This past weekend, I was reminded of how pleasant it was to fly prior to 9/11. I was flying from Memphis, Tennessee, to Hot Springs, Arkansas, on a commuter airline named Southern Airways. The terminal was in a completely different building that was located pretty far from the main airport terminal. When I walked into the building, I felt that I had gone through a time warp and was back in the 1950s. It was an old building and there were old photographs on the walls. There was also free coffee and snacks for all the passengers.
And everyone was SO nice and friendly. I had checked my suitcase and assumed that it would go all the way to Hot Springs. Instead, the Southern Airways agent made a telephone call and ascertained that it was actually at the Memphis luggage carousel. So, I was going to have to Uber back to the main terminal to get it and then Uber back. Instead, get this: The ticket agent for Southern Airways took me back to the main terminal in her personal car to retrieve my bag. When was the last time you experienced anything like that?
But here was the big thing: No security! No metal detector. No body scanning. No TSA screaming. No pat-down searches. No taking off of shoes. No removal of laptop. No taking off of coat. No confiscation of water. No anything!
One of the two pilots gave us a very friendly 2-minute safety briefing and then led the five of us out of the building. We boarded the plane, which had a single propeller and six passenger seats inside. There was no barrier separating us from the pilots. We could see outside the windshield!
I told a 21-year-old woman who was sitting next to me that this is what life was like before the 9/11 attacks. No TSA searches. No metal detectors. No body scanning. None of that intrusive security junk that violates people’s fundamental, God-given right of privacy.
There is something important to keep in mind about all this: It is the Pentagon and the CIA who brought all this on. It is they who have made flying such a miserable experience.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. officials, including those in the Pentagon and the CIA, claimed that the terrorists had struck America because of their hatred for America’s “freedom and values.”
That was a downright, unmitigated, no-good, rotten lie. Hatred for America’s “freedom and values” had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was hatred for the deaths and suffering that the Pentagon and the CIA had been inflicting on people in the Middle East that motivated the 9/11 attackers.
After the Pentagon and the CIA lost the Soviet Union as their official Cold War enemy in 1989, they desperately needed a new official enemy to justify their existence and their ever-growing taxpayer-funded largess. They needed a new racket. That’s when they went into the Middle East and began wreaking death, suffering, impoverishment, and destruction on people in that part of the world.
In the process, they knew full well that ultimately people would retaliate with terrorist attacks. There was the killing of CIA personnel in McLean, Virginia. There was also the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center. There was the attack on the USS Cole. And there were the attacks on the U.S. Embassies in East Africa. All of those attacks had been motivated by anger and rage arising from the Pentagon’s and the CIA’s deadly and destructive crusade in the Middle East.
There were people warning U.S. officials that if they didn’t cease and desist from their deadly and destructive crusade, the result would ultimately be a major terrorist attack on U.S. soil. But the Pentagon and the CIA knowingly, intentionally, and deliberately ignored those warnings. Instead, they just ramped up their killing machine, knowing full well what the result was likely to be.
Thus, when the 9/11 attacks came, the Pentagon and the CIA got what they wanted — a new official enemy — “terrorism” (and, to a certain extent, Islam and the supposed centuries-old quest by Muslims to establish a worldwide caliphate). The “war on terrorism” became a bigger racket than the “war on communism.”
And that’s when flying on planes was transformed into a miserable experience, one that is intended to keep us “safe” from the terrorists that the Pentagon and the CIA produce with their interventionist antics abroad.
The best thing that the American people could ever do is dismantle the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA (and the FBI too) and restore America’s founding system of a limited-government republic, one that comes with just a relatively small basic military force. Not only would this strengthen our nation, it would also constitute a gigantic step forward in the restoration of our rights, liberties, and privacy. It would also make flying an enjoyable experience again.
