Yawning at the Airport? You Just Might Be a Terrorist

The absurd and arbitrary nature of the decade and a half running phony war on terror gets some needed exposure in a report on the TSA checklist used to identify “suspicious” behavior.  The online magazine The Intercept has published a story on a confidential document that serves as a guideline for the government goons manning the Soviet style checkpoints in the nation’s airports. You could find yourself singled out for additional scrutiny for such things as yawning, clearing your throat or God forbid, complaining about the intrusive security procedures. Like there is nothing to bitch about regarding practices that are used to humiliate and condition law abiding Americans to bow down to uniformed big government thugs.

The website The Verge reports on the checklist in the story “The TSA thinks it can catch terrorists by watching people yawn”:

Next time you're making your way through airport security, you should probably avoid whistling. Definitely don't give anyone a "cold, penetrating stare." And go easy on the yawning. The Intercept has gotten a hold of the TSA's guide for spotting terrorists, and true to the complaints that've been lobbed at the agency for years, the list is incredibly generic; just about anyone boarding a flight could be labeled an evildoer in the eyes of the TSA.

Agents look for the indicators and tally up every traveler's total "suspicious behavior" score to decide if it's worth flagging down a law enforcement officer. Former TSA employees who spoke with The Intercept said that the SPOT (Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques) sheet is catch-all by design and gives the agency freedom to finger anyone as a potential threat to passenger safety. "Taxpayer dollars would be better spent funding real police at TSA checkpoints," a former manager said.

This is exactly the type of thing that happens in a society headed from freedom to fascism and no one dared to complain about it back when it still could have been stopped. The whole TSA program was justified by selling the public on being afraid in the aftermath of 9/11 and morphed into what is essentially a trial program for the national imposition of a police state. It didn’t take long before helpless travelers were forced to take off their shoes and made to walk upon a carpet of the foot fungus of others, old women were stripped of their medical diapers and children were felt up by leering perverts who operated with the full authority of the federal government. For those who remember the ‘old days’, the TSA embodies something that was never supposed to exist in America.

Some of the other things that are scrutinized are “arriving late for flight”, “strong body odor”, “widely open staring eyes”, appearing to be “confused or disoriented”, “rubbing or wringing of hands”, "bag does not suit the individuals appearance" and “trembling”.  None of these can be the results of travel fatigue, missed connections, normal behavior or general incompetence of the airlines – but of course I am being sarcastic here. The unspoken objective is to turn the definition of "terrorist" into something as vague as humanly possible so as to apply it against anyone, particularly those critical of the government.

The full 92 point TSA screening checklist document can be found here. Upon reading it I suspect that anyone who is rational will concur with the unnamed TSA Behavior Detection Office Manager quoted in the Intercept story that it is “complete bullshit”.

Congress just had a chance to defund and dismantle this Homeland Security monstrosity too and could have done so until the Republican “leadership” caved in to Emperor Obama and his fearmongers in the media. Now it will just keep growing until the opportunity presents itself for the government to start putting it’s Gestapo into stadiums, arenas and shopping malls across the fruited plain.

Snowden: Brit Spying Law Could Have Been Written by NSA

In an exclusive interview with The Guardian former US government contractor turned heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden has commented on British leader David Cameron's new emergency surveillance bill to be rammed through parliament this week much like the USAPATRIOT Act was in the aftermath of 9/11. During the interview, conducted in Moscow to and be made available in its entirety later this week Snowden states that the law is comparable to the 2007 Protect America Act which the Bush administration similarly rushed into law.

According to a The Guardian story entitled "Edward Snowden condemns Britain's emergency surveillance bill":

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian in Moscow, Snowden said it was very unusual for a public body to pass an emergency law such as this in circumstances other than a time of total war. "I mean we don't have bombs falling. We don't have U-boats in the harbour."

Suddenly it is a priority, he said, after the government had ignored it for an entire year. "It defies belief."

He found the urgency with which the British government was moving extraordinary and said it mirrored a similar move in the US in 2007 when the Bush administration was forced to introduce legislation, the Protect America Act, citing the same concerns about terrorist threats and the NSA losing cooperation from telecom and internet companies.

"I mean the NSA could have written this draft," he said. "They passed it under the same sort of emergency justification. They said we would be at risk. They said companies will no longer cooperate with us. We're losing valuable intelligence that puts the nation at risk."

