12/30/09 – Becky Akers – The Scott Horton Show

You could probably beat a guy to death with the Sunday New York Times, couldn't you?
Or suppose you just have really big ears, can you strangle a flight attendant?
It's sinful to leave my guest on hold this long.
It's Becky Akers, she writes for LewRockwell.com.
It says at the bottom of her articles that she writes mostly about the American Revolution, but it seems to me she writes mostly about the TSA, and thank God for that too.
Hi Becky, welcome to the show.
Hello Scott, thanks very much for having me on.
Well, I appreciate you joining us again.
You are all diseased, if anybody wants to find the whole thing of George Carlin doing his airport security rap.
It's from about 1999.
And you know what, I think at least they won't let you bring a knife on anymore, like he's saying, and a chainsaw and a broken bottle.
But they still have not stopped a single bomb from making it on a plane, right?
They haven't found a single bomb in a single suitcase or on anyone's person.
The only times anybody's brought bombs onto planes since 99, much less September 11th there, is Richard Reed and the Underpants bomber from the other day.
Am I right?
You are absolutely right.
And they both got their bombs all the way onto the plane and at least attempted to light them.
My suggestion is if you want to keep it a secret that you're carrying a bomb, don't try to light it.
Just take it on board.
You won't have any problem.
Get off at your destination with it.
Otherwise, the TSA won't have a clue.
Well, anyway, here, Christmas Kamikaze is the article at LewRockwell.com.
And well, anyway, first of all, this is sort of a parentheses, but it's right in front of my eyeballs and I can't ignore it.
Detroit, they set all their houses on fire every Halloween.
What the hell is that about?
I've never quite understood it either.
I think it's supposed to express rage at the machine or something.
But if I were going to express my rage, I wouldn't burn down my own neighborhood.
I'd go to D.C. and burn that down.
Crazy.
Well, it's part of the just having, I guess, massive neighborhoods worth of empty houses just sitting there.
And what else are you going to do with them?
Yes, yes, exactly.
I mean, you may as well get some benefit out of it once the politicians and the bankers have milked you for every penny that they can.
So instead of paying more money to the gas and oil companies to keep you warm in October, I guess you just set the house next door on fire and warm yourself that way.
Yeah, there you go.
Yeah, you can't afford any oil, any heating oil.
All right.
So I guess and you can disagree with me and phrase it however you like, Becky.
But the way I look at this sort of is two ways.
One way is that this whole thing is fake and I don't believe it.
Official Al Qaeda's claim of responsibility and this, that and the other thing.
Yeah, I don't know.
Some Indian guys supposedly put him on the plane.
I'm going to interview the eyewitness on the show tomorrow about it.
Couldn't get him on for today.
But then there's another point of view about it, which is, you know, who knows who put the guy on the plane, but at least it's plausible.
It makes sense in its own way that as retaliation for the American bombing of Yemen, they figured out somebody who was, you know, rich and English enough that he could get on a plane to the United States and carry this thing out.
And that in that sense, really, we got really lucky.
I mean, that could have been a massive, horrifying disaster on Christmas Day there.
And it was sort of by the skin of our teeth.
We weren't at we aren't right now at full scale red alert.
Who knows what?
Well, let me let me back that up a bit by just pointing out a couple of things about explosives.
And I am by no means an expert.
I almost failed high school chemistry.
So what I'm telling you is what I have gleaned from different sources I've read, and I don't have enough chemical chemistry knowledge of chemistry to talk real intelligently about it.
But my understanding is that explosives are extremely touchy, so to speak.
They're not reliable.
You have to use them under very exacting conditions.
That's why laboratories have very controlled temperatures and things like that.
This Hollywood idea that you touch a match to a string and boom, everything goes puff is just that it's a Hollywood idea.
In real life, explosives aren't reliable.
So the idea that you can smuggle them on board an aircraft and you can go to the aircraft laboratory and mix them up and boom, the plane just falls out of the sky, then is totally bogus.
For somebody to climb on board and try to light explosives in his shoes, it's so ridiculous that Richard Reed is the only person in the history of aviation who has ever tried it.
There were two other incidents, but the shoes that carried the explosives were not being worn at the time.
They had one of them was checked in luggage and that one did go off.
But again, it points to how unstable explosives are.
It just exploded on its own.
The other one was carried on board by Ramzi Yousef, who is very notorious here as the first World Trade Center bombing.
Yeah, this is the Bojinka plot.
That's right.
That's right.
But again, he wasn't wearing the shoes.
He smuggled the explosives in his shoe, assembled it at his seat and put it under the cushion of his seat.
