A recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon targets the TSA’s invasive airport searches.

While everyone is up in arms about the TSA’s security methods, let us not forget the bigger picture, that such practices are enabled because we have passively let the government create a national security state that thinks it can abuse people at will.

The really serious abuses are happening elsewhere, in the denial of basic protections to preserve the life and liberty promised in the constitution. Paul Craig Roberts provides a horrific account of what the government did with Omar Khadr and to Dr. Aafia Siddiqui and her three young children who are now missing.

As Roberts says:

We have a Congress that has forfeited its power to declare war and sits complicit while the president not only usurps its power but uses illegitimate power to commit war crimes by launching naked aggressions on the basis of lies and deception.

We have a Congress that turns a blind eye to criminal actions by the president, vice president, and executive branch, including violations of US statutory law against torture, violations of US statutory law against spying on Americans without warrants, and violations of every legal protection in the Bill of Rights, from the right of privacy to habeas corpus.

The hallmarks of the remade US legal system, thanks to the “war on terror,” are coerced self-incrimination and indefinite detention or murder without charges or evidence.

We should not be satisfied with reforming just airport security, we should seek the dismantling of the entire national security state and restoring the democratic rights that are being stolen from us.