Posted on 09/16/2001 2:58:19 PM PDT by sendtoscott
MORNING OF HORROR by L. Neil Smith Special to TLE First of all, expect never to learn the truth about what happened at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and elsewhere this morning of September 11, 2001, any more than we did with regard to the murders of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, at Ruby Ridge, Waco, or Oklahoma City. Ambiguity and uncertainty serve far too many political interests. Another certainty is that, although I'm told 50,000 people worked in the World Trade Center, more innocent individuals will die as a result of what the Old Media are lovingly referring to as a "lockdown" of Manhattan and other places, than any acts of terrorism that may have occurred. The military has just said they'll shoot down any plane they see flying. Only one civilian plane is in the air this morning, Air Force One; that's as grim a warning of things to come as I can think of. "Collateral" deaths won't just happen as a consequence, say, of somebody with a heart attack being unable to get to a hospital, but whenever and wherever some dumb kid in an army uniform gets startled by a car backfiring and starts spraying everybody and his pet poodle with automatic rifle fire. Or to whomever the martial lawyers decide it's safe to liquidate using this foul mess as a cover. Or, vastly more ominously, to people in the not-so-distant future who decide they must resist the police state that will inevitably result from these events. It's extremely difficult to think coherently about long term effects, let alone to get it all down in writing, when you learn that, not only were hijacked commercial aircraft used to commit these unspeakably evil acts, but that 90 passengers died helplessly in the first plane, and others yet unnumbered may have died in subsequent attacks. _Somebody_ has to think about it, though, or this situation will be used to turn the Bill of Rights off forever. Depending on the planning behind it, or who did the planning, it may already be too late. All airports have been shut down today, and I shudder to think about what flying will be like from now on. The Clintons, Schumers, and Waxmans will try to shut down the Internet, calling it a breeding ground for terrorism. The Bushes and Cheneys will "reluctantly" go along. Rush Limbaugh will cheer them on. What should those who value their freedom do? Every chance you have, from this moment on, whether it's on talk radio, or on the letters to the editor page, on the Internet while it's still possible, or in communication with everyone you know -- it's time for even the most apolitical to write to senators and congressmen -- emphasize two points: First, inform them that closing down the First or Second or any other Amendment is not an appropriate response to what's happened, and that any politician or bureaucrat in office who attempts to capitalize on today's horrors is committing the same sort of blatantly criminal act I've always insisted must be punished under Bill of Rights enforcement. Second, these things happen to nations with imperial ambitions. There has never been a major act of terrorism I know of that hasn't resulted from an act of government that violated somebody's rights. The way to keep this sort of thing from happening again is to stop those violations. Hideously enough, my new novel _The American Zone_, scheduled to be published next November by Tor Books, begins with an act very similar to this one, carried out to force the creation of a strong central government in the governmentless "North American Confederacy" that figures in so many of my books. As anybody who knows my work can safely predict, the evil scheme doesn't work and the villains are defeated. Life isn't as predictably pleasant as fiction. Happy endings are few and far between. But it's important to act swiftly if we're to preserve anything resembling the freedom that made this civilization great. Pass the word. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 3. IT DIDN'T WORK by Victor Milan Exclusive to TLE 9/11/01 - What our governmental masters and their media lickspittles have longed for semi-secretly for years has finally come to pass: a massive terrorist attack on American soil. In every syllable squeezing from the television you can hear the undertone: _at last: an end to all this nonsense about individual liberty. An end to anti-government sentiment. We can crush dissent and complete our enslavement of the American people, and the masses will applaud!_ But before you go joining the amen chorus - ban encryption! strip searches for airlines passengers! - you might reflect on one little detail. It hasn't worked. Retired FBI mobster Jim Kallstrom bubbled and fumed about how we were going to have to "get serious" about security. I wanted to scream at the set: are you now going to admit a missile took down TWA 800, consistent with the testimony of hundreds of eyewitnesses, and give up the shabby fiction that the crash was caused by an internal fuel explosion which have proven impossible to duplicate by exhaustive testing? The irony is, they actually might, in order to fan the fervor to Do Something About Terrorism which will likely ensue from today's attack. The unspeakable Tom Brokaw practically quivered with glee as he spoke of how foolish we had been to resent airport security measures, and how reassured we would be in the future for the massively increased measures no doubt on their way. The problem is … it didn't work. The other problem is: it will _never_ work. Anyone willing to regard the facts with so much as one eye open has seen for decades that metal detectors and other airport security measures do nothing to deter terrorists. We can debate the effect on casual nuts and criminals; but serious, organized operators wanting to hijack a plane do so without ever coming within hundreds of yards of metal detectors: by infiltrating or overpowering the ground crew, or simply driving up onto the asphalt next to the airplane and waving guns. So it has happened in dozens of hijackings worldwide since the metal detectors