Next guy to get on, the thing went off then.
So although apparently, you know, from talking to Peter Lance, the plan there was and that apparently it was a near miss kind of a thing.
Yousef, I don't think anyone would accuse of just being some idiot.
He was actually a pretty competent terrorist as far as competent terrorists go.
And but his thing was he missed the center fuel tank by not very far.
But that's what he was trying to do.
His seat that he got where you say the bomb, when it went off, it killed a Japanese businessman.
And if it had been a little bit bigger or placed a little bit differently, it very well could have taken out that plane.
And their plan was to take out 12 planes at a time.
And in fact, there's a guy who was tortured and imprisoned for years with no charges because he had a watch that the CIA falsely said was the same kind of watch as Ramsey Yousef like to use for his timers.
They were wrong, but close enough to torture and kidnap a guy.
Sorry, that's just sort of little parentheses there.
But yeah, isn't that typical of government?
The only point I was trying to make, and you're absolutely right, somebody with Ramsey Yousef sophistication and knowledge of explosives might be able to pull something like that off.
My only point in raising all this is just we should turn a real skeptical eye to this idea that any bozo can get on a plane and blow it out of the sky.
It just doesn't work that way.
And so when the government is fear mongering now and is stirring us up and making us all try to believe that, you know, catastrophe, which is narrowly averted from what I have read and the chemists I have consulted, they tell me, no, this isn't quite, you know, you would with a lot of luck, you might be able to pull off what the underwear bomber was trying to pull off.
But again, that's with an awful lot of luck.
Otherwise, it's really not that much of a danger.
Also, this idea that once a hole is blown in a plane, it is, of course, going to go down is completely false as well.
Planes have had guns shot through them.
Remember the pilot who accidentally discharged his weapon?
The gunshot did go through the skin of the airplane.
Yeah, the Mythbusters did a test on that also.
That's a total Hollywood thing where a pinprick anywhere in the fuselage means the entire plane rips apart and everybody gets sucked out like they're in outer space or something.
That's, yeah, total fantasy.
Yes.
So even if the...
Which is actually an argument for at least the marshals or if they had private security to go ahead and let them be armed.
I mean, it would suck to have a bunch of stray bullets going around.
But then again, if a terrorist can smuggle a gun onto a plane, it'd be nice for at least the security people on the plane to be able to fight back against them or have at least a chance at it.
Yeah, or the passengers.
That was the biggest mistake right there is when the feds disarmed passengers in the 1960s.
This was all in response to the hijackings, the political hijackings that were going on then.
And so Congress just stepped in and declared that from now on passengers would be disarmed and would not be able to carry weapons on board.
Well, now you've turned everybody into a sitting duck.
I mean, when you do that on Earth, on the ground, crime rates skyrocket.
We shouldn't be surprised that when the same thing has been done at 30,000 feet, the crime rate skyrockets.
And now you've got terrorists trying to kill people with airplanes.
So...
Well, I mean, George Carlin points out in that clip, and I don't know if we got that far into the clip, but I think we did, where he says, you know, nobody's been able to stop drug smugglers from being able to bring drugs on planes.
And God bless them, too.
That certainly livens up a long flight, doesn't it?
Yeah, of course.
And it means that, you know, at the end of the day, as long as the American government is mass murdering people and creating terrorists who want to come here and kill us, it's impossible to stop them all.
I mean, you're right.
I'm sure that the threat of some goofball like Richard Reed or the underpants guy actually being able to carry out something like this as easily as they seem to think they could or whatever, being overblown.
I could see that.
But, you know, on the other hand, I mean, how hard can it really be for a determined group of five or six people to be able to get on the same plane as each other and wreak havoc, you know?
It isn't hard at all.
And September 11th proved that.
Let's remember that the FAA at that point was in charge of security.
Yes, they fronted private screeners and had them out there as the public space.
But everything those screeners did was directly controlled and dictated by the FAA.
They followed FAA rules.
In fact, the FAA rule specified that in the event that a hijacker tried to take over a plane, the crew was to cooperate and they were to order passengers to cooperate as well.
So that's why the passengers on the first three flights on September 11th were very compliant and didn't try to get control of the plane.
The fourth plane, when those folks heard from people who were calling them that the other three planes had gone down, they fought back.
And it's possible the other passengers on the other flights would have as well, but for the crew following FAA directions and keeping everybody, you know, very subservient.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I thought it was great the way you pointed out in your article, Becky, that it's, again, it's Christmas Kamikaze at LewRockwell.com, and you point out in here that it wasn't really just, you know, silly bureaucratic covering one's own behind when Napolitano, the head of Homeland Security, said that the system worked because you go through and you quote the actual documents where, no, actually that is the system or that's, you know, other official statements in other contexts where, yes, the regular citizens on the plane are considered to be part of Homeland Security defense.
