Beyond the gay rights issue and Mitt Romney’s memory problems about being a bullying-asshole, the preposterous-incompetence of the war on terror is near blinding.
Hard to fathom, but the frightful state of mind is enormous: Eighteen-month-old Riyanna has been called a lot of things: cute, adorable and now … a suspected terrorist.
The US TSA is one piece of hot-wired shit.
(Illustration found here).
Riyanna’s mother explains:
She was called that (a suspected terrorist) on Tuesday night at the Ft Lauderdale Airport.
She and her parents had just boarded a JetBlue flight when an airline employee approached them and asked them to get off the plane, saying representatives from the Transportation Security Administration wanted to speak to them.
“And I said, ‘For what?'” Riyanna’s mother told only WPBF 25 News on Wednesday.
“And he said, ‘Well, it’s not you or your husband.
Your daughter was flagged as no fly.’
I said, ‘Excuse me?'”
Riyanna’s father was flabbergasted.
“It’s absurd,” he said.
“It made no sense.
Why would an 18-month-old child be on a no-fly list?”
Yes, way-indeed.
The problem lies in the dumb-ass war on terror.
From HuffPost on the TSA being dismantled:
For many TSA critics, this is the only acceptable solution.
The TSA represents a shameful chapter in this nation’s history that must be put behind us, they say.
For them, TSA will be always be associated with paranoid secrecy, crime, institutional arrogance and unnecessarily violent screening methods they’ve described as “gate rape.”
They would end the TSA for the same reason a unified Germany pulled the plug on the Stasi, the feared government security service — because it simply can’t be redeemed.
Naomi Wolf in the UK’s Guardian notes:
Actual terrorism-fighting nations would never devolve such security concerns to private contractors or sell easier travel access for cash — because it is both dangerous and absurd to do so.
In fact, what the FBI and CIA and the Pentagon are up against is that people — including Americans — are waking up to the fact that there would be no enemy if we weren’t manufacturing new terrorists by taking out civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan.
An end to foreign wars (which are already costing us thousands of casualties a year) would be a much more effective counter-terror strategy than this hyped, synthetic threat to justify a corporate surveillance-and-security product gold rush.
Instead, we are treated to a spectacle orchestrated by alarmist officials who keep holding frightening press conferences promoting the threat of dazed, poor, drugged-out “lone wolves”.
The true, Orwellian agenda is to support a vast new crony-capitalist industry that uses terror theater to turn open democracies into surveillance societies.
The parents of diaper-bomber Riyanna way-more than understands:
They believe they were profiled because they are both of Middle Eastern descent.
Riyanna’s mother wears a hijab, a traditional head scarf.
That’s why they have asked to remain anonymous.
They said they’re concerned about repurcussions.
That said, they are both Americans, born and raised in New Jersey, just like their daughter.
Riyanna’s parents said once they were taken off the plane, they were met by TSA agents and made to stand in the terminal for about 30 minutes.
US peoples are scared of everybody — from gay people to babies.