AND

During the interview, Snowden was taken aback on learning about the speed at which the British government is moving on new legislation and described it as "a significant change". He questioned why it was doing so now, more than a year after his initial revelations about the scale of government surveillance in the US, the UK and elsewhere around the world, a year in which the government had been largely silent.

He also questioned why there had been a move in the aftermath of a ruling by the European court of justice in April that declared some of the existing surveillance measures were invalid.

He said the government was asking for these "new authorities immediately without any debate, just taking their word for it, despite the fact that these exact same authorities were just declared unlawful by the European court of justice".

He added: "Is it really going to be so costly for us to take a few days to debate where the line should be drawn about the authority and what really serves the public interest?

"If these surveillance authorities are so interested, so invasive, the courts are actually saying they violate fundamental rights, do we really want to authorise them on a new, increased and more intrusive scale without any public debate?"

He said there had been government silence for the last year since he had exposed the scale of surveillance by the NSA and its British partner GCHQ. "And yet suddenly we're told there's a brand new bill that looks like it was written by the National Security Agency that has to be passed in the same manner that a surveillance bill in the United States was passed in 2007, and it has to happen now. And we don't have time to debate it, despite the fact that this was not a priority, this was not an issue that needed to be discussed at all, for an entire year. It defies belief."

Cameron of course is invoking as justification for the latest shoring up of the surveillance system of control the big, bad Muslim bogeyman and the impending risk of "terrorist" attacks on jolly old England - Hermann Goering once remarked "it works the same in any country" and at least in terms of using fear to bypass any sort of legitimate legislative process the former Nazi was spot on. While the authorities in The Homeland must tread a bit more carefully the British regime which is rapidly morphing into something that resembles the Norsefire government in the movie V For Vendetta and let's face it, the British people are spineless given their status as subjects of the Queen an the illicit royal family whose only qualification for power is to simply be born. The government there is obviously expecting some sort of uprising as it has been recently revealed that water cannons are being brought in for crowd control although since the word got out the decision has been temporarily delayed.

The US-UK surveillance colossus will not be constrained by anything as quaint as a constitution or the legitimate political process and will continue to consolidate power and increase snooping capabilities on political dissenters, journalists, bloggers, activists and any who threaten their illicit system of control. All of this was made possible when the authoritarian elements hit the jackpot with the September 11, 2001 attacks and the Pandora's Box of scare tactics was thrown open - it will never be closed without a mass uprising but the time for that grows short as the lists of those who would challenge the bastards grows longer. 

Here We Go Again: Explosive Toothpaste Alert

With the crown jewel of American cultural decadence that is the Super Bowl now receding into the recesses of the national memory the next great offering up of bread and circuses for the masses will be the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. While the Super Bowl was a national celebration of all that has gone awry in this once great country, in particular the worship of the militaristic security state this edition of the world games presents the establishment with a particularly fine opportunity to traffic in the fear and loathing that have become the coin of the realm. In the sad husk of what used to be (at least in theory) a democracy that was the envy of the world but s now just a desiccated and perverted dystiopa referred to as  the Homeland we shalt now be inundated with a plague of raw propaganda of biblical proportions. The state-corporate media are piling onto the host country as well as its hated leader Vladimir Putin who has been constantly mocked and vilified by the lackeys of the elite ever since that audacious New York Times column that ran on the twelfth anniversary of that most sanctified day questioning the asinine concept that is our blessed American exceptionalism.

The Russians have many problems given the recent spate of terrorist attacks as well as the much sensationalized infiltration of “Black Widow” suicide bombers and according to some accounts the refusal of House of Saud political fixer Prince Bandar bin Sultan (aka Bandar Bush) to guarantee protection for a price. Prince Bandar and the swinish monarchy in The Kingdom are still furious over the abandonment of the latest Middle Eastern war in Syria, jilted by both Putin and Barack Obama and have been caterwauling about it ever since. I tend to put some credence in the accounts of Bandar’s guarantee of Olympic safety as it is no secret that the House of Saud or elements thereof have provided funding to Islamist militant groups, pitting them against the Great Satan to spare them from launching a mass invasion of the opulent palaces of their oppressors. It is also of note that fifteen of the nineteen September 11, 2001 hijackers hailed from Prince Bandar’s own homeland.

