Commentary
The Chicken Little Chorus's sickening farce
By Bev Conover
Online Journal Editor & Publisher


Jul 30, 2007, 01:19

"Wires" sticking out of a block of cheese. An ice packed filled with "clay" and wrapped with "duct tape." "Terrorists" making "dry runs" to test the alertness of airport security personnel.

Only there were no wires in the cheese. And the ice pack was filled with the normal blue gel and wrapped with clear packaging tape because some of the goo, which had seeped out of the leaking container, had dried and hardened. Nor were the travelers who had these items, and other "suspicious things, in their luggage "terrorists" making "dry runs" to test the system. But the US Transportation Safety Authority (TSA), which spends sleepless nights dreaming up ways to make air travel as miserable as possible, is sticking by the lies in the "intelligence" bulletin it sent out to the nation's airports. Oops, according to the TSA, we the people weren't supposed to see this bulletin. Now that makes it right, doesn't it?

NBC News got its hands on the bulletin (or might it deliberately have been given to it, knowing what it would do in raising the fear level?) and breathlessly ran with it sans any checking of its validity. Soon, the rest of the corporate media in the Chicken Little Chorus were repeating -- over and over -- the unverified tale. But when the truth about this titillating tale of wily "terrorists" trying to slip wired cheese, clay bombs, computer games with dangling wires, battery chargers, etc., past airport security came out, there was mostly silence from the corporate media's Chicken Little Chorus.

The whole thing would be funny -- nay, a farce -- except it's messing with people's heads. Of course, that's the intention because Homeland (In)security's Chicken Little has a "gut" feeling that the "terrorists" are going to pull off something big "this summer" in the USA.

Chicken Little Chertoff's "gut" feeling apparently has sucked the Democrats into joining the Chicken Little Chorus. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, using the Democrats' weekly radio addressed, touted her party's success Friday in passing major recommendations of the 9/11 (Whitewash) Commission, the day after the Senate did likewise.

Said Pelosi, "The threat of terrorist violence against the United States is growing. al-Qaeda is gaining strength, and Osama bin Laden continues to elude capture. There is not a moment to spare to take the steps necessary to keep the American people safe."

If that's not sick enough, consider that Chicken Little In-Chief Bush is running to and fro, telling carefully picked Chicken Little audiences not that "the sky is falling" but that "the terrorists are coming!" Ya know, that's why "we have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them at home." And "if we don't fight them over there, they will follow us home." Except, they have "sleeper cells" here and more of "them" are slipping across our borders, which is why he needs more power to snoop into our personal affairs, eavesdrop on our phone calls, read our emails, freeze our assets, force us to carry and show national identity cards (drivers' licenses and passports), arrest us for disagreeing with him, render us for torture and lock us away forever in Gitmo. Shoot, why not just put radio frequency ID (RFID) chips in us all?

How did we ever did we make it 225 years without Big Brother watching us and breathing down our necks? Well, nearly 225 years because Congress, the White House and the courts have been chipping away at our rights, especially in Justice Louis Brandeis' words "the right most valued by all civilized men -- the right to be let alone." Yup, everything changed on 9/11. We lost what was left of our shrinking rights and freedoms, so what's the big deal about losing the rest?

Obviously, something bigger than an acorn bonked Chicken Little George on the head. But some of us knew that before the Felonious Five on the Supreme Court handed him and archfiend Dick Cheney the Oval Office.