No Sooner Said Than Done

Yesterday, I noted that border ‘exit interviews’ are being required for private airplanes, and asked what’s to keep Homeland Security from requiring them for people in private automobiles. Today, Ed drove down to Bellingham and points south and upon his return to the border at Peace Arch, was treated to an exit interview by the U.S. border people as he was driving to the Canadian border people. The exit interviews were being required of both Nexus and Non-Nexus travelers.

And what were their questions? Where are you going? Do you live there? What were you doing down here? Where do you fly out of?

“What were you doing down here in the U.S.?” This is now a question that we ask of a U.S. citizen. Not only that but a U.S. citizen in the fabulous trusted traveler program. Not very trusted. When last I checked, American citizens have a constitutional right to travel anywhere in the U.S. And I would think that might include not having law officers ask you what you are doing if they have no reason to believe you are doing anything that is against the law. But then, oh, right, I forgot: he was in a ‘Constitution-Free Zone,’ that amazing little circle that travels around with the border people, wherever they choose to be (within 100 miles of the actual border/coastline).

Karl Kraus, an Austrian journalist-writer who died in 1936 (and thus didn’t get to see where it all ended up in the 20th Century) once wrote that Vienna was ‘the research laboratory for world destruction.” Ah, where has the laboratory moved to today?