At today's Constitution Day parade the Tea Party Patriot contingent paraded holding the names & photos of New York City firefighters who died on 9/11; their theme was,
Yet James Bamford observes that Post-9/11, NSA 'enemies' include us:
".... Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide. ...""The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. ..." (link)
With the usual 20-20 hindsight, I'm wishing I'd thought to survey today's Constitution Day parade TPPs, asking whether curtailing civil liberties is the right response to terrorism.
(I'd like to be surprised; this from Glenn Greenwald in Salon suggests it's possible.)
See also Wired's infographic-laden The Dead, the Dollars, the Drones: 9/11 Era by the Numbers.
Bamford quotes Orwell:
“Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up... You have to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard.”It's no way for a free people to live.
3 comments:
I would pull back a bit on terrorist definition: Not the population at large but the far right and the Republican Party as their enablers.
PS: GREAT follow through on ALEC and the documentation that CONGRESSPERSON TOM MCCLINTOCK is indeed an alumni of this "star chamber" and his current and potential future constituents have a right to know he was AND any legislation that came out that impacts CALIFORNIA. Should be automatic grounds for resignation.
Sorry Curtis, I guess my post was muddled - the Bamford piece made clear that to the NSA, we're all [the NSA's] targets.
Yes, we need to know what legislation McClintock sponsored, that was actually written by ALEC - which probably means its corporate members.
FYI, the response from Igor Birman, to my request "could you ask Congressman McClintock whether, when he was a Calif. state politician, he sponsored any legislation that ALEC took a hand in composing? And if so, which bills?"
was that he has no idea & McClintock doesn't remember.
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