-NEW- Saddam Films Appear

It's the Story That Won't Die (unlike the Dictator)!

Yes, amazingly, the dummies responsible for filming Saddam Hussein's wacky last moments on Earth ("Moqtada Moqtada Moqtada!") are at it again. This time, though, the new cell-phone footage is of Saddam's Corpse! Wheee! As if watching him plunge to his death wasn't gruesome enough, now we get to see his dead body.

Naturally, it's turned up on the internet, because some really great stuff you just can't keep to yourself and your hateful religious sect, right?

So now Saddam's officially a martyr and we get footage of Moqtada's boys playing with his corpse. How soon until video shows up of them shitting in his dead mouth?

Incidentally, I've been asked why I give a shit how Saddam died and my answer is twofold: first, the cell-phone video revealed the sectarian nature of his execution and will inflame tensions in Iraq. Second, all of these films being released prove one thing: the first film released had been edited to present a propaganda view of a sedate, solemn execution, something we now know was complete bullshit. If we can't believe how they killed Saddam, then why should we believe anything else that comes out of the Maliki government?

Black Dahlia's Top Ten Most Outrageous Civil Liberties Violations of 2006

Dahlia Lithwick, one of the best writers out there about about legal matters, has a great article today at Slate.com where she lists her "Bill Of Wrongs" for 2006:

10. Attempt to Get Death Penalty for Zacarias Moussaoui
9. Guantanamo Bay
8. Slagging the Media
7. Slagging the Courts
6. The State-Secrets Doctrine
5. Government Snooping
4. Extraordinary Rendition
3. Abuse of Jose Padilla
2. The Military Commissions Act of 2006
1. Hubris

Good list. Good writing about each point in the list. Go read the article.

US Settles Nuisance Lawsuit By Domestic Terrorist

U.S. Settles Suit Filed by Oregon Lawyer
$2 Million Will Be Paid For Wrongful Arrest After Madrid Attack

The U.S. government agreed yesterday to pay $2 million to settle a lawsuit filed by an Oregon lawyer who was arrested and jailed for two weeks in 2004 after the FBI bungled a fingerprint match and mistakenly linked him to a terrorist attack in Spain.

Under the terms of the settlement filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Portland, the government also issued an unusual apology to Brandon Mayfield for the "suffering" caused by his wrongful arrest and imprisonment. It acknowledged that the ordeal was "deeply upsetting" to Mayfield and his family.

Mayfield will be able to continue pursuing his legal challenge to the constitutionality of the USA Patriot Act anti-terrorism law, which was used to obtain his personal records while he was under investigation.

The payment is a clear embarrassment for the FBI, which arrested Mayfield as a material witness in May 2004. FBI examiners had erroneously linked him to a partial fingerprint on a bag of detonators found after terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid in March, killing 191 people. The bureau compounded its error by stridently resisting the conclusions of the Spanish National Police, which notified the FBI three weeks before Mayfield was arrested that the fingerprint did not belong to him.

Mayfield's lawsuit alleged that his civil rights had been violated and that he was arrested because he is a Muslim convert who had represented some defendants in terrorism-related cases. In a statement Mayfield said that he was threatened with the death penalty while in custody, that he and his family were targeted "because of our Muslim religion," and that he looks forward "to the day when the Patriot Act is declared unconstitutional."

On March 11, 2004, terrorists later linked to al-Qaeda detonated bombs on several commuter trains in Madrid. The FBI assisted Spanish police by comparing latent fingerprints found nearby on a bag of detonators against its massive fingerprint database, which includes prints from former U.S. soldiers. Mayfield served in the U.S. Army. Two FBI examiners and a unit chief eventually narrowed the fingerprint match to Mayfield. Spanish police conducted their own analysis and concluded that the print was not Mayfield's. The FBI disputed that finding, dispatching an examiner to Madrid to press its case. Mayfield was arrested three weeks later amid media leaks about the ongoing investigation.

The FBI, which did not comment on yesterday's settlement, has repeatedly said that there were unusual similarities between Mayfield's fingerprints and the one found on the bag of detonators, which was eventually identified as belonging to an Algerian national named Ouhnane Daoud.

A report released in March by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine found that although Mayfield's religion was not a factor in his initial identification, it contributed to the FBI's reluctance to reexamine its conclusions after challenges from Spanish police.

Fine also found that the FBI used expanded powers under the Patriot Act to demand personal information about Mayfield from banks and other companies, and that the law "amplified the consequences" of the FBI's mistakes by allowing other government agencies to share flawed information.

