Naturally, that has Our Rulers and their propagandists in the corporate media damning Mr. Oyewole as a dire threat to the ole Homeland.

Mr. Oyewole, now 54, arrived in this country 23 years ago. Therein lies the first sin with which Leviathan charged him earlier this week: he didn’t ask a bureaucrat’s permission to exercise his God-given and inalienable right to travel and live where and how he pleases. Ergo, he has degenerated from solid serf to one of America’s most reviled lepers, an “illegal” immigrant.
 
We might expect so dastardly a criminal to laze about on welfare all day, sucking down food-stamps and watching TV. Au contraire. Mr. Oyewole found a job as a guard with the private company policing Newark Airport and proceeded to work industriously enough that he currently supervises thirty underlings. As Michael McKeon, a spokesman for Mr. Oyewole’s employer, put it, "During his time with FJC [Security Services], he had nothing in his record or his performance to indicate a cause for concern or a reason to question the state police and federal government's background checks.”
 
And those “background checks” were numerous. Yet as “Jerry Thomas,” Mr. Oyewole passed them all with flying colors – even though the real Mr. Thomas was a “petty criminal” someone shot dead in New York City in 1992. The State contends that Mr. Oyewole “began using Thomas' birth certificate and Social Security number three weeks before Thomas' murder.” (Intriguingly, Mr. Oyewole has pleaded innocent to charges of “identity theft” — and indeed, he didn't swipe anything: Our Rulers allege that Thomas sold his ID to a cabbie, who in turn sold it to Mr. Oyewole.)
 
So here we have Mr. O's second non-crime. He, and not the incompetent bureaucracies checking his fingerprints and background, is at fault for peaceably living and working as someone he wasn’t – though the government admits he adopted Mr. Thomas’ identity solely to hide from its unconstitutional persecution of immigrants. New Jersey’s “Port Authority, which operates the area's main airports and other transit hubs, … said its investigation found no indication that he used the fake identity for any reason other than to live in the United States.”
 
Ironically, Mr. Oyewole’s story hit the headlines the same day that a new report on the TSA’s ineptitude did. Its brood of pinheads and perverts was one of the many that repeatedly snooped into Mr. Oyewole’s background, all to protect America from a man who so admired it he left his home, family, and everything familiar to join its alien culture. The agency that has “its eagle sights set on your underwear and water bottle,” to quote wired.com's delicious prose, denied as it always does any culpability for “miss[ing] the real security threat under its nose.”
 
As we descend further into government’s Wonderland, remember that Mr. Oyewole presented no “real security threat” whatever. But that doesn’t stop the Feds from pretending he’s immensely dangerous. And precisely the sort of ruffian from which the TSA allegedly guards us: “security” from the likes of Mr. Oyewole is why its deviants thrust their hands down our pants. Yet the TSA egregiously failed to ferret him out.
 
The report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) documents plenty more such failures. They occur, the OIG assures us in flawless jargon, because the TSA has no consistent method for internally communicating such mishaps. Yo, OIG: they occur because government is unutterably, totally, without exception incompetent at everything, all the time. Its minions can’t even find “threats” they themselves have manufactured out of whole cloth.
 
Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) wasted our taxes on commissioning this report – yet another in a very long series from the OIG proving the TSA’s worthlessness. Each of the series’ installments provokes the same reaction: Congress flutters its filthy paws and moans awhile, the TSA agrees to some of the OIG’s recommendations, and then it resumes groping passengers as usual. This time, our money also bought publicity for The Lout, with the media blaring his name in every story about the OIG’s findings. Behold the depths of senatorial slime: while the TSA gate-rapes children and strip-searches grannies, The Lout worries about how the agency’s brutes in the field communicate with HQ.
 
All while Jerry Thomas’ murder remains unsolved. Perhaps in part that’s because Our Rulers obsess over punishing such non-criminals as Mr. Oyewole. At any rate, “police in New York said Tuesday there is no evidence tying Oyewole to Thomas' shooting.” You can bet your bippy they’re trying to find some, though: how better to stoke the anti-immigrant hysteria than to parade an “illegal” killer before the sheeple?
 
Meantime, Leviathan contents itself with persecuting a mere “identity thief.” But it’s made the most of Mr. Oyewole’s third non-crime, that of assuming a dead man’s name: “Standing in an orange prison jumpsuit and flanked by two sheriff's officers, Oyewole appeared … [in] the Essex County Correctional Facility where he has been held since his arrest Monday... . Municipal Court Judge Roslyn Holmes-Grant raised his bail from $75,000 to $250,000 after Deputy Attorney General Vincent Militello noted that prosecutors believe Oyewole may have used several aliases over the years. ‘We simply do not know who this gentleman is,’ Militello told the judge. ‘Therefore he is a flight risk.’"

Hey, Vinny, correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t flight exactly what you want here? Aren’t you hoping this “illegal” wipes America’s dust from his feet and wings it back to Nigeria? How’s about letting him do just that, saving taxpayers the costs of imprisoning him for ten years (yep, government is nothing if not cruel and vengeful. Imagine caging a guy for a decade because he helped himself to something for which a dead man has no further use)?
 
You needn’t be an anarchist to recognize the lunacy here. Indeed, we might suppose that even the staunchest statist would blush at his god’s imbecility. But no. “Experts” and the media fulminate over the imminent danger this “employee with an unblemished record” posed for twenty years: “Oyewole had access to sensitive areas of the airport, including the tarmac and the planes themselves.” Oh, horrors! No telling what a man working hard to better himself might do to either. “The employees he supervised also inspected cargo vehicles for possible unauthorized cargo…” Yikes! What if our bad boy corrupted them, too? Perhaps they’re even now aspiring to a promotion and raise in pay. Thank Heaven that though Mr. Oyewole’s “clearance allowed him access to secure areas throughout the airport, … he still had to pass through metal detectors, a Transportation Security Administration official said.” You know how efficiently metal detectors sniff out “illegals.” Oh, wait: I’ve confused metal detectors with the TSA’s “Mexican Hunters” at Newark Airport – the racists who preyed on Hispanic folks, despite the TSA’s assurances that its goons never, ever discriminate. And then there’s “Charles Slepian, a security expert and founder of the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center,” who opined that Mr. Oyewole “is an example of what can happen when you don't screen your personnel very well’…”
 
Really, Chuck? In that case, may I suggest Americans immediately shed their fixation with identification? Whatever his name, Mr. Oyewole lived here quietly and productively for almost a quarter of a century. His proficiency satisfied his employer enough to promote him. Nor would he ever have come to Leviathan’s attention but for an anonymous snitch (yet another bane for “illegals”: they are ripe for extortion and exploitation). Whether he calls himself “Bimbo Olumuyiwa Oyewole,” “Jerry Thomas,” or even “The Rose” changes none of that.

Likewise, flashing a driver’s license may comfort folks who confuse that act with waving a magic wand, but it protects nothing other than the jobs of the DMV’s leeches – and the police state, of course: “Papers, please” has ever been the cry of totalitarians. Yet this silliness pervades the public sector, where the TSA has so dogmatically tied ID to “security” that most people accept the link without question.

Worse, It’s spread to the private sphere. Clerks in shops large and small, hotels and even supermarkets routinely demand ID for purchases with credit cards – despite the credit-card companies’ insistence that merchants spare us such abuse. Nor has any cashier anywhereever compared my license against the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List. “Becky Akers” might top that catalog, but the innkeeper scrutinizing my ID would never know.
 
A rose by any other name smells as sweet. But the State and its shams always, nauseatingly stink.

This article was published in 2011.