The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

Going back to the 1990s, Osama bin Laden didn’t like the idea of Americans with weapons (instead of cameras) in Saudi Arabia, the nation of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He said so with both words and a truck bomb. It was the beginning of a suspicion-driven relationship with a succession of American governments.

In the 1980s he had been supported by the US as he fought alongside the Mujahedeen to oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. But then, the money stream from the CIA must have dried up, witness the frictions that developed.

After the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 to defeat Osama’s hosts, the Taliban, Al Qaeda left the Tora Bora caves by mule and found sanctuary in the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan. There, he made a few audio and video tapes to broadcast his message to the world.  In 2004, he set out his aims — to bankrupt the US with a few roadside bombs to which the US mighty military would respond with a massive answer of booms. In that speech Osama said that every dollar of Al Qaeda “defeated a million dollars [the US spent], by the permission of of Allah.” It was “easy to provoke and bait the Bush Administration.”

The Gadfly Revelry and Research Team says the goal of US bankruptcy is a smoke screen. What Osama is really after is more scary. Here’s the simple historic sequence. The hijackers of 9-11 turned box cutters into weapons, as it is said. Thereafter, box cutters and nail clippers and sewing scissors were banned on all flights. The actual weapons of mass destruction — the commercial jetliners — could not be banned in our capitalocracy. Little more than three months later, while we were concentrating on sharp objects, the shoe bomber enlarged the weapons list. His smoking shoe failed to go off, but immediately afterward, passengers had to to remove their shoes for special inspection while they, themselves, went through metal detectors in bare feet.

Then, Al Qaeda moved beyond knives and exploding shoes. In 2006, a group of would-be terrorists were going to create bombs out of sports drinks and detonate them on planes flying to the US from England. The CIA and MI5 said so. But, the wannabes had not bought airline tickets, nor did they own a computer. They had visited a computer cafe, though, to look over airline schedules. After their capture, all airline passengers were banned from carrying any kind of liquid onto a plane — no soft drinks, no hard drinks, no perfume …

With all the delays, scanning, and carry on restrictions, the American public was becoming uneasy. They started to question why the US intelligence services — all 16 of them — were merely reacting to the previous terrorist attempts and not anticipating Al Qaeda’s imaginative thinking. Then came the Christmas bomber from Nigeria via Yemen. As we all found out — the FAA, too — he was wearing a bomb in his underwear. Right away, the companies making scanners fine-tuned their machines to show our underwear. The trouble was the improved scanners also showed the image of each body. Every point of entry for boarding the airlines would become an adult bookstore where the security people would view us down to our skin. Public outcry followed. The scanner companies reacted by offering to program their technology to defocus our faces. That was not enough for the ACLU and some right wing libertarians who suspected the NSA would end up with our nude photos. Or, they might even sell some of the images to commercial diet companies. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have airline passengers disrobe and deposit their underduds in a basket?

Al Qaeda, with the help of the underwear bomber, has now taken us from the fear of terrorism to the fear of embarrassment. What will be next — Sharia law and a holy Qur’an in every hotel room?