Posts Tagged ‘Transportation Security Administration’

Obama Jackbooted Blackshirt Fascist Thugs Alert

June 21, 2011

I’ve explained why I call Obama a fascist at great length.  And of course that article could actually have been a whole lot longer than it was (here’s a VERY recent addition, for instance).

Take this, for example:

June 20, 2011
TSA Now Storming Public Places 8,000 Times a Year
By Tara Servatius

Americans must decide if, in the name of homeland security, they are willing to allow TSA operatives to storm public places in their communities with no warning, pat them down, and search their bags.  And they better decide quickly.

Bus travelers were shocked when jackbooted TSA officers in black SWAT-style uniforms descended unannounced upon the Tampa Greyhound bus station in April with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies and federal bureaucrats in tow.

A news report by ABC Action News in Tampa showed passengers being given the signature pat downs Americans are used to watching the Transportation Security Administration screeners perform at our airports. Canine teams sniffed their bags and the buses they rode. Immigration officials hunted for large sums of cash as part of an anti-smuggling initiative.

The TSA clearly intends for these out-of-nowhere swarms by its officers at community transit centers, bus stops and public events to become a routine and accepted part of American life.

The TSA has conducted 8,000 of these security sweeps across the country in the past year alone, TSA chief John Pistole told a Senate committee June 14.  They are part of its VIPR (Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response) program, which targets public transit related places.

All of which is enough to make you wonder if we are watching the formation of the “civilian national security force” President Obama called for on the campaign trail “that is just as powerful, just as strong and just as well funded” as the military.

The VIPR swarm on Wednesday, the TSA’s largest so far, was such a shocking display of the agency’s power that it set the blogosphere abuzz.

In a massive flex of muscle most people didn’t know the TSA had, the agency led dozens of federal and state law enforcement agencies in a VIPR exercise that covered three states and 5,000 square miles. According to the Marietta Times, the sweep used reconnaissance aircraft and “multiple airborne assets, including Blackhawk helicopters and fixed wing aircraft as well as waterborne and surface teams.”

When did the TSA get this powerful? Last year, Pistole told USA Today he wanted to “take the TSA to the next level,” building it into a “national-security, counterterrorism organization, fully integrated into U.S. government efforts.”

What few people realize is how far Pistole has already come in his quest. This is apparently what that next level looks like. More than 300 law enforcement and military personnel swept through a 100-mile stretch of the Ohio Valley alone, examining the area’s industrial infrastructure, the Charleston Gazette reported.

Federal air marshals, the Army Corps of Engineers, the U.S. Coast Guard, the FBI, the Office of Homeland Security and two dozen other federal, state and local agencies teamed up to scour the state’s roads, bridges, water supply and transit centers under the TSA’s leadership.

What is remarkable about these security swarms is that they don’t just involve federal, state and local law enforcement officials. The TSA brings in squads of bureaucrats from state and federal agencies as well, everything from transportation departments to departments of natural resources.

The TSA had received no specific threats about the Tampa bus station before the April sweep, reporters were told.

They were there “to sort of invent the wheel in advance in case we have to if there ever is specific intelligence requiring us to be here,” said Gary Milano with the Department of Homeland Security in an ABC News Action television report. “This way us and our partners are ready to move in at a moment’s notice.”

Federal immigration officials from Customs and Border Patrol swept the station with the TSA, looking for “immigration violations, threats to national security” and “bulk cash smuggling.” (How the bulk cash smuggling investigation related to national security was never explained.)

“We’ll be back,” Milano told reporters. “We won’t say when we’ll be back. This way the bad guys are on notice we’ll be back.”

The TSA gave the same vague answers when asked about the three-state sweep this week. That sweep wasn’t in response to any specific security threat, either.

The purpose was to “have a visible presence and let people know we’re out here,” Michael Cleveland, federal security director for TSA operations in West Virginia told the Gazette. “It can be a deterrent.”

It might be — if Americans are willing to live this way.

Tara Servatius is a radio talk show host. Follow her @TaraServatius and on Facebook.

It has ALWAYS been under liberals and progressives that America has degenerated into the depths of a police state.  Go back and see all the fascist garbage that Woodrow Wilson beqeathed us with, for example.  Consider FDR putting the Japanese into camps and even LYING to the Supreme Court to justify doing so.

Or perhaps you prefer to stay modern: consider Barack Obama’s confiscating General Motors from the legitimate bondholders so he could hand it over to his union cronies.  Or consider Obama denouncing George Bush as violating the Constitution in an Iran War he never even got in –

“The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation,” Obama responded [on December 20, 2007].

– prior to ripping up the Constitution and then urinating on it to get America into Libya and Yemen.

Liberals are hypocrites.  Hypocrisy is the liberals’ quintessential essence.  If you took the hypocrisy out of the liberal, you could not have liberalism.  You certainly couldn’t have Nancy Pelosi.  Oh, or John Kerry.  Or Charlie Rangel.  Or Al Gore.  Or Barack Obama.  Or Joe Biden.  Or Bill and Hillary Clinton.  Notice how these are pretty much all their top-level people; the rank-and-file march in goose-step behind them.  Democrats are the kind of people who demonize Republicans left and right for taking actions that are necessary in the face of direct threats.  And then they do far worse than the Republicans EVER did, and “It’s not fascism when WE do it.”

