A month ago, the American Patriot who goes by the nom-de-plume Winston Smith emigrated from the United States. He did not do so because he was escaping the Nazification of the United States by Bush and his jackbooted thugs, although some say they have done so for this very reason. His reasons were personal and had to do with family (he is married to a foreign national and has resumed residence in her country for the time being).

On his way out of the country, at San Francisco International, he was flagged for some sort of “secondary” security check by the initial TSA inspector who checks boarding passes. Undoubtedly his boarding pass had been marked in some way indicating Smith should be subjected to some sort of special security analysis. Among the dozens of people who passed through the line as Winston Smith did, he could see where neither those who passed before him or the many who passed from behind him were subjected to a “secondary” check. Smith says the word “secondary” was uttered by one of the TSA staff to another. Smith was positive that the use of the word “secondary” was in reference to him He saw one other person go through what was apparently a “primary” security check.

A secondary security check involves putting the ticketed passenger in an area where he can be seen by all the people having cleared the basic screening area (namely all passengers). The passenger is then told to remove his belt, has his crotch patted down while the metal detectors make more than the usual number of sweeps, all in full view of the screened passengers proceeding to their gates. He has his carry-on emptied and individual items, including his wallet full of money, re-screened through the metal detector, out of his view. The process took at least 10 minutes and probably much longer, although Smith did not think to time the actual process, so perturbed was he by the insinuation achieved by the process that he represented some major security threat.

Smith did not think to ask any member of the TSA if something on his boarding pass triggered this level of security check—and it was probably a good thing he did not ask, for had he done so, he'd probably be making the acquaintance of some federal government-sanctioned professional interrogator/torturer telling him that the nightstick being jammed in his asshole to his considerable pain was now okay under the new security arrangements to hold unsuspecting American citizens incognito and deny them any Constitutional right whatsoever as a class of “noncombatant enemy” of the state. (Heil Bush!)

Smith doesn't fly too much. In the three years since he returned to the United States (in mid-2001, before Bush was exposed as an asshole that does not take America's national security seriously—I refer you to the report of the Commission on 11 September for evidence), he has flown domestically from Sacramento to Orange County on business, and the one-way out of the U.S. through San Francisco. Both times Smith was pulled out of line for a thorough security check, and he could not figure out how the system worked.

One other thing you need to know about Smith before you say “so what!?”

Smith regularly posts very virulent anti-George W. Bush messages to political newsgroups. He has called for Bush's defeat this November and has said that Bush's coming to power in 2000 was an unparalleled travesty. He has said that Bush is certainly one of the worst three of the 43 presidents who have ever headed the nation, and has said he will almost certainly be judged the worst. Winston Smith has declared that Bush should be brought before an international tribunal and tried on charges of crimes against the peace, the same crimes for which Hitler would have been tried (the members of his regime who survived the war's end were convicted of these, at the time, novel charges) and for which Bush wants to see Saddam Hussein tried. Smith has said that he would be willing to be part of the posse that arrests Bush and brings him before the tribunal.

Certainly the computers at the NSA, FBI, and Secret Service that scan the dross of the Internet newsgroups have flagged Smith as a personality who seriously, persistently, and consistently is someone politically opposed to Bush in the most expressive way possible. It was probably child's play for them to determine Smith's real identity—new “security” laws make it possible for a federal law enforcement agency to demand, without a court's supervision (warrant), that an Internet service provider to open the logs that reveal that identity of who logged in under what IP host at what time (the ISP would also be given a warning that if anyone were informed by the ISP that the logs possibly containing their names were checked under a demand, that the ISP would be arrested under these “national security” laws). All public records of Smith under his real identity were pooled into a central coordination center, part of whose inner workings is probably to see that whenever Smith claims his boarding pass on an airplane, he is given the third degree by the TSA.

This entire process can function to serve the purposes of providing the kind of political intimidation someone like George W. Bush would like to see. Sure, this form of political intimidation might seem petty at first. After all, Smith was not actually kept from boarding his flights, nor did his asshole feel the entire brunt and length of a nightstick.

But intimidation of this sort proceeds in phases. Bush has November to worry about, and even though he can keep the fact that he is using federal agencies criminally to serve his own political ends by saying that any revelation of his shenanigans that could be obtained under the Freedom of Information Act must be overruled in the interests of national security, Bush realizes that political intimidation of the heavy-handed kind might make it rather obvious.

Right now Bush is sitting pretty. Any request by Smith under FOIA would have to be immediately turned down because it would be a request to see how the TSA determines who it gives the third degree, and making public that information would supposedly serve the purposes of terrorists.

And also of other enemies of the state, like Winston Smith.

Yes, because Bush has equated himself with the state, any enemy of Bush is an enemy of the state. For Smith to reveal that Bush is using the security apparatus of the state to perpetrate political intimidation, Smith must determine how he came to be a constant target of an inordinate security check.

Of course, Bush and his thuggish supporters will tell you that in the case of Smith and the terrorist, the national and airplane security system is functioning as it should. An enemy of Bush, political or otherwise, is an enemy of the state. Bush's supporters are even upset that someone like Smith was even allowed to board his flight. If there was knowledge that Smith had called for Bush's arrest and trial before an international tribunal, why was he allowed even to walk free much less board his flight? The Brown Shirts that support Bush call such statements “sedition” and “treason”! Such are the kind of brutes who claim to support a free nation and who back a megalomaniac the likes of Bush.

Of course, Smith is not without reason for believing that Bush criminally uses the federal security apparatus to effect political intimidation and harassment on a minor or major level. There have been documented cases of Bush using the national flight security system to intimidate his political enemies. A couple of San Francisco activists were placed on a “no-fly” list which excludes or prevent certain people from ever boarding a commercial flight. The no-fly list is unconstitutional by its very nature. It prevents the free, unfettered travel by flight of a person who has never been convicted of a crime or denied any rights in a court of law. This is the kind of thing for which the United States criticized the now-gone Soviet Union. And speaking of the Soviet Union, who used psychiatrists to declare as mentally ill those enemies of the state (after all, what person in his right mind could oppose the truth and virtues of Communism? according to the Soviet state), George W. Bush and his thugs are using psychiatrists to declare as mentally ill persons who oppose or expose him as a criminal: by using mental illness as a cover, such persons can be held incognito and under arrest indefinitely and without trial, and those declared psychotic (but which are not) can be administered “medications” against their will to make them docile. That prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq have died while in the custody of some agency of the United States government makes what Bush can do in United States territory itself small potatoes by comparison.

This is the most corrupt administration since, well, the Reagan-Bush administration, in which George W. Bush's daddy, George Herbert Walker Bush, issued midnight pardons before Clinton took office, pardons for crimes for which they had not even been indicted, but which he was sure they would be indicted, with an investigation that would have exposed the full extent of 12 years of misrule by Ronald Reagan and the guy who called his idea of tax breaks for the rich as “voodoo economics.”

In November if Bush gets a second term, legitimately or otherwise, the nation can look forward to an instant military draft (a two-, maybe three-year enlistment will be required), the first use of a national sales tax which always hits the poor and never the rich, and a host of other criminal activities designed to eliminate civil liberties, especially the kinds of liberties used by citizens to determine if their government is corrupt.

Mavi Gözler
American Patriot

23 August 2004

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