The Terror Industrial Complex, as “Frontline” Calls It, Is a Metastatic Cancer — Unproductive, Egregiously Costly, and a Threat to American Civil Liberties

© 2011 Peter Free

 

20 January 2011

 

 

Frontline aired Dana Priest’s investigation into this malignant extension of unnecessary, unproductive government power

 

Washington Post reporter Dana Priest has investigated burgeoning anti-terrorism intelligence/industrial operations, which exceed anyone’s ability track.

 

Former four-star General Michael Hayden, who directed the National Security Administration and later the Central Intelligence Agency said, “I would never claim to you that I knew all the compartments.”

 

Absurdly, these secret money-sucking expansions of hysterical paranoia have not even been able to equal the productive capacities of old-fashioned citizen reporting and police work.

 

The Paranoia Complex is, consequently, a colossal waste of money.  Due to secrecy, no one knows just how many resources it wastes or even what programs taxpayer money goes toward.

 

If that lack of accountability is not the antithesis of intelligent democracy, I don’t know what is.

 

The terror-industrial complex simultaneously poses a frightening threat to citizen privacy and freedoms.

 

Witness, for (minor) example, the Maryland State Police use of computerized patrol car cameras to serially photograph, and records check, the license plates of passing cars for no reason at all.

 

 

“Big Brother is my friend,” right?

 

If you want to see the very real beginnings of a “Big Brother Is Watching You” America, look at this documentary.

 

 

Citation

 

Michael Kirk, Are We Safer?, Frontline (January 2011)

 

 

Transcript

 

A transcript of the program is here.

 

 

Before you dismiss my warning as a quasi-libertarian overreaction —

 

Look at the Frontline production and compare what you see and hear with your own experiences with self-interested, paranoid bureaucracies of this kind.

 

Then, let’s talk about what voters should do.