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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Early Warning, 9/11 Gone Wild 12/22/05 "Washington Post" -- -- The New York Times editorial on National Security Agency spying in the United States refers to "your mail and your e-mail" and "your telephone conversations" being monitored. The connotation of course is that the "you" is some New York Times reading Cappuccino drinking upper middle class Manhattan intellectual, that thousands if not tens of thousands of similar Americans are having their phones tapped and e-mails intercepted. Come on. The government is not just repeating the targeting of political opponents a la J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. It is not picking out a Seymour Hersh or a Cindy Sheehan to find their links to foreign influences nor seeking to ruin their lives by developing incriminating evidence on them. I know I sound like some Fox news watching, flag waiving, gun toting, Cappuccino hater defending the national security state. The New York Times and the government may not want to say the obvious, that by and large, it is Muslims in America who are being monitored in the 9/11 Order. It is not the liberal or the literary in the back of the New York City taxicab that is the target. It is the driver. If the government is going to find the next Mohamed Atta in our midst, it is going to do so, it thinks, through the intercepted phone call to uncle Mohamed in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. It is going to correlate the purchase, the airline ticket, the license plate at the Mosque. What has happened since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is as pernicious and as damaging as any abuse or panic or misstep of the past: We must pledge allegiance to a certain post 9/11 Order, abandon the rule of law, compromise our values, turn against our neighbors, enlist in a clash of civilizations, all in the name of defeating the terrorists. We are being asked to destroy our country in order to save it. In October 2001, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to collect intelligence on U.S. persons -- citizens and residents -- suspected of having connections to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday on NBC's Meet the Press, government counter-terrorism fighters complained about a "seam" between intelligence and law enforcement agencies that allowed al Qaeda to infiltrate. This is the central paradigm of the 9/11 Order: The government isn't to be held responsible for its incompetence and failure to protect Americans. It is the laws and the handcuffs placed on the government that is the problem. Soon we all became agents of "actionable intelligence." On NBC's Meet the Press on Sept. 30, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced the term and referred to the measures the government was taking "so that, in fact, things can be done" against terrorist networks. Terrorist networks operating not just in Afghanistan or the Middle East, but also in Buffalo and Detroit. Actionable intelligence is data: Intercepted phone calls and e-mails, credit card receipts, library transactions, web preferences, and associations. The 9/11 Order is all about the data. An ever larger and unleashed government vacuum cleaner sucks up the words and the actions and collects the material in giant databases. The government tells us that plots have been uncovered and new attacks thwarted. They say that the old rules were too cumbersome, that they just couldn't wait the extra hours. Tonight on ABC's "Nightline" Vice President Dick Cheney will make the precise argument that the new surveillance was necessitated by the old rules. "It's the kind of capability if we'd had before 9/11 might have led us to be able to prevent 9/11," the Vice President says. It is a giant fishing expedition as much as it is a highly targeted campaign. The hundreds of millions of intercepts and data points are massaged by the data miners and link analyzers and churned through banks of computers and dozens of new software programs in pursuit of the holy "connecting of the dots." They just might track a license plate to a cave in Pakistan. It's all here in the seams, in the dots, this actionable intelligence: ghost detainees, renditions, coalitions of the willing to torture, special authorities and special operations, warrantless surveillance, corners being cut and laws being broken. "These are stateless networks of people who communicate, and communicate in much more fluid ways," Secretary Rice said yesterday. Stateless networks of people in our midst. We are not safe and the government is doing God's work to protect us. That is the message. The reasonable answer will be congressional hearings and government contrition and revised laws to continue the 9/11 Order. The right answer is to challenge the presumption of a terrorist threat that is so potentially destructive that it demands we destroy ourselves to fight it. Terrorists will continue to exist, they will continue to live in our midst and there will be terrorist incidents, probably even terrible ones, in our future. If we just stopped providing ever more excuses for the America haters and the haters of democracy, that would be a far more effective counter-terrorism strategy.
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#1. To: Zipporah (#0)
I would think God would be mighty mad at such a slanderous statement like that. God doesn't need a judge on his side in this matter; he is the ultimate judge
God is always good! that is how the Dominion christians are. They feel that the US government does the work of god. they support bush strongly & the war too. I don't like the dominion christians.
Well it seems if they believe this they aren't trusting God now are they?
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