Once more the Bush Administration's War on Terror has blown up in their face. This time leaving you and I to foot the $2.3 Million bill for their fuckup.

But oh, no, we don't need to do away with the Patriot Act, do we? Government NEVER makes mistakes and never tries to ruin innocent people's lives. Government certainly never abuses its powers to detain alleged terrorism suspects under relaxed standards of probable cause... err, scratch that.

The Patriot Act is an abomination and must be repealed. Any parts of it which are truly necessary for law enforcement's use should be separated out and passed individually. The idea of lumping together all sorts of semi-legal and blatantly illegal bullshit together and then demanding that Congress vote on something called a "Patriot Act" three days after 9/11 is typical of Bush's reign of terror. Only one senator and two Congressmen had the guts to even read the thing in advance and all three of them voted against it... what should THAT have told us?

The Bind Torture Kill President -NEEDS- that power, though... how else is he to perpetuate his divide-and-conquer policy of State Terror enforced through fear?

What Happened and Why (And Don't Be Fooled)

The outcome of this election is as clear as it gets. Unfortunately, the Mainstream Corporate Media is out there spin, spin, spinning this election, spreading myths about what happened. The stickiest spin is that this election is somehow a victory for Conservatism and Conservative Democrats... the reasoning being that if Democrats want to stay in power, they have to be more like Republicans.

Sorry, no, not buying it.

In the interests of clarity, let's examine EXACTLY what this election meant versus what everyone is claiming:

(1) This is a devastating defeat for the Republican Party. Excuses are being made that this is "standard 6th-year losses for the President's party." If that's true, why did Democrats GAIN seats in the House in Clinton's 6th year in office? The truth here is that the President and his party are deeply unpopular and out of touch with America's desires. This win for the Democrats is a historically humiliating defeat for Bush and his supporters and they know it. We should be proud enough to acknowledge it and to force the Corporate Media to stop regurgitating Republican Talking Points.

(2) These election results are a resounding rejection of the core, defining premises of Bush's Republican Party. While the war was definitely on voters' minds, this election was NOT only about Iraq. The Democrats who won did so by opposing the main tenets of Bush's GOP: unchecked Presidential power, One-Party Rule, warmongering, war profiteering, bloated Federal deficits, tax cuts for the rich and the corruption which has fed the GOP elections machine for the last 12 years. Nine corrupt Republican incumbents were kicked out by the voters, and that's with the Corporate Media generally ignoring their crimes. When the Ethics Rules are tightened come January, and the investigations begin in earnest, another 9 will probably follow.


3) This election does NOT show support for "Conservatism" or for a new "Conservative Democratic Party."

When the Republicans took the House in 1994, their success resulted from picking off vulnerable Democrats in the South. By contrast, Democratic candidates won Tuesday in every part of the country and in the reddest of red states like Arkansas, Kansas and Indiana. The Republicans are rapidly collapsing into the Party of the Racist South... but even there, they lost incumbents and support. As we saw in Kansas where 9 major Republicans switched parties and ran as Moderate Democrats, the GOP has catered to the deranged Theologist Religious Right for so long that they've alienated middle of the road voters from their own party.

Most devastating for the Republicans, Democrats got 30% of the White Christian Evangelical vote. The message is sinking in for religious people: Republicans stand for power not for Jesus. There's no Christian message in fucking the poor and extending the life of Teri Schiavo, only hate-mana thrown to a small and deranged band of religious extremists. There's nothing Christ-like about scapegoating Gays while molesting Congressional pages. There's no message from God about shifting money from the poor to the rich through regressive tax cuts.

Furthermore, Democrats of all stripes and ideologies won... from the first honest-to-god Socialist to ever serve in the House to Jim Webb, former Secretary of the Navy for Ronald Reagan.

Yes, some conservative Democrats were elected. Some of them are pro-Life and some are opposed to gay marriage. Big Deal. Harry Reid is both of those things, but he's still a clear progressive whose stances on those issues kept Karl Rove from running distracting sideshows the real issues, like he has for the last 3 elections. The same goes for guys like Casey in Pennsylvania... I'd rather have a pro-life Democrat than a theocrat like Rick Santorum any day of the week.

Best of all, for the first time in 12 years, Democrats didn't win by pretending to be Republicans... they won because they emphatically and unapologetically vowed to oppose what the Republican Party has become and to put an end to its destructive one-party rule. No one voting thought they were getting Republican Lite. Democrats won by aggressively attacking everything Bush stands for, not by trying to be a slightly modified and duller version of it like they did in 2000, 2002 and 2004.


