Liberty, Security, Fraternity -— or the Lack Thereof

One year after America was hit with the deadliest attack ever on its own soil, airports were open, even if many New York-area flights were cancelled, and most that took off were 70 percent empty; schools were open, even if many parents kept their kids home; and some businesses were closed altogether.

One year after America was hit with the deadliest attack ever on its own soil, let us take stock. How free, safe, and unified is America at war?

The story of liberty in America is the story of its absence. That story has a name: Steven Hatfill. Hatfill has been the first American to endure a new type of abuse of law enforcement power, as a "person of interest." The status of "person of interest," as opposed to "suspect," violates all manner of legal safeguards, including the presumption of innocence and due process. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III have used the sham of declaring Hatfill a "person of interest," to convict a man on whom they have not one iota of incriminating evidence, in the court of public opinion.

From the standpoint of the Republic, I'm not sure what is worse: What the feds have done to Steven Hatfill, or the silence of the sheeple.

Day to day, the most identifiable faces of the loss of liberty are those of the elderly white ladies harassed by incompetent, racist airport screeners; the octogenarian former war hero and governor who is ordered to surrender his Medal of Honor or forego flying by a screener who doesn't even know what the Medal of Honor is (the gent refused, and flied anyway); the young women who are sexually fondled by out-of-control screeners; and the mother who is forced to drink from — and thus contaminate — the breast milk she'd pumped and bottled for her newborn baby, thus robbing the baby of nourishment, as twentyish and thirtyish, single, Middle Eastern men pass through security unmolested.

Even before racist transportation Secretary Norman Mineta set the screeners loose, they were so notorious for their racism, that several years ago, a Saturday Night Live sketch had two black female screeners at New York's Kennedy Airport abusing and holding up a white male passenger, while outrageously suspicious-acting black travelers passed through without the screeners even looking at them.

On campus, white male college professors and students have been harassed by Moslem students — foreign enemies and citizen-seditionists alike. No Moslem students have been disciplined, even when some were caught lying, in charging a white American professor with having shown them intolerance in the classroom. The school's socialist administrators exploited the students' false charges to "get" the politically conservative professor.

Meanwhile, the academic Fifth Column complains of non-existent attacks on its First Amendment rights.

When not harassing innocent-looking white folks and ignoring youngish, single, Middle Eastern men, our federalized, racist, immigrant high school dropouts — aka airport screeners — nod off on the job, or fail to notice all manner of forbidden weapons. On Labor Day weekend, reporters from the New York Daily News scored a perfect record at smuggling an assortment of illegal weapons — including box cutters, razor knives and pepper spray — past screeners at eleven airports, and on six major carriers around the country: Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Las Vegas, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Washington, D.C., Newark, New York, Boston and Portland, Maine. The reporters did not use secret compartments to hide the weapons.

The embodiment of the lack of security is Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta. Usually, even reasonably well-informed Americans can't name the secretary of transportation; and if they can, it's usually bad news. Norman Mineta is a nightmare. This racist, affirmative action hustler still seeks revenge against white people, whose nail clippers he confiscates, because sixty years ago a white official confiscated his baseball bat. Mineta has set his band of incompetent, foreign, high school dropouts — aka air security screeners — loose to harass the least suspicious-looking white travelers, while ignoring suspicious-looking Middle Easterners. That is, when the now federalized screeners aren't nodding off on the job, or looking on blankly, as passengers carry on all manner of illegal weapons.

Although the Aviation Security Law that federalized airport screeners last year was initially supposed to require that all screeners have high school degrees, most of the active screeners were dunces, and since the point of the law was to make inept foreigners permanent, overpaid federal employees, rather than improve airport security, Congress watered down the law's ultimate language, so that an applicant who lacked a high school diploma could substitute one year of experience as a screener. Consultant Isaac Yeffet, the former chief of security at Israeli airline El Al, the world leader for security, ridiculed the dodge, "Sure you have experience — the experience of failure!" Yeffet noted that people who lack a certain level of intelligence cannot be properly trained for the job, and that a high school diploma is an absolute requirement for the job. (I suspect Yeffet would like to see a good deal more than a high school diploma). Last November, in congressional testimony, Yeffet observed, "X-ray machines can help in assisting the security people, but can never replace the qualified and well trained personnel that can determine who is innocent, and who is not, by the interview process. Human beings invent security machines, thus humans can invent new ways to overcome these devices by outsmarting them."

As if to emphasize his hostility to flight security, Mineta adamantly opposed arming airline pilots (Congress ignored him). To Norman Mineta, 911 was nothing but an opportunity to indulge his racism.

Not to be outdone, on the anniversary, NBC's Tom Brokaw sought shamelessly to demagogue against the Bush Administration, saying it had refused to free up money for the federalization of airport screeners. However, Brokaw sought to put words into the mouth of the wrong 911 widow. The woman, named Sweeney, had lost her soldier husband, a Desert Storm veteran, on one of the 911 flights. Mrs. Sweeney contradicted Brokaw, "It's a joke. All they were doing was slapping a federal tag on the people they already had."

The Justice Department, particularly the FBI, has fatally bungled the anthrax (or as they call it, "Amerithrax") case, and rather than a law enforcement agency, has become an instrument of homegrown terror. A year ago, libertarian journalist Vin Suprynowicz called for abolishing the FBI and razing its headquarters, a call just repeated by conservative writer Paul Craig Roberts. A few years ago, I would have written off both men as crazy; now, I take them seriously.

