Wow

Retired Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney talking about the necessity of racial profiling in airports:

Let's try to analyze this "logic" a bit. He starts off by saying that "he believes" that there will be a terrorist attack on an airplane in the next "30-120 days." This is an incredulously vague number if I've ever heard one. A little bit of background on Lt. Gen. McInerney would be beneficial here. He was one of the retired military officials recruited by the Pentagon as a "key influential" to appear on talk shows and/or as sources in articles/op-eds to sell the American public on the Iraq war back in 2002. So it's clear that McInerney is no stranger to shameless propaganda engineered to advance the budget/agenda of the military-industrial complex. Typical of this sort of propaganda is the imposition of meaningless, vague deadlines such as this, designed to elicit knee-jerk fear in all who hear them. Particularly note the lack of evidence, and also the lack of a request to provide it from the interviewer.

So, the profiling bombshell. The fact that this is a hideous, bigoted thing to propose can, I think, be taken for granted. Again, he goes into no detail regarding how "muslims" would be identified. This is made particularly difficult when he says the profiling would not be racial in nature. The fact that he proposes profiling based on religious belief effectively indicates that he feels that the government, through the arm of the TSA, should be able to violate the individual rights of anyone it wants.

As justification for this, he says that Israel has done this for some time and been "extremely successful" with this technique. So, the idea here is to use Israel as our model for human rights/moral decisions? Because, if so, that's fucked.

Finally, the idea that the government should, or could, be held responsible for the wellbeing of every citizen of its principality is complete bullshit, and yet seems to be regarded as its primary objective these days. For more on this, I quote Glenn Greenwald:

"The citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will -- in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation -- Keep Us Safe. Whenever the Government fails to do so, the reaction -- just as we saw this week -- is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done to ensure that nothing bad in the world ever happens. Demands that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable are necessary and wise, but demands that political leaders ensure that we can live in womb-like Absolute Safety are delusional and destructive. Yet this is what the citizenry screams out every time something threatening happens: please, take more of our privacy away; monitor more of our communications; ban more of us from flying; engage in rituals to create the illusion of Strength; imprison more people without charges; take more and more control and power so you can Keep Us Safe."