(4) The Blogs Won This Election. Many of the Democrats who won were candidates who were supported most enthusiastically by the most liberal blogs who raised money for only a handful of challengers, many of whom won against Republican incumbents in previously red districts: Sherrod Brown, Ben Cardin, Chris Carney, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Nick Lampson, Tim McNerery, Patrick Murphy, Joe Sestak, Jon Tester, Tim Walz and Jim Webb, among others.

Many of those Democratic winners weren't initially supported by the Democratic Party, either... especially McNerey in his race against Dick "I Hate The Earth" Pombo, who got $300,000 or so from the DNC versus the $1.6 million that the GOP pumped into that race. The Blogs and Environmental Movement made the difference in overcoming a corrupt polluter who spent over $7 Million against an expert in Wind Power.

Not every Blog-support candidate won, but that doesn't mean that liberal blogs weren't effective. Bloggers tended to support underdog Democratic candidates who were challenging Republican incumbents... the seats which are the most difficult to win. Most blog-favored Democrats who lost were ones running in extremely red districts against GOP incumbents -- such as Angie Paccione (against the heinous Marilyn Musgrave) and Victoria Wulslin (against the equally disgusting Jean Schmidt) -- and they came very close to winning.

Given those facts, the idea that this election was some great repudiation of the Progressive Blogger Branch of the Democratic Party is wishful thinking by those who wish it were so. The Democrats who won have one thing in common: aggressive opposition to the monstrosities of the Republican Party.

(5) Karl Rove is not All-Powerful and The American People aren't retarded -- or -- You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time.

For the last six years, Bush and his cronies have run rampant across the political landscape destroying our freedom, limiting our Civil Rights, and fatally wounding the Constitution. They've gotten away with it because they out-strategized their Democratic opponents at every turn.

In 2000, voters bought into Rove's talking points of "Compassionate Conservatism," "Clinton Fatigue," and "No Child Left Behind." Rove pointed Bush squarely at the middle, while simultaneously telling Christian Evangelical Theocracy-lovers that once in office Bush would outlaw abortion, evolution, stem cells and make being gay an executable offense. The mainstream Corporate Media refused to see the truth before their eyes, didn't notice that Bush wasn't sending "dog-whistle" code signals to religious voters (such as constantly quoting from the Bible and obscure right-wing Hymns in his speeches) and pretended that Bush's lies about the failure of his policies in Texas were equivalent to Gore's overstatements about the Social Security Lockbox and him personally inventing the Internet (which he didn't even say).

At the same time, Gore's handlers were telling him to run a Republican-Lite campaign. To aid this, Gore brought on Joe Lieberman, who proceeded to make the election about who loved God more, him or Bush. God, god, god, blah blah social security lockbox, god, god, god, earth-toned suits, God, god. Blechhh. Progressive voters stayed home, Gore won the popular vote and then blinked in Florida when confronted by clear voting fraud. His scrambling attempts to only recount Dem-leaning counties made him appear partisan. When the Supreme Court handed down their illegal and unprecedented ruling, Gore blinked again: Democratic "Leadership" advised Gore to step away gracefully to maintain his future electability, despite later recounts which showed that Gore had clearly won the state of Florida.

Having thus won in 2000, Rove and Tom Delay set about establishing permanent One-Party Rule of America. There was no tax they wouldn't cut, no legislation they wouldn't pass, so long as they got a corporate campaign contribution in return.

In 2001, before 9/11, Bush's popularity was hovering around 39%, the lowest for any President that early in his career. The Republicans were headed towards massive midterm losses. After 9/11, the Republicans used the boogeyman of Osama Bin Laden to scare voters into voting against their own economic and political self-interest. As proof of their weakness, the Democrats were even unwilling to challenge the legitimacy of Rove's terror alert issued in the week before the election. Rove made the 2002 elections a referendum on whether Democrats had the stomach to confront Saddam Hussein. Weak-kneed Democratic "Leadership" like Tom Daschle and Dick Gephardt were unable to adjust to this new scaremongering reality, unable to rationally prove that Saddam was a paper tiger, express a clear alternative vision for the nation, and voted FOR the President's desired war. Thus, by playing Republican-Lite once again, they were swept from office by the Rove Machine.

