September 2006: Safety Last

"Security Kiosk Fail"

It's the fifth anniversary of the jewel of Bush's Trifecta. And with mid-term elections on the way, there's a panic level in need of being stepped up.

Andrew Greeley called it correctly in September 2002: Media ignored calm amid the 9/11 chaos—

In some sense, Sept. 11 was a victory over the terrorists. Socially responsible free Americans prevented the loss from being much worse. Yet, the response of the planning agencies has been to establish more and more elaborate command-and-control structures, which will force a population that is not about to panic into panic behavior.
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The media got the story all wrong because the panic paradigm is still pervasive and because no one in the media had read the disaster-research literature. They thus reinforced the propensity of those running the country not to trust the good sense and social concern of ordinary folk. Rather, they want to control everything with such ditsy ideas as the proposed Homeland Security Department. That plan would take union and civil service protections away from government workers and accomplish little else.

In no time flat our country became "The Homeland," without comment from the major media. Forgetting for a moment the massive theft it's enabled, the term in itself is deeply disturbing. And since 2001 I've only seen two guesses at the origins of the term.

Back in 2002, in The Strange Career of "Homeland Security," Margie Burns suggested that the term originated from the Institute for Homeland Security, a military contracting-CIA-Sun Myung Moon connected group, founded in 1999.

And while conducting this interview, Thom Hartmann quotes—

...Rudolf Hess introducing Adolf Hitler in 1934 at the Nuremburg rallies. This is from Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" movie...Notice the word "Heimat". And then he says, 'für alle Deutschen in der ganze Welt': 'All of the Germans in the entire world'. "Dank ihrer Führung" – thanks to our Führer – wird Deutschland sein Ziel erreichen, Heimat zu sein". 'Heimat zu sein' – a homeland here we have. "Heimat zu sein für alle Deutschen der Welt. Heil Hitler! Seig Heil! Sieg Heil!" And then he introduces Hitler and Hitler gets up and speaks and starts using the word 'homeland' for the very first time. And I don't remember the world 'homeland' ever being used in the context of the United States before now.

Barbara Bush may have said it in a very different context, but it's certainly the case that "This is working out very well for them." Only too true, when—Thom Hartmann again—Bush has "used 9/11 as his own 'Reichstag fire' to gut the Constitution and enhance the power and wealth of his corporate cronies..."

Which brings us to the upcoming vote on the Military Commissions bill, which Glenn Greenwald calls, The legalization of torture and permanent detention.

Mark Danner later writes a piece about the International Red Cross report on torture of detainees in CIA custody. The report is released in 2007, and Danner's article appears in 2009. But Danner notes (in section 4 of the article) how much we knew, so many years earlier—

News of the "black sites" first appeared prominently in the press—on the front page of The Washington Post —in December 2002...A year and a half later, after the publication and broadcast of the Abu Ghraib photographs—the one moment in the last half-dozen years when the torture story, thanks to the lurid images, became "televisual"—a great wave of leaks swept into public view hundreds of pages of "secret" documents about torture and the Bush administration's decision-making regarding it... There have been many important "revelations" since, but none of them has changed the essential fact: by no later than the summer of 2004, the American people had before them the basic narrative of how the elected and appointed officials of their government decided to torture prisoners and how they went about it.

In other doings of the Family Values Party, sexual harasser of male congressional pages, Mark Foley resigns. Fellow Republicans have covered up his behavior for at least six years—after learning about it from a page in 2000.

It's not long before Fox News footage labels Foley, "Democrat."

While there's this, from the godly Dallas area—

FRISCO, Texas -- An award-winning Texas art teacher who was reprimanded after one of her fifth-grade students saw a nude sculpture during a trip to a museum has lost her job.

The school board in Frisco has voted not to renew Sydney McGee's contract after 28 years.