America’s security is in the news today, particularly with the verdict just in from the first trial of a Guantanamo Bay detainee in a civilian court. Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani was charged by the Justice Department of conspiring to kill Americans in bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.
After seven days of deliberations, a jury found Ghailani guilty of just one count of conspiracy, acquitting him of multiple other counts including murder and conspiracy to murder, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Perhaps the government has a few blockbuster detainees up its sleeve and just wanted to see how this whole civilian trial thing is going to work out before showing the world how torture and invasions of privacy are indispensable to protecting American assets and “the American way of life” in a post-9/11 world. But it says here we won’t be seeing too many blockbuster verdicts out of Guantanamo detainee trials any time soon.
Meanwhile, average everyday American travelers continue to be subjected to unrestrained invasions of privacy as a condition of flying what used to be hailed by one american airline as “The Friendly Skies.”
They are totally making fun of us in Taiwan right now and a video shot recently by a guy named John Tyner — who is, in my estimation a true American hero — shows just how absurd and inept and bloated the entire TSA monstrosity has become.
Asked at a recent Senate hearing into TSA security policies that subject air passengers to what would amount to, in Tyner’s words, “sexual assault if you weren’t the government” — and have drawn uncounted complaints made to members of congress as a result — TSA head John Pistole said, “Am I going to change the policies? No.”
We’ll see how Pistole feels after November 24, I guess. That date has been selected by an organization called Fly With Dignity as National Opt-Out Day.
FWD is urging ordinary citizens to stand up for their rights, stand up for liberty, and protest the federal government’s policy of virtually stripping us naked or requiring us to submit to an “enhanced pat down” that touches people’s breasts and genitals in an aggressive manner as a precondition for being allowed to board an airplane.
I think I would urge people to do as Tyner did, however, to not only opt-out of the full body scan by the TSA’s AIT (Advanced Imaging Technology) machines but also to their absurd “enhanced pat-down” procedure and throw the entire air transportation industry into a tizzy for a day.
But that’s too much to ask, I guess. People have to get where they are going and I should probably just shut up because it’s not like any of those AIT images is ever going to be made public. And the TSA is catching serious criminals like Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who are bent on blowing us up and hating on us because of our freedoms.
Right?