Barack Obama is of course the poster boy for the biggest hypocrite who ever lived.  Think of him demonizing Bush for Iraq and Afghanistan before keeping us in Iraq and Afghanistan and getting us in THREE MORE SHOOTING WARS to boot (Pakistan, Libya and Yemen).  Think of Obama on the Patriot Act.  Think of Obama on rendition.  Think of Obama on Gitmo.  Think of Obama on domestic eavesdropping.  Think of Obama on the surge strategy.  Think of Obama on the debt ceiling.  Think of Obama on transparency.  Think of Obama constantly assuring us of all the shovel-ready jobs to sell his massive stimulus boondoggle and then joking that “Shovel-ready was not as … uh .. shovel-ready as we expected” when the evidence that he’d lied was beyond overwhelming.  Think of Obama assuring the American people that if you like your health care plan you can keep it in the face of the new Price Waterhouse study that shows HALF of all employers will dump their employees into ObamaCare.  Think of Obama on damn near EVERYTHING.

Liberals are people who say one thing and do another.   They are people who are capable of endless self-righteous selective outrage that dries up when THEY’RE running things.

This is the same reason why the world’s worst human rights abusers routinely get to sit on the human rights council at the überleft United Nations and then lecture the rest of us on “human rights.”

Where are all the liberals demanding Obama be impeached for all his wars?  Where are all the liberals demanding Obama be impeached for all of his secrecy and his lies?  It was all over the place (and all over the front pages of the mainstream media) throughout the years of Bush derangement syndrome.  Remember how they were out in force every single day in front of the televesion cameras?  Where are all the Cindy Sheehands and the Code Pinks and the coverage of them NOW???

Where is all the outrage over our civil liberties as Obama’s thugs and goons fondle our junk???

Try to sort through the Democrats’ basic premise: the party that is trying to grow the size of goverment more and more and put government in charge of more and more of our lives ISN’T fascist; while the party that is trying to reduce the size and scope and power of government ARE the fascists.

Democrats are FINE with fascists and fascism, as long as the fascists are UNION fascists.

TSA Manual: Obama ‘Transparency’ Only For Terrorists, Not Americans

December 9, 2009

Obama promised the most transparent and open administration ever.  For Americans, he has utterly failed to deliver anything remotely close:

From Newsweek back in July of this year:

As a senator, Barack Obama denounced the Bush administration for holding “secret energy meetings” with oil executives at the White House. But last week public-interest groups were dismayed when his own administration rejected a Freedom of Information Act request for Secret Service logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House to discuss Obama’s “clean coal” policies. One reason: the disclosure of such records might impinge on privileged “presidential communications.” The refusal, approved by White House counsel Greg Craig’s office, is the latest in a series of cases in which Obama officials have opted against public disclosure. Since Obama pledged on his first day in office to usher in a “new era” of openness, “nothing has changed,” says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. “For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies.”

What we’ll find is that Obama is FAR worse than Bush ever was.  Obama took Bush secrecy as his launching platform and then flew off to Mars with pathological and paranoid secrecy of his own.

How about this one?

From the Associated Press, just three days ago:

WASHINGTON — It’s hardly the image of transparency the Obama administration wants to project: A workshop on government openness is closed to the public.

The event Monday for federal employees is a fitting symbol of President Barack Obama’s uneven record so far on the Freedom of Information Act, a big part of keeping his campaign promise to make his administration the most transparent ever. As Obama’s first year in office ends, the government’s actions when the public and press seek information are not yet matching up with the president’s words.

That’s right: Obama had a workshop on openness that was closed to the public.  He doesn’t actually want an open administration; he merely wants to have the appearance of one.  So we had a workshop on gimmickry on how to spin the truth and conceal reality.

And Obama’s paranoid secrecy gets even more pathetic and absurd from there.  He just got through invoking executive privilege for his freaking SOCIAL SECRETARY! Do you know how ridiculous that is?

Michael Scherer of Time points out how utterly a insane this paranoid invocation of executive privilege is in his article:

But Gibbs’ justification for Rogers’ absence — invoking the separation of powers — nonetheless raised some eyebrows among legal scholars. “I’d completely fall out of my chair if they invoked executive privilege with regards to a social secretary arranging a party,” said Mark J. Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason, who recently wrote a book on executive privilege.

The writer at American Power notes:

I mean, c’mon, does the Social Secretary sit in on White House domestic and foreign policy briefings? It would sound simply absurd, but given the unprecedented corruption of this regime, nothing can be taken for granted.

Invoking executive privilege for a social secretary is beyond ridiculous.  Unless you think that the number of White House plate settings in the color “mauve” is highly sensitive confidential information that needs to be protected.

So let’s just let it be known: the Obama administration clearly has no intention of applying Obama’s promises of transparency and openness to the American people.

So who IS Obama going to apply his promises of transparency and openness to?

I’m glad you asked:

In a massive security breach, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently posted online its airport screening procedures manual, including some of the most closely guarded secrets regarding special rules for diplomats and CIA and law enforcement officers.

The most sensitive parts of the 93-page Standard Operating Procedures manual were apparently redacted in a way that computer savvy individuals easily overcame.

The document shows sample CIA, Congressional and law enforcement credentials which experts say would make it easy for terrorists to duplicate.

The improperly redacted areas indicate that only 20 percent of checked bags are to be hand searched for explosives and reveal in detail the limitations of x-ray screening machines.

The most terrorist-friendly administration in American history just got even friendlier.

On the bright side, at least conservative can’t say Obama isn’t being “transparent” and “open” anymore.  Terrorists are being allowed to learn everything they want as the veils are lifted.