Like Sheep To the Slaughter

From a story on the uselessness of the terror alert system come this pearl:

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, at a Reuters Washington Summit in mid-October, acknowledged problems with the advisory system.

"The problem is a color code, or a number, or whatever, without information to people as to what it means, and what they're supposed to do, that's really where the frustration is," Napolitano said at the summit. "The code itself, absent a connection with real information, doesn't have much utility."

But that's just the point, really, isn't it? Americans aren't supposed to learn or care about what kinds of terrorist threats there are, nor why any of these threats exist. We're supposed to see a sign with pretty colors, and then react like sheep, get scared, and let the government take away a few more of our precious American civil liberties.

This is not hyberbole. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was pressured to use the terror alert system to scare the public into voting for Bush, who used this victory to continue the destruction of the rule of law and US civil liberties.

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

This worked pretty well for a while. But now Americans are beginning to question why we are supposedly facing a never-ending existential threat from people who just don't like our movies or taste in music. They want details. They want to know why we are sacrificing American ideals and spending hundreds of billions of dollars fighting wars we can't win against people who shouldn't hate us.

Authoritarian rulers love to scare the people. But they're going to have to come up with something better than this pretty soon.