Government tyranny since 9/11

The two highest achievements of the human mind are the twin concepts of "loyalty" and "duty." Whenever these twin concepts fall into disrepute – get out of there fast! You may possibly save yourself, but it is too late to save that society. It is doomed.

– R.A. Heinlein

Nearly 11 years after 9/11, America is ... no longer America. Sept. 11 resulted in the biggest power grab by the federal government in our nation's history. Hundreds of billions of dollars have been squandered on security theater since then, "keeping us safe."

But to be "safe," we now need "our papers" to travel domestically on an airline. Can the rest of public transportation be far off the TSA's radar screen? And how about private travel? Can checkpoints for private cars be entirely off their radar? Totalitarian nations always maintain control of domestic travel. In the old USSR, you needed permission to move from one city to another.

We are surveilled from the cradle to the grave. Millions of police requests for cell phone calls, text messages and location data are made annually. We don't need to be told about them, of course. It would only upset us. Google works in partnership with the National Security Administration to profile Americans. Prosecuting crimes is no longer enough. Keeping track of what we do is no longer enough. They need to know what we're thinking about. Or what we might think about.

Police and prosecutors routinely throw "terrorism" charges into the mix against ordinary criminals. Everybody hates terrorists. And recent Homeland Security reports indicate that pretty much all of us are terrorists, anyway. All except illegal aliens, which are a protected criminal class.

Between 20 and 30 thousand domestic drones will soon be clogging the airspace over America, employing classified military surveillance technology to count everything from cow farts to the weapons in your home. They will be flown by people on the ground – who won't die in the midair collisions with passenger airplanes certain to result.

All this drone data will go to the federal government's computer coffers. All without a single warrant ever being issued. All to be added to every person's private dossier. Maintained forever. Available to convict you while you're alive and smear you after you're dead.

None of it was necessary. And none of it is necessary. That's according to a Dec. 18, 2002, Associated Press article now scrubbed from the AP search engine and most of the Internet. (See the article text at end of this column.) It was published under the title "State Dept. Takes Heat in 9/11 Attacks, by Ken Guggenheim, Associated Press Writer, Dec. 18, 6:02 PM ET, 2002." Here is an excerpt:

"The State Department's failure to follow its own rules for issuing visas allowed the Sept. 11 attacks to happen, two top Republican senators said Wednesday.

"Sens. Jon Kyl and Pat Roberts said in a report that 'the answer to the question – could 9/11 have been prevented – is yes, if State Department personnel had merely followed the law and not granted non-immigrant visas to 15 of the 19 hijackers in Saudi Arabia.'"

So the two things that caused 9/11 – illegal immigration and out-of-control State Department officials – haven't changed at all. In fact, they are flourishing under federal government protection. Why has no one in the State Department ever been prosecuted for disregarding the law and issuing visas to terrorists?

Perhaps it is because the State Department has been infested with communists since at least the days when Alger Hiss sat at the table with FDR and divided up Europe with Stalin at the end of World War II. NSA's Venona intercepts confirm that Hiss was a communist agent. So FDR, as president, would have known: One of his top policy-makers was a communist agent.

Now, tell me again: Why does the federal government need an illegal federal police force (nowhere permitted them under the Constitution) called TSA? Why do Americans have to "show their papers" to travel, while illegal immigrants can do pretty much whatever they darn well please? Perhaps it is because America is no longer America.

Here is the scrubbed AP story:

State Dept. Takes Heat in 9/11 Attacks Wed Dec 18, 6:02 PM ET By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer

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WASHINGTON - The State Department's failure to follow its own rules for issuing visas allowed the Sept. 11 attacks to happen, two top Republicans senators said Wednesday.

Sens. Jon Kyl and Pat Roberts said in a report that "the answer to the question – could 9/11 have been prevented – is yes, if State Department personnel had merely followed the law and not granted non-immigrant visas to 15 of the 19 hijackers in Saudi Arabia."

If laws had been followed, "most of the hijackers would not have been able to obtain visas and 9/11 would not have happened," they said.

There was no comment from the State Department. Responding in the past to similar criticism, State Department officials have said they had no reason to believe the men were terrorists.

Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in October that consular officers followed procedures in place at the time. He said visa procedures have since been improved to identify potential threats.

Roberts, of Kansas, will likely be the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman next year; Kyl, of Arizona, will have a top position in the Senate Republican leadership.

Both were part of the House and Senate intelligence committees' inquiry into intelligence failures leading up to the attacks. Last week, in its final report, the inquiry said agencies were poorly organized and failed to share information, but didn't identify a single intelligence error that, by itself, allowed the attacks to occur.

Kyl and Roberts were among several lawmakers submitting supplemental reports this week. They said the inquiry findings, most of which remain classified, didn't dig deeply enough into the cause of intelligence problems. They said also intelligence committee leaders excluded other lawmakers from key decisions during the investigation.

Their report also said the investigation's scope, confined to intelligence issues, was too limited. The most glaring omission, they said, was the failure to examine State Department procedures for issuing visas.

Kyl and Roberts said the hijackers should have been denied visas as single young men with no visible means of support. But consular officials were uncertain of their authority to deny visas, they said, citing an October report by the General Accounting Office (news - web sites), Congress' auditing arm.

A member of the House panel, Rep. Mike Castle, R-Del., also criticized the State Department in a separate, supplemental report. He said most of the hijackers were wrongly admitted "as a result of decisions made and errors committed by responsible State Department and Justice Department (news - web sites) officers."

Immigration matters will be among the issues examined by a new commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. The panel will be led by former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean.

In their criticism of the inquiry, Kyl and Roberts said they were particularly troubled that its leaders held public hearings despite the objections of some senators.

"The hearings distracted these (intelligence) agencies, our front line troops on the war on terrorism," and "revealed a lot of sensitive information from which our enemies could profit," they said in the report.

Eleanor Hill, the inquiry staff director, denied that sensitive information was released at the hearings, noting that reports and testimonies had been cleared by intelligence agencies.

Of their criticism that rank-and-file members were excluded from important decisions, Hill noted the difficulty of coordinating a complex inquiry examining massive amounts of information – much of it classified – with a panel of 37 lawmakers.

"The members usually realize that investigations aren't run by 15 different people making decisions in different directions," she said in an interview. "You have to have some management of the way the thing is conducted."