In 2004, Democratic "Leadership" decided that instead of a popular progressive Governor who was against the war, the party machinery should instead be rallied behind a career political insider Senator who had voted for the war, a lifetime politician with a career full of procedural votes which could easily be twisted to mean anything the Republicans wanted ("he voted NO on giving our troops body armor"), NO charisma, no ability to speak movingly or clearly to the common man, an excessive love for nuanced speech ("I voted for the bill, before I voted against it), an inability to define his own career successes and a complete inability to fight back when aggressively attacked, either with labels (flip-flopper) or even about his own history (Swift-boats Veterans for Truth).

Faced with The Decider or The Equivocator, America voted for Rove's candidate. It helped that he had anti-gay ballot measures on 24 state ballots to drive his religious hate-filled partisans to the voting booth.

This time around, though, new Democratic Leadership rejected the Republican-Lite theory. Howard Dean, Rahm Emmanuel, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid kept a generally straight line as they marched towards Rove with bayonets lowered: The President is out of touch, the Republicans are corrupt, and the war is probably already lost. Faced with a unified opponent unwilling to play Republican-Lite, Rove's vaunted machine failed; today, he is a rejected loser. Karl Rove's ability to hypnotize zombified Americans with distractions like the New Jersey court ruling on gay civil unions, or John Kerry idiotic comments, or moronic buzzphrases has worn thin. No longer will catchy slogans about how Democrats "support terrorists" and their "San Francisco values" work to divide people like before... so long as Democrats don't allow themselves to stand still and allow the Republicans to define them.

Rovism is dead. Americans see Bush's Republican movement for what it is and have begun the process of smashing it.

(6) The Democratic victory is only one small step towards the restoration of our country, the Constitution and the Rule of Law. This President feels that Congress is irrelevant and has shown a propensity for ignoring any law that it passes and for ignoring any and all rebukes shown him by the Supreme Court. Reversing the damage done by six years of One-Party Rule will take time and concerted effort: there is still accountability to be imposed, subpoenas to be issued, crimes to be uncovered, radicalism to be reversed, and tons of damage to be undone... and none of that will be easy. Democrats still face a dysfunctional and corrupt national media, apathy on the part of some Americans, the potent use of propaganda by the Bush administration, voter suppression tactics, gerrymandering and fundraising corruption.

Lastly, let's not ignore the threats that still face us. Just because Karl Rove didn't wheel Osama bin Laden out in the week before this midterm election doesn't mean he's not saving him for 2008. Let's wait and see some serious examinations of the voting machine results in close elections before we admit that Diebold's machines are fine when they clearly are NOT fine. Let's also not forget the mindnumbing panic and fear that 9/11 produced which allowed this cabal of Authoritarian psychotics to gain absolute control of our country for four years. If another attack should happen, we need to be ready to point out that retreat into Despotism is NOT the answer.

Get to work, Democrats. Otherwise you're just part of the problem.

The Minister Has Been Away

The Minister has been away in Miami Beach, Florida. He was invited to speak at The Wolfsonian Museum and the Miami Ad School about the subject of Propaganda and the Propaganda Research Project.

The Miami Ad School students were an amazing audience. They laughed where they were supposed to and asked a lot of questions afterwards. Hell, they even sat still, long after the Minister accidentally went over his time limit. The presentation that night involved the various types of Propaganda, how to see through them, and then some examples of the Minister's own Propaganda. The Minister kicked himself later for not speaking about fonts, the care he uses to replicate old 40's fonts, and the difficulty involved with picking a replacement font when the original is not available (or was hand-drawn). The Minister will make up for that next time.

The Wolfsonian audience was kept low due to a ferocious rainstorm which raged for two hours prior to the event. Still, for the 20 or so who turned out, a good time was had by all. The presentation on that night focused on the Bush Administration's attempts to propagandize the American citizenry through the use of subliminal signage and religious imagery in official press photographs, followed by a historical examination of the President's term in office as told through the Minister's propaganda pieces.

The Minister's favorite attendee at the Wolfsonian was the beefy white man, mid-40's with a crew-cut blocked three inches above the collar of his tweed coat, who was sitting in the audience taking notes on a clipboard. Afterwards the Minister ran into the man in the hallway and thanked him for coming to the event:

The Minister of Propaganda: "Hi, thanks for coming out. Oh, hey, I saw you taking notes... You're not with Homeland Security, are you?"

Sinister Man In Tweed: "See you in Gitmo, Kid!"

The Minister of Propaganda: "Ha ha... huh?"

For the rest of the evening, the Minister signed all books like this: "Dear __________, You're a traitor for owning this book. See you in Gitmo, Kid!"

