It's just like with JFK - the CIA wanted Lee Harvey Oswald to be "the lone gunman" so if you have a nutcase, you don't have a conspiracy. Too bad it surfaced that Oswald had been to Mexico and had ties to the CIA and that the bullets fired didn't match the location of the book repository, etc. So, now we have a "Lone Terrorist" as a class of patsy to use at whim. Usually will be the Arab immigrant unable to secure legal aid anyhow. Once established, anyone can be the patsy. When Uncle Sam wants to disappear someone, they become "The Lone Terrorist." Simple, sweet, clean. The sheep will buy it. "He was a lone terrorist, kept to himself, valued his privacy..." Funny how we went from the Declaration of Independence that says "We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" to enumerate such rights in the Bill of Rights, to the USA PATRIOT act which removes all Liberty and due process at the slightest whim of any burrowcrat in the right agency. There was some Asimov robot story about this world where the robots' laws were bypassed by changing the definition of human to those from a specific planet only, thus having the robots kill outsiders to defend them. Eventually they tweaked it so deeply that the robots killed everyone. This is a pretty standard sci-fi theme. In this case, "citizen" goes away, as do rights. "He's not a citizen, he's a lone terrorist." Ditto "protected witness" and "illegal combattant" as a way to remove rights. It's has not been 98'C for quite some time now, and the frog has long been boiled. ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :NSA got $20Bil/year |Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :and didn't stop 9-11|share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:Instead of rewarding|monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :their failures, we |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :should get refunds! |site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------ On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Eric Murray wrote:
WTF is a "lone terrorist"?