But I digress. The domestic propaganda machine is set on high with the latest Olympic scare being about toothpaste bombs. This of course is meant for internal consumption in the United States of Kardashian where the populace needs to be kept in a constant state of fear to ensure their continued submission to the NSA Stasi and the police state forces that serve as enforcers of our own increasingly Draconian laws. Having a football free month of full spectrum media dominance with which to hype not only the dangers of Olympic terrorism but also to launch diatribes against all things Russian look for the fear card to be played often and dealt from the bottom of the deck. The tale of the explosive toothpaste is the latest in a line of the type of bullshit that Americans have been bludgeoned with to meekly accept the never ending war on terror. Christ, this is all straight out of the Bush-Cheney textbook, recall the days back when the child fondling, old woman harassing government goons at the TSA staked out their territory by confiscating an ever growing list of personal hygiene items from terrified travelers? Remember that there was once a time when our national airports actually did not old Soviet bloc checkpoints where state sanctioned theft, bullying and other forms of intimidation were enforced. We never had to take our shoes off nor be felt up by thugs nor marched through naked body scanners – the deadly explosive toothpaste bombs of a reminder that we all must sacrifice to remain free.

This week the “two minutes hate” is to be directed at Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak who inflamed the sensitivities of our leadership class daring to opine during news conference last week that the security in Sochi as far as the Russian state being able to guarantee total safety is “the same in Sochi as in Boston” and “For Example, in the United States, at the marathon, people died not so long ago”. OUCH! That has to really smart to have that vodka marinated, star spangled shit sandwich jammed down the throat particulary in the aftermath of the Super Bowl when of all people a (GASP)  “truther” was able to penetrate millions of dollars in paramilitary forces and high tech security to hijack the microphone during game MVP Malcolm Smith’s press conference to deliver his message that 9/11 needs to be investigated. That humiliating breach of the fraud of the security state illustrates what a scam that it all is, the man could have been wearing a suicide bomb and detonated in the middle of the crowd during the freaking game.

Kozak’s comments may have assoles aplenty in full pucker mode but he is spot on and the failure of the trillion dollar NSA all-seeing spy machine to stop two losers from setting off a pressure cooker bomb at the Boston Marathon finish line shows just how much of a lie that it is that the government police state can prevent anything - it is all about money, power and getting over. That Kozak chose to take a poke at Boston has to be especially galling to the chowder heads who after the bombing allowed a huge portion of their city to be put under a de facto state of martial law where black clad paramilitary police squads roamed the streets and conducted unconstitutional, warrantless, house to house searches. That the ever belligerent bad asses of Beantown, heralded as one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution would so easily throw up their hands, cower and kiss the whip had to really fuck with the local psyche. It was all washed away in the exploitation of the bombings though, hijacked by the Red Sox baseball team as a chintzy motiational tactic to power them to a World Series win which was then prompted as the cleansing of a most vile act that was perpetrated upon a city. The whole thing was sickening and as revealing of an American character now bereft of dignity and content to cower in fear at bogeymen invoked by the profiteers who run their government. To think that after the humiliation of the bombing, the further indignity of the rape of their rights by being placed under martial law and then the spectacle of watching the post World Series win pilgrimage of freaks to kiss the street at the finish line was as surreal as it was sickening. Samuel Adams had to be rolling over in his grave over that. 

There is also the ongoing exploitation of another American demographic through the use of disgusting ‘gay baiting’ and the continuing drenched in hypocrisy hectoring of Putin over his less than stellar record towards homosexuals. This is laughable horseshit coming from the Obama administration which has turned the exploitation of the gay community for votes into an art form. It is even more ridiculous when considering that a good numer of American states, largely comprised of  those down behind the cornbread curtain in Dixie have their own onerous laws against homosexuality in one form or the other (all denying personal rights) and the legitimately recognized portions of the American Christian establishment treat gays with the same sort of intolerance and hatred that the Ku Klux Klan espoused towards blacks or for that matter the establishment expresses towards all who do not heel to them.  You know, Jesus Christ never once denounced gays but he sure as hell preached many a mean sermon against hypocrisy of the type that The Homeland is drenched in.

The Olympic closing ceremony is to be on February 23rd making the next few weeks the perfect opportunity to those who want to get off the grid for awhile and just tune out all of the noise.

Goebbels Shrugged: Obama Rolls Out a Resurgent Al Qaeda

“I give them credit, I think the government is doing exactly the right thing here.”