The Minister has no idea if the crew-cut was indeed a military snitch, but the stories in the paper the next day where the ACLU once again proved that the Pentagon is spying on non-violent anti-war protestors like it was 1972 all over again didn't ease the mind.

Oh, and the Minister's bags were searched both when flying to Miami and flying home to Los Angeles. Probably because of the high incidence of published authors/anti-war activists who have joined Al Qaeda and blown up airplanes, right? Polite notecards were even left in the Minister's bags by the TSA, informing him of the search. That wasn't necessary though: the Minister always knows when his bags have been searched because they're the first ones off of the baggage carousel. Why, it's so convenient that it's almost worth surrendering your civil liberties for!

This marks the 19th and 20th consecutive times that the Minister's bags have been searched. Simple probability math results in a box set showing that the odds of this happening at random are approximately 1 in a few billion.

Lest you sneer and delcare that the Minister is suffering from delusions of grandeur, reflect for a moment on the fact that the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) in New York City wrote the text for the Minister's first book of posters. Then reflect on the fact that Barbara Olshansky, assistant legal director of the CCR in New York, reports that she has been stopped and searched every time she has flown since 9/11. On several of those occasions, she was forced to pull down her pants in view of other travelers. On one flight in 2002, six members of the CCR's staff, including Olshansky, were stopped and subjected to intense scrutiny, even though they had purchased their tickets independently and had not checked in as a group. On that occasion, Olshansky got angry and demanded to know why she had been singled out. The airline agent at the gate threatened to bar her from the plane if she raised a fuss and added brusquely, “The computer spit you out. I don’t know why, and I don’t have time to talk to you about it.”

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA), part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is authorized by law to maintain watch lists of names of individuals suspected of posing "a risk of air piracy or terrorism or a threat to airline or passenger safety." While initially denying to the media that such a list existed, the TSA finally acknowledged the No-Fly List's existence in October 2002. In December of 2002, the Electronic Privacy and Information Center (EPIC) sued the TSA and DHS to force them to reveal details of the No-Fly List and any evidence of the suspected "Hassle When Flying" List.

The documents obtained by EPIC establish that the TSA administers two lists: a "No Fly" list and a "Selectee" list, which requires the passenger to go through additional security measures. The names are provided to air carriers through any number of local and federal police agencies and are stored in their computer systems so that an individual with a name that matches the list can be flagged when getting a boarding pass. A TSA "No Fly List" name match requires the agent to call a law enforcement officer to detain and question the passenger. In the case of a Selectee, an "S" or special mark is printed on their boarding pass and the person receives additional screening at security. The TSA has withheld the number of names on each of the lists. The TSA has also withheld information about any existing approval process for putting citizens on the lists. Nor will the TSA reveal who (if anyone) verifies that the names are selected appropriately and whether the information is accurate. Nor does the TSA have a centralized standardized way to challenge or remove your name from either list.

In other words, even if the Minister has been put on the Selectee List, there's no way to verify that he has been, no way to discover why, no way to challenge said placement, and no way to get the Minister's name removed from the list.

While the Minister fully supports catching air-travelling "Terrorist Suiciders" he doesn't support the Bush Administration using a non-partisan government agency to target Americans based on their political beliefs.

Airport Security in this country has gotten painful in America since 9/11. Our Government's immediate response was to blame failed airport security for the failures of the CIA and FBI and Customs & Immigration services in allowing known terrorists into the country, to live here for years while planning and training for their attacks, and for not stopping them before they slammed two jetliners into the World Trade Center, a third into the Pentagon and a fourth into a field a few hundred miles short of the Capitol Dome or the White House.

This over-reaction to perceived (but not real) failures and the corresponding bulking up of Airport Security is stupid, futile and, in the long run, utterly pointless.

On September 11th, 2001, airport security did exactly the job that it was meant to do that day: it x-rayed the terrorists' carry-on baggage and ran them through a metal detector. The box cutters and Leatherman tools that the hijackers used on 9/11 were detected... and ignored because they were all perfectly legal to carry onboard of airplanes. If they hadn't been, they would have been confiscated.

Even that wouldn't have stopped the 9/11 hijackers, however. Ban whatever you like, it doesn't take the world's smartest criminal to smuggle a dangerous item onto plane. There's an entire class of people who spend all day concocting nefarious, and ultimately undetectable, instruments of destruction... prison inmates. As any Corrections Officer can tell you, prisoners are ruthlessly inventive when it comes to improvising weaponry with which to cause their fellow prisoners harm. Hell, G-10 laminate is an ultra-hard, metal-free material used in circuit boards, and can be carved into a wicked razor-sharp credit card knife that would pass any x-ray screening or metal detector. We can't keep weapons out of maximum security prisons... so how can we hope to keep them out of airports? Let's just stipulate that the hijackers would have boarded the planes on 9/11 despite whatever kind of weapons they had on them at the time.

