plan of attack and the proper training can succeed in spite of millions and even billions of dollars being spent to assure his or her failure.

TSA and DHS are peopled by arrogant, petty dictators who should have been weeded out during the recruitment phase. It appears that TSA agents are trained mainly to posture and push their weight around to inconvenience the traveling public--oh, and to occationally steal from the people they're supposed to protect. It appears that what we need is protection from these petty dictators. DHS frequently points to the fact that there have been no commercial airplane seizures by terrorists since the 9/11 debacle. Although this may be true, it is is also possible that this was a one-shot deal and that serious terrorists are canny enough to realize that another stop at this particular watering hole might a bit risky. We have more to fear from the terrorist who simply strolls across at any point along our extremely long borders with all the equipment he needs strapped to his back than from a box-cutter-wielding fanatic boarding one of our commercial airplanes.

My greatest fear in the backlash of the events of 9/11 is the deprivation of the civil liberties our forefathers drafted in the Constitution and added to with the Bill of Rights and the thousands--nay, millions--of valiant Americans who gave their lives to secure our freedoms for all time. Thanks to Bush and his cronies and their creation of a climate of fear, we are now being subjected to an erosion of our civil liberties (given to us by our government in the making when we separated from the tyranny of an English king--not by "God" and "nature", as that jackass Paul Ryan claimed in a speech I heard on CNN). Thanks to GWB and the weak-kneed Republican Congress, our Federal government now has the power to remove from each of us all civil liberties simply by citing "national security", frequently without habeas corpus.

It is not my intent here to foster an additional climate of fear, except as it applies to our continuing slide to total government control of the people for its own dictatorial ends. There is nothing more insidious and dangerous to the common man than a self-serving government that would deprive its citizens freedom to the "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" our American forefathers deemed we deserved. Any abridgement of these basic rights is a form of internal terrorism and must be stamped at the polls by the electorate, many of whom became disenfranchised in 2000 and then again in 2004.

One final word: we continue to fight a "war on terrorism" through super-powerful security agencies and the illegal war in Afghanistan and the all-but-finished war in Iraq. Message to Uncle Sam: The war was over on 9/11 when terrorist operations succeeded. All of the loss of civil liberties the American citizen have made us suffer through and the humongous debt you heaped upon us and future generations are unambiguous evidence that you lost your war and reduced the greatness of the United States of America. The USA, it appears, is now more villified outside our borders than at any other time in our history.

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