With the Benghazi official account breaking down like cheap cement with too much sand in the mix, we now know with near certainty that our very own Department of State has been recruiting and arming Al-Qaeda.

Let's reflect on autumn 2000. Al-Qaeda was officially designated by our President as global enemy Number One. In response to the events of September 11, 2000 and after designating an axis of evil yet carefully navigating around the question of Islam and its fanatics, the federal government in Washington rushed to increase surveillance and security measures to guard against Al-Qaeda and the threat of terrorism.

We, the citizens who are not responsible for terrorism, are saddled 12 years later with the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Safety Administration and a surveillance technology that is everywhere, all the time.

$9 trillion dollars later are we more secure? If Al-Qaeda is the prime designee in the axis of evil, why is the US Department of State recruiting and arming them? The implication is to topple the Ba'athist regime of Bashar Assad, but that brings up more questions. Disturbing questions. But let's stick with the topic of Who Are They Looking For?

TSA is omnipresent. Trains, planes and automobiles. Now railroads and buses. Next it will be dog walkers and model airplanes.

Homeland Security peers through every remote camera and surveillance platform. The federal decision to see and record everything is approaching total coverage. You're even recorded and surveilled in many national parks.

Who, or what, are they looking for? If Al-Qaeda is now our surrogate shadow-military so the US Department of State can pretend to clean hands, who is all this surveillance for? It looks like Washington has targeted you and me as the mission of surveillance. I mean, if the Al-Qaeda boogey-man is now inside the tent, who is Washington looking for?

Warrantless wiretapping. Police checkpoints. Metal detectors. Bomb scanners. Backscatter x-ray machines. Warrantless physical searches. Millions of scanning surveillance cameras. Everything you write, every commentary stored, many bone-deep Patriotic groups labeled by the Washington as potential terrorists, then Orwell was a lightweight in describing the total surveillance state and it was all brought to pass by the threat of Al-Qaeda.

But now the federal apparatus is recruiting and arming Al-Qaeda, the zenith of Islamic terror. We're still carrying the (often unconstitutional) weight of surveillance and security even as the threat has been brought into our national tent.

I'm sure to 100 decimal points there are threats out there. I am, after all, a firm defender of the 2nd Amendment. But this is the question; if Al-Qaeda was enemy number one and the US Government expensed trillions of dollars to forge a surveillance and security society responding to the threat of Al-Qaeda and Islamic jihadists, and we're now recruiting them and arming them ... who, or what, is all this surveillance looking for?

You? Me?

Michael Geer, author and publisher, welcomes comments geer.michael@gmail.com; http://www.finaletrilogy.com/   http://www.aintnotruthlikeit.com/index.html   http://priceriverpublishing.weebly.com/