So what's that mean? Quite simply, it says that metal detectors and X-Ray machines are the last line of defense designed to prevent a criminal from getting onboard a commercial airliner with an obvious weapons such as a handgun or a knife. They are not, and we should not expect them to be, front-line anti-terror tools. Stopping terrorists is a police and intelligence matter. Terrorism needs to be stopped at the planning stages. That's where increased security spending could do the most good. By the time the terrorist gets to the airport, it's too late... the primary line of defense has already failed and no amount of bullshit airport security will stop them at that point. If they've avoided detection, then these theoretical terrorists are easily clever enough to sneak weapons onboard the planes.

Despite whatever paranoid bullshit terror plots the Administration might bring up to scare Americans into surrendering civil liberties and expanding airport security measures, there remains one highly exceptional anti-terrorist protection scheme: the onboard passengers.

On September 11th, 2001, the era of the Al-Qaeda Passenger Airplane Bomb was both born... and strangled in its cradle. Prior to 9/11, terrorist hijackings typically ended with extended hostage negotiation situations and special-forces-shootouts on airport tarmacs. When those planes were hijacked, the passengers in them could only imagine that their flights would end the same way. But when the first three planes hit the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon, word went out to every plane in the air, including United Flight 93. There were no armed pilots or Air Marshals on United 93... instead, average American citizens discovered that they were NOT going to be landing in Cuba and traded for PLO "prisoners of war" but instead that they were going to be slammed into a government building. So they charged their attackers and forced them to prematurely crash the plane.

Today, there will be no "maybe this will all work itself out" phase for airline passengers. Today, EVERY passenger knows what will happen if terrorists get control of the plane: either they'll die when they're slammed into a building or they'll die when Dick Cheney orders them shot out of the air. NO ONE will EVER allow their plane to get taken over by Terrorists ever again. People will stand up, push one arm through the strap of the flotation devices that they're sitting on, and charge whatever stupid Al Queada Suicider was dumb enough to announce his intention to hijack the plane. Then that stupid terrorist will be kicked and stomped to death by the panicked passengers. United 93 wasn't the first time passengers had risen up against people trying to take over the plane, but it was certainly the LAST time that any passengers anywhere will allow a small group of terrorists to hijack their plane. Knives or no knives, guns or no guns, bombs or no bombs, shoebombs or no shoebombs, liquid explosive bombs or no liquid explosive bombs, no terrorist will ever again be able to take control of an airplane once it is in flight.

Osama (or whoever) has to know this. It's why Al Qaeda hasn't tried the same tactic again. It's too bad that the TSA insists on always protecting us against YESTERDAY'S threat.

Yes, Al Qaeda has tried other things, such as the stupid Richard Reid shoe bomb plot attempt which utterly failed... and yet accomplished Al Qaeda's primary goal of spreading fear and panic... because now the TSA (reacting to yesterday's threat) makes us take off our shoes at the security booth and stand around waiting for our shoes to come out of the x-ray machine. Reid's lame shoebomb attempt was foiled not by an x-ray machine, but by a flight attendant and some passengers who punched his lights out (thus proving my above theory).

Yet again, though, we see the average passenger being punished for the actions of one lone nutcase who was easily stopped. Enough with the x-raying of shoes... it's inconvenient for passengers, the Department of Homeland Security said that x-raying shoes doesn't detect bombs,and even if some idiot winds up on the plane with a shoe-bomb, he's going to get kicked and stomped to death. Give us some credit for a sense of self-preservation, would ya?

Incidentally, all airport security is rendered moot by the simple fact that for $50, any Al Qaeda Terrorist can put a package onto any airliner he wants simply by sending it "air freight." To this day, a full five fucking years after 9/11/2001, Air Freight packages are NOT x-rayed, nor does the Al Qaeda shippen even have to get on board with his bomb!

Only a moron would allow potentially bomb-filled packages to be shipped on civilian airliners while simultaneously making fliers take off their shoes, not carry liquids, or like in Britain, check their laptops and ipods. The simple fact that air freight isn't x-rayed means that ALL airport security is merely a Kabuki Dance designed to make the sheep feel safe-ish, all while reinforcing the need for an all-powerful police state.

See ya in Gitmo, kids!