We lost the war on terror

Doug Thompson at Capitol Hill Blue makes a chilling case on how and why the United States has lost the war on terror.

Osama and his buddies wanted to destroy the American way of life.

They succeeded.

Six years after the attacks, America is a paranoid, corrupt, rotting shell of itself: A country divided by political extremes, economically devastated by a war based on lies.

Gone are the freedoms we used to cherish and take for granted: Buried not under the rubble of the twin towers of the World Trade Center but by a callous Presidential administration that considers the Constitution an “outdated document” and individual rights a disposable commodity.

The Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath of 9/11 and now the largest federal bureaucracy in history, decides who can or cannot board a commercial airliner in this country, who can or cannot obtain a passport and who can or cannot even criticize their government.

In a non-descript building on Fairfax Drive in Arlington, Virginia, a giant government computer developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) monitors everyday financial transactions and tracks day-to-day travel of millions of Americans. If either fits a pre-determined “profile” an investigative file is opened on those Americans.

FBI agents, armed with thousands of “National Security Letters” swoop in on banks, employers and Internet service providers to secretly obtain records on Americans. A federal judge recently found such tactics unconstitutional but stayed an order banning the practice so the government can appeal.

On street corners in many large cities, cameras scan the faces of people just going about their business and feed the images into “facial recognition” software programs, looking for those “suspected” of terrorist involvement. Americans who fall into the web of “suspected” involvement are grabbed off the streets and whisked away to secret detention centers out of the country where “enhanced interrogation techniques” are used to try and obtain confessions.