Code Red at Jet Blue.

Lately I've been amusing myself by alerting friends and acquaintances to the striking resemblance between George W. Bush and Ted Bundy. It goes beyond the merely physical. I've seen a lot of footage of Bundy. The gestures, the facial expressions, the tone of voice and inflection, especially when telling some blatant lie?they're identical. Naturally this has led me to fantasize about a treason trial, and how wonderful it would be to see Bush in an electric chair. I'd pay to see that. I'll bet he would whine and cry, just like Bundy did. Time Warner could put it on pay-per-view. They'd make millions.

The catalog of criminal acts against the Republic perpetrated by Bush and his consiglieres and capos since he oozed his way into the Oval Office is astounding. It is a testimonial to the stupidity and apathy of the American people that they haven't risen up with pitchforks and torches and taken the White House apart brick by brick. Clinton was rightfully impeached for lying about a single blowjob. Yet Bush, a smirking little psychopath who deserted from the National Guard in time of war, lied about an imminent threat to the physical security and well-being of the United States to get us into a war.

As part of their ongoing plan to loot and destroy America, the apparatchiks of the Bush regime have initiated measures aimed toward the creation of an internal passport. They've hired Gen. Yevgeny Primakov, former Prime Minister, to consult with our own Office of Information Awareness on the details of this effort. These creatures believe that your constitutionally mandated "inalienable rights" are nothing more than privileges granted by the state, to be revoked at whim.

Everybody I know who regularly flies in or out of New York took to Jet Blue immediately. In an industry dominated by a customer-be-damned attitude, Jet Blue was the very model of a customer-oriented airline. It was incredibly refreshing to be treated by an airline as if your business really mattered to them. Therefore it was all the more dismaying to learn last week that Jet Blue essentially engaged in a field test of the new CAPPS II passenger-screening system in collaboration with a private contractor, Torch Concepts, of Huntsville, AL. This field test involved Jet Blue handing over the personal data on some five million customers who flew from 2000 to mid-2002. The sharing of this data was in direct violation of Jet Blue's stated policy on customer privacy and was executed with no notice whatsoever to the customers involved.

CAPPS II is a police-state mechanism, a purely Soviet device. It requires airlines to collect passengers' full legal name, actual residence address, home phone number and date of birth prior to booking a reservation. This information would be turned over to the government, whose contractors would then match the data to third-party information databases, such as credit reporting agencies, and government databases, including property ownership, tax records and law enforcement. The customer would then be profiled and assigned a color code, which would determine the level of screening the customer would be subjected to prior to boarding the flight, if indeed the customer is permitted to fly at all.

Torch Concepts' own report regarding the field test is very revealing, and gives a good indication of what is ahead for the estimated 600 million ticketed passengers who fly each year in this country. (The full report is available at cryptome.org/jetblue-spy.pdf.) The most interesting part of the report, especially for New Yorkers, has to do the company's categorizing of Jet Blue customers. On page 22, Torch delineates two major categories of passengers: young middle-income home owners with short length-of-residence and older upper-income home owners with longer length-of-residence.

All other customers were classified as "anomalous." If you rent, if you are older and recently moved, if you are in any way "lower-income," you are "anomalous" and may be in line for the airport cavity search at the airport?if they allow you to fly at all. No doubt if you have any history of civil disobedience or saying unkind things about foreign policy and/or the Bush regime, you'll be taking the train.

Furthermore, CAPPS II could use this screening process to capture and detain such enemies of the state as deadbeat dads, parking-ticket scofflaws, tax evaders and anyone with an outstanding warrant or debt. Presumably this will prevent goatherders from Afghanistan from taking over any aircraft with boxcutters and plunging them into important edifices. Where this gets really Soviet is that anyone with a government security clearance or what is defined as a "position of trust and confidence" gets a free ride through all of this. They can arrive at the airport at the last minute?just like we all used to be able to do?and saunter right through the security checkpoint without further ado. They will never be screened, delayed, groped, asked to show their tits or cavity searched.

Privacy expert and activist John Gilmore puts it like this: "There'll be one rule for 'Party Members' and another rule for the 'proletariat.' CAPPS II assumes you are guilty until proven innocent?and assumes you are innocent if you work for the government. That alone is reason enough to stop it."

It's not the law of the land yet, but it will be if the American public doesn't get off its collective ass and do something about it. Ted Bundy's in the White House, and Josef Stalin is alive and well, and his name is John Ashcroft.