 - Peter King, Rep (IRA)

It was like going back to the future, all the way back to 2004. Beset by mounting pressure over the gross intrusions on the lives of others by Obama’s out of control NSA Stasi the old trusty bogeyman Al-Qaeda returned with a vengeance. Never mind that Obama had spent the better part of the last two years proclaiming that the organization had been “decimated”, “on the run”,weakened and unable to mount a serious threat. Obama had practically thrown out his rotator cuff patting himself on the back and doing an end zone celebration dance with bin Laden’s bloody scalp. However, the great one swiftly realized the political value of having an Emanuel Goldstein as the peasants were becoming restive over each new revelation that they were indeed living in a fascist police state.

So the fortuitous revelation that the NSA was producing gold in their data-mining by uncovering an evil and drastic plot, murder was imminent as the Obama administration closed embassies and unleashed the media mockingbirds. Nothing quite has the clout of an attack by the evil Muslims that was guaranteed to kill Americans in a manner unseen since the morning of September 11, 2001. When confronted with fear of the other you could always count on the masses of asses rallying around the flag and gobbling up the bullshit biscuits cranked out by the corporate-state propaganda machine. I suspect that the big announcement of the resurgent radical Islamic hydra was in the planning stages for weeks as something that could stench the flow of stories on the high crimes and misdemeanors contained in the documents of one whistleblower named Ed Snowden. A nice little piece of red meat was chucked into the pit two weeks ago when hundreds of militants including but of course “senior members” of Al Qaeda engineered a daring jailbreak from Baghdad’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Remember the place? It was Saddam’s preeminent torture facility until it was hijacked by U.S. invaders and used for even more torture, especially that of a cruel and perverse sexual sadism that is as American as apple pie these days. This was the place where that little peckerwood tramp Lynddie England and her violent nutball boyfriend Charles Graner were caught filming their disgusting and demeaning abuse of Iraqis back when Bush’s Iraq war was in full swing. To say that the joint had a bad reputation is quite an understatement.

So with the marauding devil of the modern era now regenerated just in time to provide cover for the NSA the frenzied alert of imminent danger was issued. By Friday the pocket  media was ablaze with fear and dread, a barrage of lies was laid down in a shock and awe campaign, the manner of which hasn’t been seen in years. While Americans began to once again notice swarthy and scary phantoms in turbans lurking under their beds and in their closets the lackeys and water carriers who serve as unprincipled mouthpieces of the regime were sent forth to make their case for the commander in chief and to mount a stifling defense of the American Stasi. The Sunday morning pits of vanity and iniquity would be their beachhead and they stormed it vigorously. The interesting thing however is that Obama’s top defenders were Republicans.

It was a formidable but consistently fascist cadre that said to hell with fighting the Obama agenda and threw their considerable might behind El Presidente. A crackerjack lineup of loudmouths fired up their panic/manure spreaders and left a fog of phobia in their wake. There was Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, of the Senate Intelligence Committee (aka Senate Intelligence Lobby) who proclaimed” “The one thing we can talk about is the fact that there’s been an awful lot of chatter out there,” the chatter is “very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11.” Chambliss, to those unfamiliar with his antics the chickenhawk draft dodger who in a run for the Georgia seat smeared his opponent, Vietnam veteran Max Cleland as soft on terror, airing a dirty smear campaign that no war veteran who lost three limbs in service to his country should ever have to face. But guys like Chambliss have no scruples, especially when it comes to being whores to the mega-billion dollar domestic spying industry.

In addition to Senator draft dodger there was the onerous Peter King, a real expert on terrorism considering that he spent a good part of his early career supporting the IRA, a terrorist organization that used bombs planted in public places to murder innocent women and children. He offered up his praise for Obama’s dictatorial spying, “I give them credit, I think the government is doing exactly the right thing here.”. King, like Chambliss is just another hypocrite who is fine with taking a bit of time off from kicking Obama in the balls over Benghazi to lock down his campaign contribution check from the American Stasi. And what would a Sunday morning be without John McCain’s BFF good old Miss South Carolina aka Lindsay Graham. Graham appeared on CNN’s State of the Union with the insipid blathering sow Candy Crowley. Graham, in his most honey tongued Gomer Pyle twang proceeded to make the case for permanent religious war in the Middle East. They always reliable Graham practically crooned “If we ever take the bait, and try to come home and create fortress America, you’ll have another 9/11.” It was an obvious sucker punch to the Rand Paul, Justin Amash non-interventionist wing of the party and a deep, sloppy kiss to the neocons who are back in the game now. To Crowley’s credit she did rebut Graham’s lies and innuendo by asking him one of the forbidden questions:

 “When you look at this map of U.S. embassies that are closed, twenty-two of them, most of them across the Muslim world, when you hear this global warning to all Americans to take care, what do you think that says?…Since the mission of terrorists is to terrorize, in some sense do you feel as if they’ve already won?”

