The three [year-end 2010] plots had two things in common: They were launched by lone-wolf attackers, and the FBI was in the middle of them. Experts say to expect more undercover cases in 2011, because the agency has clearly decided that the best way to battle the growing threat of homegrown terrorism in this country is to confront the suspects directly.
“I believe that we have something in this country that you don’t see characterized in TV shows,” says Philip Mudd, a former counterterrorism official with both the CIA and the FBI, who is now a research fellow at the New America Foundation.
“It is not cells or clusters of individuals that are like-minded … it is clusters of kids who are talking about extremism,” he says. “I think this exists across the country. Kids are talking about what they don’t like in Palestine or Iraq or Afghanistan, and within those clusters occasionally you’re going to have a couple who say, ‘All my friends, all our friends are talking, why don’t we do something about it?’ ”
As long as we have a huge bureaucracy dedicated to curbing “terrorism” we are going to have constant reports of an enemy who seeks to “evolve a different strategy.” It’s good for business. Big government business. How else do you justify dedicating untold resources to this cause? And I say this as someone who unreservedly supports those who serve in harm’s way in Afghanistan and other hostile locales. But, I just worry a little bit about what we are doing here at home in the name of “security.” I suspect that these FBI cases are more about sending a signal to freaky people who might want to do something crazy that the guy they’re collaborating with might be a federal agent, than they are about an evolving threat. Fine. Keep us safe, but remember what you are keeping us safe for: Freedom.
2. As we surrender more and more liberty for “security” what, at the end of the day, is there left to preserve? The airport searches in the name of security surpass anything that was done in the public transportation spaces in the old Soviet Union. In the name of security they want to expand these to ground transportation and hotels. (Now if they would also ask for citizenship papers along with our photo ids we might at least get rid of the illegals.) In other words they want to expand the security zone to all public spaces.
In creating this “security” they are creating the police state that I have no desire to see survive.
This all started because Abraham Lincoln broke the US Constitution when he suspended habeas corpus, instituted the income tax, illegally created West Virginia*, and denied the people of the soveriegn states their legal right to secede. This was followed by illegal Federal Reconstructionist actions, such as rejecting the new and legally elected members of Congress selected by the South, removing the legally elected civilian governments in the South, and illegally passing the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments**.
FDR pushed the fissures open wider with his packing the Supreme Court, wealth redistribution, National Security Act, and internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry. There were lots more examples from many more presidents and congresses, but the point is, this is just the end result of much earlier actions.
You can’t break the Constitutional safeguards on personal liberty withouth consequences. The Republic has had a cancer since Lincoln and it is now metastasizing and we get to witness its death. t is VERY sad and heart rending and I fear for the future of my children.
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* “. .. but no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the
juncture of two or more States or parts of States, without the consent of the legislatures of the States concerned as well as Congress.”
** “…the southern state governments that participated in ratifying them were not legally competent to do so because of the irregular fashion in which those governments had been created. The other objection is that some or all of the southern ratifications were extorted from the states through unlawful federal threats.” (The University of Chicago Law School Law Review)