And then, of course, you ask the obvious question, then how come you disarm us then?
Yes, exactly.
Wouldn't it be nice if you had something to fight these guys back?
But think how convenient it makes it for the government.
When you have disarmed people, they can't fight back against you.
No matter what you tell them, they have to obey.
There have been incidents where planes have had, supposedly, had bomb threats against them.
What DTSA has done at that point is had the plane isolated on a runway, you know, far away from other flights, with passengers aboard.
Now, just imagine for a moment that you're one of those passengers.
You have just been told that there is a bomb threat on your plane, and you're not going to be able to get off of it.
Or perhaps you haven't been told, but you have a pretty good suspicion.
Something bad is going on, because we're being held here on this runway, far away from everything else.
And there are SWAT teams circling the plane.
Something really bad is going on here, and I can't get off.
Man, now that's the thing I can't understand, because how long does it take for them?
Seriously, how long does it take for them?
Well, see, I have a false premise, which is that they would be, one, you know, of at least average intelligence, two, that they would have proper motives, and three, be able to, you know, figure out what the hell to do at all.
But with all my false premises intact, I think what I would do if I was, I don't know, the head cop in that situation, is I would say, make sure you have enough cops around the plane that if there really is a bomber terrorist guy, he's not going to be able to run away and get away.
And then otherwise, get everybody off the freaking plane.
If there's a threat of a bomb, why are they trying to strap innocent people to the bomb?
Why wouldn't they let them away?
And you know what?
It makes me think that somewhere at the decision making, there actually is no reason or logic there at all.
Just a matter of, like, oh, gee, I think it's somebody else's responsibility to make this decision.
Uh-uh, I think it's somebody else's.
And nobody makes the decision to let the people off the plane.
Because what logic could there possibly be, Becky?
What logic could there possibly be to leaving them on the plane when they think that there may be a bomb on it?
I have no answer to that.
The only thing I've ever come up with is, possibly, they think if they can, basically what happens is the marshals go on and other law enforcement go on, and they take people off and escort them off one at a time and search them.
So that feeling I can figure is TSA is hoping against COVID actually comes up with a bona fide terrorist.
Because remember, the seven years it's been in existence, the $40, $45 billion we have spent on this stupid agency is completely wasted.
Not one terrorist has it ever uncovered.
So the TSA lives day to day hoping, hoping, hoping it can actually come up with one that it finds.
Not one like the underwear bomber that other passengers find or who's careless enough to let everybody know who he is, but that the TSA can actually say, yes, all are searching the five billion-plus pairs of shoes we've looked at, the two million daily passengers we humiliate and hassle.
It's all worth it, because look, we just saved 300 people's lives.
We found a terrorist.
So that's the only thing I come up with is that's what they're looking for.
But imagine being on that plane.
Imagine you are a father or mother with a child, and you are being told there's a bomb on this plane, we think, we're not sure.
You can't get off.
You have nothing with which to defend yourself against government goons forcing you to stay not only on the plane, but strapped into your seat.
You have been completely disarmed.
You are totally at their mercy.
Your only choice at that point is do you die with the bomb or do you die in a fusillade of bullets because you're trying to get off what you've been told is going to blow up.
Wow.
Is it really as stupid as you make it sound, Becky?
Yeah, it's actually stupider.
I don't have words to describe how stupid.
And let's also remember that not all of this is sheer stupidity.
A lot of this is outright corruption.
A lot of this is venality, okay?
It's been a very interesting business week as an article on how fast the stock prices for a corporation called L3 are rising because it makes millimeter wave scanning equipment, okay?
And this is fascinating to watch this now.
TSA has actually been pushing these millimeter wave scanners, which are the naked camera scanners.
They take pictures of passengers through their clothes.
You appear naked to the screener who's looking at the monitor.
These things, the TSA has been trying to push these gizmos on us since 2002, and they have been met with steadfast resistance.
Passengers do not want government goons leering at them in their birthday suits.
I think this is particularly heinous.
I mean, to me, I remember as a child reading tales of the Nazis and how they did this to victims entering concentration camps.
Concentration camps, very first stop was you stripped and they looked at you.
And I am astonished that the TSA would even consider something like this and that there hasn't been widespread rebellion at the fact that they are.
Now, there is a lot of resistance.
Now, there are some passengers that say they don't have any problem with it at all, but there have been enough saying, I won't submit to that with TSA.