The answer to that is obvious, were the 9/11 attacks engineered to destroy America from with the so-called “terrorists” should be running victory laps over the Sunday morning swill. By allowing psychotic terrorists like King and Graham who never met a carpet bombing of brown-skinned civilians that he didn’t like it would in theory present a huge triumph for those who hated us for our freedoms and way of life. The problem is, and this is never defined by the corrupt corporate-state media is that those who hate us for those reasons are right here in the U.S.A. and are occupying the government as well as chairs on the propaganda circuit.

There are many Republicans who eagerly join their fellow travelers on the other side of the aisle when it comes to issues of fascism, war, torture, unconstitutional surveillance and any other matter that concerns stripping the rights away from law-abiding, tax-paying, loyal Americans and extracting their money to fund the special interest groups (primarily war oriented) that are their benefactors. It is an elite cadre, also one that  support Obama’s immigration ‘reform’ policies precisely because their corporate paymasters need more cheap labor to drive down wages, bust unions and loot pension plans. Unlike the rank and file and other members of Congress who are kept in the dark about mass surveillance and data-mining there are those who enjoy access and actually have influence far in excess as their constitutionally defined level of representation There is the Gang of Eight, a sort of Senate within the Senate that is not mentioned anywhere in the constitution and this cabal exerts disproportionate control. This group typically includes McCain and Graham (and their new toady Marco Rubio) who are constantly in the media, pushing for war and oppression and are the go-to guys for the Pentagon and the armaments industry. Unlike the majority of Congress which is paralyzed due to partisan rancor and loyal only to special interests the gang is able to get things done by moving along or killing legislation. They will be instrumental in saving Obama’s Stasi, as will Skull and Bonesman John Kerry and of course Dianne Feinstein who has never met a military or secret surveillance program that she couldn’t support. Note that the other proponents of the NSA all benefit financially from the industry.

Political whore-mongering, lies, double-dealing and graft chasing are one thing but the most disturbing aspect of all of this latest alleged threat is that we now once again are seeing a pattern emerge of the invocation of September 11, 2001 as justification for every abuse of power that followed. The cynical use of the most tragic day in the nation’s history to make political hay by the previous administration, certain members of Congress and the always opportunistic defense and surveillance industry pimps was shameful. It was akin to pissing on the dead but that has never been beyond politicians, the uptick in invoking that which should never be used as another tool in the political toolbox over the last month has been as incessant as it is intolerable. That it is being used to justify NSA mass surveillance on innocent Americans is even more outrageous than the foreign wars of aggression that were sold to the public on the premise of payback for the attacks.

Interesting, the Obama administration and the government did so much to put their stamp on the official story of what occurred on September 11, 2001 as the national religion back on the tenth anniversary. Hell, the NFL, a preeminent American icon and corporate behemoth even participated, allowing their games that day to become a celebration of the mythology. So why is the scab now being pulled off?  It is being done for political cover for a rotten and rogue administration as well as powerful members of Congress who need to preserve their spying capabilities for all of the advantages that they provide and which can be bartered. Disgusting isn’t it?

So the embassy closures will continue now for at least another week and maybe more if it serves to protect Obama’s ass from scrutiny over his Stasi.  Here is an idea for Barry – why not just close them permanently and get the hell out of parts of the world where we don’t belong? It will take a few generations but if you are forward thinking enough maybe there will be a time when we are no longer feared and hated abroad. Despite all of the state crap propaganda about how they “hate us for our freedoms’ that is a lie of Hitlerian proportions. First off, if you take a good look around in 2013 we really are not “free” anymore thanks to the NSA intelligence colossus and secondly, they hate us for our intervening in their countries.

Oh, and in breaking news the Obama administration State Department has just ordered Americans to immediately leave Yemen. I guess the locals aren’t thrilled with Barry’s ongoing drone strikes.