One night after the attacks, I went shopping at the local Waldbaum's supermarket, where — even though the neighborhood is predominantly white — the night shift is white-free. As I walk up an aisle, a black, apparently Jamaican worker I've never seen before, suddenly appears, staring right at me, pushing a cart of canned goods at me. With a second cart blocking the lane to my right, I can either slam into him, or back up. I back up. I get the slightest revenge by making him wait on me, and ask me to move, when he gets to my section.

Later, I am chatting with another West Indian worker, let's call him "Stanley," whom I've known for a couple of years. Stanley complains that man can barely use a firearm to protect his own property. Although he works at Waldbaum's at a low-level job, Stanley, who has four children split between two women here and his nation of birth, has long played the real estate market. He owns a few two-family houses. He rents one floor of his own home, and both floors of the others. Stanley is politically conservative, and yet ...

"Giuliani said he's sick of being mayor," Stanley informs me. The man is disgusted with it, hates it, wants to be rid of the job, etc. I ask Stanley where he read this news: "in the newspaper." Which newspaper? Did he really read an article saying this, or was it perhaps a headline or a caption? He grants that he didn't read an article; maybe it was a headline.

(Note that Stanley's views are typical of many West Indian men. As a strongly conservative, former police officer from Kingston, Jamaica I used to be friendly with explained his choice to vote for black socialist David Dinkins over white liberal Republican Rudy Giuliani in 1993: "It's all about black and white, and white and black.")

The "news" about Giuliani makes "Mary," the fiftyish, black, veteran American cashier smile. Mary, who is from the Far Rockaway area, has six grown daughters.

Stanley asks me if I voted for Bush for president. Why not? I should have voted for Gore, maybe?

Suddenly, the black guy who backed me up in the aisle appears, shouting at Stanley from thirty feet away: "Why you even talking to him?! What is he?! Why you even talking to him?!"

I respond, pointing to the skin on my arm: "What am I?! You tell me?!" He responds to my challenge by slightly changing gears: "He a Bush," he says, in transparent code.

To listen to the black workers' small talk, you'd never know we'd been attacked the previous day. The only war they were aware of, as they slaved away for a white-owned firm that won't hire white men for the night shift, was the race war.

In December, Adam's Mark, a St. Louis-based, national chain of 24 hotels, bent over for the NAACP, and agreed to meet $5 million in extortion demands.

In September, 2001, Adam's Mark spokeswoman, Sharon Harvey Davis, had assured me that, "We are saying, that we are going to aggressively defend the lawsuit," but her boss, Adam's Mark-founder Fred Bossert, caved in. The chain agreed to pay $1,000,000 to be split among the five black plaintiffs — Dante Gilliam, Jamie Morrison, Latoya Straughn, Napoleon Berrian and Mark Simmonds — who initially sued it; $600,000 to four racially segregated, black Florida colleges; $400,000 to be split among 400 black guests; and to forfeit payment on $3 million dollars in contracts that were broken by groups and individuals that had cheated the hotel, in support of the NAACP shakedown.

In June, New York Times reported on post-911 racial comity — black New Yorkers feel less oppressed by white folks than usual. I kid you not.

More recently, black "farmers," whose only cash crops are shakedowns, complained that they didn't get enough extortion money from the USDA via Bill Clinton for their 1999 reparations scam, and must be paid more, more, more, if they are to plant, plant, plant. ABC News blessed the 1999 shakedown as a "milestone civil rights lawsuit." Last year, Reed Irvine exposed the scam, showing that there were more litigants than there were black farmers in the entire US of A, that it had never been proved that the black farmers were discriminated against, and that the USDA criteria kept becoming more expansive, generous, and uncritical.

In fairness to black racists, solidarity wasn't all that strong among white folks, either.

During last Christmas season, a white veteran was selling Christmas trees in the shopping district of my neighborhood. The optician across the street — also white — enlisted a fireman customer of hers from the firehouse a block away, to harass the man. She lied to the irate veteran, claiming that the fireman had acted on his own, but acknowledged to him that she didn't like the aesthetics of a man selling Christmas trees on the street. "I live in this area, and it looks terrible," even if the man did have a license to sell the trees on the street. After the man left the store, the optician admitted that it was she who had sicced the fireman on the hard-working veteran. Since the optician didn't say otherwise, I'm guessing that there were no veterans in her immediate family.

Finally, on the anniversary of 9/11, we were treated to an orgy of greed, as an apparently all-white group of survivors of 9/11 victims, not content to accept the first-ever government payout to victims of a military attack, wanted at least one million-to 1.5 million dollars per victim ... from the feds alone, plus an unlimited right to sue everyone in sight (the federal law providing the payout frees the other parties from liability), from the businesses and authorities who built the World Trade Center ("those deathtraps!," according to Sally Regenhardt, whose son, a fireman died in the Twin Towers), to the airlines whose flights the terrorists hijacked. The leader of the pack, Charles Wolf, emphasized that its members were suburban Republicans: "Most of those victims didn't live in New York City; they lived in the suburbs. And guess which way they vote?"

So, there you have it: Liberty, security, fraternity — or the lack thereof — in these United States.

To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .

the first-ever government payout to victims of a military attack,

So if you suffer a tragedy, your fellow taxpayers owe you something? Good grief!

Good artical! Did bush just let the federal airport screeners bill go through without a veto? Has bush ever threatend to use a veto? If so on what?

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