As I said, has been trying since 2002 to get this stuff through and hasn't been able to.
Jason Chavis came out earlier this year with an amendment in the House.
He's a Republican congressman from Utah.
He came out with a bill that would have prohibited the TSA from using these scanners as primary screening.
In other words, every passenger on every flight at every airport in the country would be required to go through a millimeter wave scanner and be photographed naked before getting on the flight.
He put through a bill that said TSA can't do that.
They can only use them as secondary screening.
If TSA decides that you're suspicious, then you have to go through it or you can choose.
I always love the TSA's definition of choice.
You can choose to be groped instead.
Okay, that bill is now in the Senate.
It was awaiting, you know, it's time on the floor to be voted on.
Of course now, all of a sudden, very conveniently for the corporations making these incredibly expensive machines at $170,000 a pop for all 2,800 lanes at the airports in the country, very conveniently for them, the underwear bomber, if he had been through a millimeter wave scanner, of course they would have found the bomb.
All of a sudden, you have a lot of people...
Right, they wouldn't have just sat there smacking their gum and let them go through anyway.
Yeah, and you know...
No chance of that.
And imagine how much distraction you can sow in a screener's mind if you choose a very attractive and shapely woman to carry your bomb on board.
Do you really think he's going to be looking at the bomb or is he going to be looking elsewhere?
But at any rate, isn't this convenient now that all of a sudden when the TSA has been rolling these things out and it's accelerated it this year, it's been meeting a lot of resistance, the ACLU's done very good work trying to thwart it, EPIC, EFF, all of these groups and a lot of individuals, there have been individual women who have come out and said, I was pushed into this thing without my knowledge, TSA didn't tell me what this was, I just wound up in it and I was utterly humiliated when I found out what was going on.
So there's been a lot of resistance.
TSA is really still, after seven years, having a hard time getting these things through.
Now, all of a sudden, this resistance is conveniently melting away as we're told that the only thing that could have caught this guy before he got on board was a millimeter wave scanner.
So I go back to your point, Scott, it's, you know, I really wonder, who's he working for?
Was he working for Al-Qaeda or somebody else?
Well, I mean, the thing is, as long as the American government is killing hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people, there are going to be people who try to do stuff like this to us.
I mean, that doesn't mean that the Pentagon or the CIA can't fake something like this and hire a guy to hire a guy to hire a guy to do something stupid or whatever.
But, you know, in a way, there's so many different people's interests being served by it that it's almost not the point anymore.
I mean, my point really would be just that no matter how many more terrorist attacks there are or aren't, the solution should never be more power for the state.
I mean, hell, look at this, the whole policy.
Remember all those people dying and they said, hey, we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here.
They said, we're going to turn Iraq into the flypaper.
So all the terrorists will go there and we'll kill them there.
And then when they're dead, there won't be any terrorists anymore and everything will be fine.
And Obama says, well, we just have to do the same thing in Pakistan.
And now here's a guy from Nigeria, according to their story, anyway, a guy from Nigeria who stopped in Yemen and said, yeah, I'll get revenge for America attacking Yemen for you.
Sure.
Give me some money, put me on a plane, let's go.
And then he went and he tried it.
I mean, that's at least according to their story, the entire policy, Becky, of killing hundreds of thousands of people over the last eight years has been for nothing.
Yes, yes.
And we should expect that we will be paying the price as long as we let these sociopaths go around the world and create horrible mayhem and destruction everywhere they go.
You read some of the quotes from different secretaries of state and different directors of the CIA.
It's just absolutely mind boggling.
The arrogance, the utter inability to sympathize with anyone who isn't an American government official, the contempt these people have for other peoples and cultures.
And it's like, what do we expect if we are going to continue to sit back and let these people do this worldwide?
We're going to be paying the price.
You know, there was an idea abroad during the Civil War that all of the death and the horrible things that Americans on both sides were suffering was a direct retribution from God for slavery, for the evils of slavery.
And I don't know how else we can look at terrorism now and all of the police state tactics that are being employed.
As a Christian, I don't have any hesitation whatsoever to say, yes, I think the Lord is punishing America, because we are so far from the golden rule.
We go around the world enslaving people without being honest enough to call it that.
We go around the world murdering other people, again, without being honest enough to call it that.
We go around the world stealing money from people without being honest enough to call it that.
What do we expect?
So very much, we're going to reap what we sow.
And what we are sowing worldwide is what we're seeing come home to haunt us now.
And all of these police state tactics that are eating us alive, we're not going to get rid of them as long as we allow the U.S. military and U.S. politicians and bureaucrats to go elsewhere in the world and treat people that way.
