and all the country an airport by Matt Giwer, © 2002 [August]
Yesterday the airports. Today the country. Tomorrow the world. -- The Iron Webmaster
At one time very few people knew where the government was headed when it came to smoking on airplanes. If they spoke what they knew would happen they were laughed at. They were the only people not surprised when being relegated to the back of the plane concluded in a world wide ban on smoking on commercial airline flights. The US is planning to recruit twelve million people, 1 per 24 people, to act as spies on the rest of us. Given the most likely reaction of the rest of the population the one thing we cannot do is fault them for their courage. And perhaps they will have patriotic motives. If their are publically identified as spies there lives won't be worth the time of day. Lets look at some facts. The enforcements agents in the drug war have a secret profile of what to look for in a drug courier. That profile is secret for a good reason. If it were public drug smugglers would avoid doing anything on the profile. There will be a secret profile on what to look for when watching for terrorists. There will be a profile as the TIPSters are not born with the knowledge of what to look for, or what a terrorist is like or what does a terrorist do? It certainly cannot be left to everyone to make up their own criteria. A copy of the Koran and prayer rugs? Farakhan's Nation of Islam claims several million members and they have both. Do they look like they are of Middle East origin? Do you mean like Marlo Thomas whose father, Danny Thomas, was Lebanese? Technically all Israelis are a Middle East origin and some fourty percent are not European immigrants. And certainly what to report cannot be limited to seeing explosives around the house or flight manuals on the cocktail table. So the government must create some profile. As there will be so many secret spies it will not be able to hand out copies as it would quickly become public. But it will be given to the supervisors who will use it for briefing his agents. Supervisors are the first step in a bureaucracy. They may be called handlers but certainly so many millions cannot simply report to one person. There has to be some filtering up the chain. And someone hase to be held accountable for the inevitable mistakes and abuse of spying authority as well as to be rewarded for successes. There will certainly be abuses such as the drug sting entrapment operation carried out against John Delorean. Of course Delorean had the money to fight it and win. You and I do not. The creation of such a profile will follow the law and experience. The law will develop in the same manner as previous terrorist laws developed. For example there were laws covering theft and kidnapping long before the first airliner was hijacked. Since Lindberg, moving a kidnapped person across a state line has carried the federal death penalty. In hijacking a plane it is difficult not to move the kidnapped passengers across state lines. Yet special laws against hijacking were passed even though the death penalty is warranted many times over for each passenger and crew member. Those laws quickly made crimes of many other things. Joke about hijacking in an airport and go to jail. Joke about a bomb in an airport and go to jail. It will become a crime to make jokes about terrorism any place in the US. And there will be millions of ears listening for such jokes. How many laws? Those governing the operation of a petting zoo run to 135 pages. Twelve million is too many people to apply even the most elementary psychological screening for suitability to the job. And it is illegal to apply IQ tests. And like all government organizations, incompetants and illiterates must be qualified to satisfy quotas. The real problem is we have no established criteria to determine who is suitable to be a domestic spy. Unfortunately we know where to get the criteria. The closest applicable screening criteria are available from the records of organizations such as the Gestapo, Stasi, Cheka and other secret police. The US set up the secret police in Iran for the Shah so the talent is already in the US. Those organizations worked by having a small group rely upon the 'tips' of the average citizen. They didn't have the time or manpower to do much more than count up the 'tips' against each person. When there were enough or something unpleasant the person was arrested and interrogated. Interrogation rarely failed to result in the person being sent to a camp. The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, has called for camps to be created. He is behind this secret police program. What more is there to say? No one can define terrorism. Rather it is like pornography, people know it when they see it. Of course everyone sees something different so there will be no consistance in who will be imprisoned. An offense in one part of the country will be ignored in another part. The current policy is, anyone determined by the Attorney General of the United States to be involved in terrorist activity is designated an enemy combtant and locked away on the AG's personal authority. In the few cases where people have been released they have reported solitary confinement except when being threatened or beaten by interogators. There is no need to exaggerate or guess what will occur in the camps as they have already been used to extract confessions. The job performance of the spies, those working for the Attorney General determining who is locked away, and the interogators will all be judged by their positive results. That is, by how many people the spies report, how many the Attorney General's staff locks away and how many confessions are produced. Confessing to something is not as difficult as it might seem. John Walker Lindh confessed to carrying a rifle and two grenades while in the Taliban miliia. Many Americans have done that in the employ of other governments without being charged with a crime and in some case lauded as heros. It is not clear how it became a crime in Lindh's case other than by selective application of the law. But this is a guide for the future. There are so many laws everyone is in violation of many of them if viewed through the right lens and darkly. This has been going on for years in enforcing drug laws even with lawyers and the courts overseeing the entire operation. There is no involvement or participation of attorneys or judges in this war against terrorism. The President has been thumbing his nose at the courts since this started. That in itself means the US has been a dictatorship since September 2001. In the beginning the spies will be unpaid meaning there will be no motivation to do anything. So there will be a medal or a small cash bonus for successes. A success will be the number of people reported which lead to an arrest. The bonuses for both the AG staff and the interogators will be based on the number of confessions. Soon there will be a need for a full blown organizational structure as there are so many millions reporting to so few. The first competition will be for the supervisory positions and performance is the natural criteria for selection. The supervisory positions will become paid positions and there will become a hierarchy of supervisors. These changes will take a few years but it is inevitable as it is the way of human nature. For example with mail handlers becoming spies the supervisory personnel are the natural supervisory spies. If I get my neighbor's mail in my mailbox does information about him wind up in my file? Another certainty is that once started it will have the eternal life of all other bureaucracies. This new organization will be around to harrass our great-grandchildren. As a bureaucracy it is also certain it will be given new things to do which are only vaguely related to terrorism if at all. For example by giving spies the IRS records of a family income it can report on family's having a higher standard of living and who are therefore likely tax evaders. We are clearly headed for a secret police organization operating against citizens and for the laws which apply in airports to be applied to the entire country. Already the Attorney General has said questioning him is playing into the hands of the terrorists. Even J. Edgar Hoover never went that far.
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