Fear of the innocent: the insanity behind ‘clean skins’
April 7th, 2007In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Michael Chertoff, who arrives in Britain tomorrow for talks with John Reid, the Home Secretary, said the US was determined to build extra defences against so-called “clean skin” terrorists from Europe.
“We need to build layers of protection, and I don’t think we totally want to rely upon the fact that a foreign government is going to know that one of their citizens is suspicious and is going to be coming here,” he said.Mr Chertoff insisted that the US required additional information, including email addresses and credit card details, to vet European passengers and rejected “the idea that we’re going to bargain with the European Union over who’s going to come into the United States” under the visa waiver scheme.
“We have an absolute right to get this, in the same way that if someone wants to be a guest in my house I have a right to ask them who they are and get identification.”
The July 7 tube and bus bombs nearly two years ago had shown that Britain had a problem with its Muslim immigrant population that America did not share, he argued.
“Our Muslim population is better educated and economically better off than the average American. So, from a standpoint of mobility in society, it’s a successful immigrant population. To some degree, the whole country is a country of immigrants, and therefore there’s no sense that we have insiders or outsiders. In some countries [in Europe], you had an influx of people that came in as a colonial legacy and may have always have felt, to some extent, that they were viewed as second-class citizens, and they’ve tended to impact and be kind of clustered in some areas.”
Mr Chertoff, a former federal prosecutor, said that one of his biggest worries was that “unknown terrorists” – such as most of the 7/7 bombers, who were British citizens with no criminal record or intelligence traces – could use the visa waiver scheme to enter and attack America. […]
What does this really mean?
It means that not only do they not trust people in their dirty database of ‘terrorists’ but that everyone who is NOT in that database, the ‘clean skins’ is ALSO a suspect.
This is obviously as unsustainable as the absurd and insane ‘threat level’ meter that has now been abandoned, and I predict that this ‘strategy’ will be abandoned as unworkable, useless and a total waste of money, as is the case with the utterly offensive USVISIT.
Once again, the vendors are pushing for an upgrade of technology. There is not a single case of someone being missed by USVIST because they only have two prints instead of ten. This is a totally made up reason for retrofitting the system. But you know this.
What is going to happen is that they are going to run out of strategies. When that happens, they will simply give up. Like the scene from The Man Who Fell to Earth where Newton is simply abandoned, because they could not get anything out of him, couldn’t do any thing with him….they just left the secret facility one day and that was it; no explanation, no rationale, just over.
The database, which can only be used to harass and abuse people will be dismantled. The public will become fed up with surveillance and harassment, just like the people living under the Soviets did. This whole episode will be seen as a monumental failure and a waste of astronomical sums of money.
Shame on them all for participating in it.