went in. So it apparently happened today. During the first Bush's Gulf War airport security was tightened - and civil liberties eroded further. The object, of course - since even the FBI at the time admitted it had no evidence of "Iraqi terror squads" on the ground in the USA - was to further desensitize us to sheep-like submission to intrusive, police-state supervision and scrutiny, with a view to expanding it (and they've done so - look at the public "schools"). Now, smug statist extrusions like Brokaw assure us, today's events prove how necessary such measures were, no? No. They prove those measures _didn't work._ The Clinton junta was the most fascistic in American peacetime history. Clinton gutted the Bill of Rights, unleashed massive domestic spying, turned every imaginable federal agency and plenty of unimaginable ones - HUD has a SWAT team - into military powers. Thanks to your federal tax dollars, so lavishly distributed by Clinton, every cow town large enough to have a traffic light has on call a heavily-armed death squad kitted out in the same sort of uniforms they'd be wearing if the Nazis had successfully invaded America. Look cross-eyed at a member of our ruling classes and they'll be happy to surround your house and shoot you - and your pets, and your neighbors, and sometimes one another. Didn't slow down the terrorists much, now, did they? This is no doubt going to be unpopular. But I have to say it: We have to just say no. The plans to further destroy our liberties have long been drawn up, awaiting just such a provocation. You know it. I know it. But - even assuming this wasn't a provocation in the sense of having been staged with the encouragement or connivance of the US government, which, yes, I absolutely believe to be a possibility (if you never saw the video of an FBI informant teaching the original WTC bombers how to mix ANFO, at least you've figured out the government lied about OKC, I hope) - you have another reason, beyond the atavistic, selfish craving for personal liberty which we're all sure to hear endlessly lambasted in the coming weeks, to resist the programmatic wave of assaults on the few liberties Clinton left us. Which is … it _won't work_. Whatever grotesque humiliations they're going to make us undergo for the privilege of flying, once flights resume tomorrow - flying naked? foregoing carry-on luggage? - will do nothing to prevent a recurrence of just these events. As existing security measures did nothing. But guess what? That's just the beginning. If terrorists want to use "weapons of mass destruction," no amount of dictatorship or internal security can or will stop them. If you consent to give up any freedom, any liberty, even any more of your tax money - you will get no more security. Want to be safe from WMDs? Move out of the city. Homestead the National Forest. Move off Ground Zero. There is no other way. A video camera on every street corner - the four or five that don't yet have them - won't prevent terrorists from unleashing a nuclear device or biological or chemical agent anywhere they want to. In military terms the only defense against such weapons is dispersion. Unless they repeal the laws of physics, that's unlikely to change. Of course, we haven't had NBC terrorism yet - although no doubt our masters and their lackeys have their fingers crossed that, good Lord willing and the creek don't rise, they won't have much longer to wait. But we will. But even in light of what actually has happened: so long as we have air traffic, the risk of planes being turned into flying bombs will persist as well. Again, no murder-rape of the Bill of Rights will prevent that. The only thing which could even forestall it is a solid cordon around every landing strip in North America, including military bases - what happens when the bad guys jack a KC-135 flying tanker and take it to Disneyland? America was a police state before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the suburbs of Pittsburgh. America was already in effect an occupied country. And all of it ion the name of … protecting us. Our occupiers have failed totally to protect us. They will fail consistently in the future. The only things governmental measures - the barbed wire, videocams, phone taps, email surveillance; the crushing of dissent; the confiscation of firearms (you don't think they'll pass up an opportunity to crank that up a notch, do you?) - will _or can_ protect is our rulers. From us. Remember this: if you give them what they ask it will do _nothing_ to enhance your personal safety. Nothing. It will more than likely decrease it, measurably and rapidly. So when they come on your TV and ask you to give them the world to make you safe from terrorism - tell them where to go. They tried that. It didn't work. - - - ADDENDUM TO "IT DIDN'T WORK" by Victor Milan Exclusive to THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE 9/14/01 - the government is sticking resolutely to claims that the four airplanes were hijacked by men wielding box cutters and improvised knives. If true, it changes nothing. All the "security" measures we have had heaped upon us failed to protect us. And even if measures might be instituted which would forestall _this particular_ mode of attacking a jetliner, they will leave others gaping wide. There remains no defense against WMDs but dispersion. Against more one-on-one violence, such as the hijackings themselves, the best defense is an armed populace - as the heroic but unarmed passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 proved beyond what even slithering filth like Schumer and Feinstein can question. What might they have achieve had they been permitted to carry the proper tools? Which brings us face-up with another nightmare scenario: what if Flight 93's passengers, having overcome the terrific disadvantage of being disarmed - as much morally, by the government's constant litany of "don't resist!", as by the lack of physical instruments - and successfully overwhelmed their attackers, were then shot down by the US government?
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