If you had the misfortune to be blown up by the Tsarnaev brothers, and are now facing a future with one leg and suddenly circumscribed goals, like those brave Americans featured on the cover of the current People magazine under the headline “Boston Tough,” you might wish Boston had been a little tougher on Tamerlan and spent less time chasing the phantoms of “Free America Citizens.” But, in fact, it would have been extremely difficult to track the Tsarnaevs at, say, the mosque they attended. Your Granny’s phone calls, your teenager’s Flickr stream, and your Telecharge tickets for two on the aisle at Mamma Mia! for your wife’s birthday, and the MasterCard bill for dinner with your mistress three days later are all fair game, but since October 2011 mosques have been off-limits to the security state. If the FBI guy who got the tip-off from Moscow about young Tamerlan had been sufficiently intrigued to want to visit the Boston mosque where he is said to have made pro-terrorism statements during worship, the agent would have been unable to do so without seeking approval from something called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee high up in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. The Sensitive Operations Review Committee is so sensitive nobody knows who’s on it. You might get approved, or you might get sentenced to extra sensitivity training for the next three months. Even after the bombing, the cops forbore to set foot in the lads’ mosque for four days. Three hundred million Americans are standing naked in the NSA digital scanner, but the all-seeing security state has agreed that not just their womenfolk but Islam itself can be fully veiled from head to toe.
We have a government that’s doing all sorts of things that it shouldn’t be doing, and is utterly incompetent at both them, and the things it should be doing.
Or as David Burge put it in 140 characters or less:
Govt has to scrape all your phone calls and emails because govt forgot to enforce immigration law on 20 expired visas in 2001.
Is the same exemption applied to other religious institutions. (Not suggesting that Baptists or Seventh Day Adventists have much of a record for blowing people up with bombs, just curious about the policy.)
We have a government where a large percentage should be doing prison time.
The big picture is clear and has been for a long time. They are a combination of incompetent and evil… but not incompetent at being evil and evading responsibility.
They will never hold themselves to account. We have to do it. We aren’t. We’d better get started. It’s really tough to win if you don’t enter the race.
Anarcho-Tyranny