NATO Summit, the Chicago Way and Fortress America

No-Fly Zone To Be Enforced By Shoot-To-Kill Order During NATO Summit « CBS Chicago:

NATO has the occasional summit and there's going to be one soon in Chicago. These summits are met with massive protests and this should be an especially bad one with the Occupy movement active. Chicago has a tradition of police riots as well as regular rioting. There's also lots and lots of old fashioned murder and mayhem in Chicago so this has the potential of being very bad. There's a high-rise condo building that's actually locking residents in for several days as it's going to be too dangerous to have doors that open near the summit site.

The article that inspired this blog post is about how the Air Force has been ordered to shoot down planes that come within ten miles of the summit. Non-commercial flights aren't supposed to enter that zone anyway, since there are airports and skyscrapers and millions of people at risk if your plane's engine conks out. Similar zones exist around most cities for this reason. They aren't shoot-to-kill zones, however. The White House under Clinton was almost hit by a small plane (it crashed onto the South Lawn, I believe) and there were fighter jets dispatched during the Bush administration when planes got too close to the White House. It's rare, but there are morons with pilot's licenses.

The shoot-to-kill thing troubles me because we've seen this administration decide that it can kill Americans that it considers terrorists anywhere in the world without so much as an indictment (a DA famously said that he could get a ham sandwich indicted as an example of how easy the process is). The administration has produced a legal brief explaining how it found this right, but the brief is classified. No, really. Obama is using drones in the Middle East to kill people at several times the rate that Bush did, even though Obama said that it was wrong to do so. Just like how Guantanamo's terrorist prison was going to be closed by him, except it wasn't. Now he's okay with shooting down planes over a major American city if the need arises.

One of the problems with a big government is that it has mission creep. It keeps making more and more jobs for itself, new mandates and regulations. Remember how the TSA was going to do security at the airports only? Not anymore. They have searched train passengers AFTER they arrived at their destination and checked IDs at a Social Security office. It's not what the law establishing them gave them the right to do, but that doesn't matter. They can expand themselves to the point where they are checking IDs (but not to see if someone's an illegal alien, heavens, no) at federal building which would be the job of local security or the US Marshalls. The Department of Education recently bought shotguns and conducted a SWAT-style raid (body armor, automatic weapons, the whole bit) on the house of the husband of a woman possibly involved in student loan fraud. This was before the Department of Homeland Security bought 450,000,000 rounds of pistol ammo. At the rate of usage in the Iraq war, that's six years and five months worth of ammunition usage. Does the Department of Education need a SWAT team? Does the TSA need to interfere with the current security at federal buildings? You have duplication of equipment and forces doing the same job poorly at several times the cost. There's no accountability to the voters because Congress didn't write any laws giving authority to do these things.

The problem with the War on Terror is that it's a tactic. You can sit around and come up with two or three ideas for terror attacks an hour without much effort. Here are five:

1. Using crop dusters to spray chemical weapons around a water reservoir.
2. Two or three truck bombs (think Oklahoma City) detonate during rush hour on bridges in New York.
3. Car bomb in the tailgating section of a stadium.
4. Suicide bomber at the TSA checkpoint in an airport.
5. Truck bomb parked on train tracks next to a bridge.

Between one and three terrorists are required for those attacks. Right now, as I write this, I can hear a prop airplane flying a few miles away. I'm not terrified because the chance of it being a terrorist is one in billions. The goal of terrorism is terror. The terrorists want us scared because scared people are stupid and make bad decisions. The TSA and the DHS were stupid decisions and so is shooting down planes over Chicago. 

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