I'm talking with Becky Akers from LewRockwell.com.
The article is called Christmas Kamikaze.
But of course, it's really more about the police state.
And I don't know about the supernatural and all that.
I'll leave your faith to you and others' faith to them.
But it's clear that there's such a thing as cause and effect.
You like to put them in whatever order you like, whoever you are.
I don't just mean you, but one may put them in whatever order they like.
It's a subjective kind of thing sometimes.
But yeah, I guess the real point is that the American people are so insulated from this violence.
It really is almost like when you talk about these wars, you're talking about a TV show that's really no more real than King of the Hill or anything else.
It's just this thing that's happening so far away somewhere.
And it really is such a small percentage of the American people who actually participate in the armed forces and actually participate in these wars.
There are a lot of Americans who don't know anyone in the military or who's been in the military any time recently or anything like that, kind of separated away from most of us.
And it can seem kind of not real.
It can seem like it's of no real consequence.
But it's very different, apparently, I guess, if you're an Iraqi or an Afghan or a Pakistani or someone from Somalia or from Yemen.
This is actual hell on earth.
Just like they say in the cliche, but for real.
And there's a thing called Robert Greenwald did a movie called Rethink Afghanistan.
And there's a piece in there.
You can watch it on Google Video where they're showing Afghans in this refugee camp where America's war has put them.
And they are praying for death.
It's like it's some of the most horrifying thing.
I'm trying not to be too sentimental because it seems fake for people I've never met so far away and whatever.
But like, man, that is some pretty sad footage.
These old ladies saying, you know, I wish God would just kill me rather than let me continue to live like this.
And this is really what America is doing.
I mean, if this was the olden days, you could literally have, you know, religious stories built around that time that the Americans came and killed everybody.
You know what I mean?
It's that level of violence, the kind of thing that will be remembered in history forever and ever and ever.
The time America tried to wage war on Islam and then blew itself up.
Yes, yes.
And it's also very harrowing to read the stories of the guys at Gitmo.
A lot of those men were simply kidnapped from their fields in Afghanistan or Pakistan.
They have absolutely no connection to terrorists whatsoever.
They were sold for the $5,000 reward the U.S. military was offering for, quote, terrorists.
They have been at Gitmo and been tortured.
This ought to scare outrage and horrify all of us, because remember that what the government does to helpless prisoners in Gitmo, it can do to helpless passengers on planes.
It can do to helpless prisoners in U.S. jails.
It can do to the rest of us, because most of us have been disarmed.
Most of us, even people who have shotguns and rifles and assorted other weapons, you don't stand a chance against an armed battalion from the U.S. Army.
And that, of course, is the whole point of the Second Amendment, not just that we be armed, but that we be armed far more than any government agent anywhere, because we're supposed to keep these people in their place.
The Founders understood the utterly murderous rampage that is government, and they meant for us to keep it in its place.
The way we do that is through being armed, being armed to the teeth.
Not that a SWAT guy carries more than we do.
We ought to be able to defeat the SWAT guy.
So, you know, again, if we don't keep the government in its place, it's going to come to us, it's going to sooner or later torture us.
No government in history has ever tortured only foreigners.
It's never happened.
The point of torture...
Hey, our government's already tortured Jose Padilla right out of his mind, and he's an American citizen right there.
Your precedent's already set, Becky, there.
Yes.
On that one.
Yes.
And so we all ought to, anytime there's torture going on anywhere, all of us...
I mean, it's just inconceivable to me again that there is not outright rebellion in the streets over this.
Now, of course, torture has gone on in America from the American government for a long, long time.
You know, cops routinely tortured people, beat them up, that sort of thing.
And of course, our proxies in South America and Africa and the Middle East and Asia and everywhere else.
Yes, but that was all under the table.
It was never officially condoned.
That's why the Bush administration is spectacularly and uniquely heinous.
It brought this stuff out into the open and condoned it.
I mean, it's one thing to bring it out in the open and reform it and abolish it and say, no, you're not going to do this anymore.
It's another thing to say, yeah, yeah, I order people to be tortured, and you know what?
I'd do it again because I'm protecting America.
No, you aren't.
You have just destroyed the Constitution.
Yeah.
Well, and I mean, it's easy to see.
Zarqawi and Zawahiri both were tortured before they became the terrorist enemies of the United States that they became and on like that.
And a lot of the other people, of course, are fighting on behalf of the tortured.
That's it.
We're all out of time.
Thank you very much for yours today, Becky.
Thank you, Scott.
Everybody, that's Becky Akers from LewRockwell.com.
Sorry to cut you off, but we're out.