Every time you go to the airport and are forced to undergo the TSA screening process, including the possibility of pat-down searches, keep in mind that this is for one reason alone: to ensure that the CIA and the Pentagon continue to have the “right” to intervene and meddle in the affairs of other nations. That’s what the destruction of our liberty and privacy are all about — foreign interventionism. It is not about protecting our freedom because no one is threatening to invade and conquer the United States.

The destruction of our liberty and privacy are justified under the rubric that the terrorists are coming to do bad things to us. But the reason that foreigners want to do bad things to us is because the CIA and the Pentagon insist on their “right” to continue doing bad things to foreigners with their coups, interventions, invasions, occupations, assassinations, kidnappings, indefinite detention, and torture.

If all U.S. troops and CIA agents in foreign lands were brought home and discharged or fired and sent into the private sector — that is, if all U.S. interventionism were to cease and desist — life for Americans would return to normal. No more anti-American terrorism and, therefore, no more war on terrorism. No more PATRIOT Act, no more mass secret surveillance, no more Homeland Security, and no more TSA.

Which will it be: liberty and privacy or continued interventionism and continued destruction of our rights and liberties in the name of keeping us “safe and secure” from the threats that their interventionism produces?