chaptertwelve asked:
So. Given what we’ve learned in the past few days, and bearing in mind what we may learn in the days ahead, what do you imagine as our best and worst case scenarios in terms of a path forward? How do you see all of this playing out in the near and distant future?1. Best case scenario, public outcry grows, and politicians feel pressured to put protections into the law that require probable cause for individualized warrants, and prohibit the blanket kind of surveillance that’s been used by the administration. The FISA court is changed in some way that makes it an actual check on potential abuse. Perhaps the Supreme Court is permitted to review all FISA judgments in camera in some kind of audit for abuse.
2. Worst case scenario, most of the public never cares about the surveillance. Other stories push the issue from the news, and the government continues to amass large amounts of private information concerning all citizens. The FBI starts to access this information for non-terrorist cases. Other government agencies do the same. The IRS checks your online purchases. The EPA monitors purchases of materials that might pollute. Those who express controversial opinions or visit controversial websites are watched. Rogue government employees access private data for their own person gain—selling it to interested parties, blackmailing people engaged in extramarital affairs, stealing identities. You’ll come home from work to find that your home has been ransacked by a SWAT team pursuant to a warrant issued by a secret court for unspecified reasons.
I fear that that the most likely outcome is closer to 2 than 1. Consider how crazy the drug war has become—the massive amounts of money spent to fight it, the increasingly militarized local police forces that enforce prohibition, the asset forfeiture laws that take private property from innocent citizens without any due process, and the massive incarceration of millions of people for extraordinarily long periods of time. At the beginning of the drug war, you’d be laughed at for suggesting that this would happen. But it did, because people just didn’t care, and drugs were scary. Terrorism is scarier than drugs, so you can imagine how that’s going to play out.
(reposted for reblogging)
Emphasis added.
(P.S. Hey Tumblr, your mobile app is fucking terrible.)
“Civil liberties are not something you get to ‘trade,’ not least because they don’t all belong to you. They belong to me, too, and to the woman at the next table here at the Commonwealth Avenue Starbucks — Oh, c’mon, you knew where I was anyway, NSA guys. — and to the four people who just walked down the street past the big plate-glass window. You give yours away, you’re giving mine away, too, whether I want you to do so or not. Therefore, we all surrender those civil liberties. We do not trade them because we don’t get anything back. And it’s not like we can cut another deal later to get them back.”
“Perhaps most disturbing about the Attorney General’s letter is that it leaves totally unexplained why the United States has killed so many innocent non-American citizens in its strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. Yet, from my investigation on the ground in a variety of countries, I’ve become convinced that we are making more new enemies than we are killing terrorists. We must confront the realities of the full impact of our ‘targeted’ killing program, particularly when innocent civilians are killed, so that we can have a real debate about whether our counterterrorism strategies are enhancing or degrading our national security.”
“So, you know, it’s either timely ‘justice’ or it’s grave injustice. But either way, it’s quick. And apparently Florida legislators just like their justice or injustice to happen quickly. … If you have to kill a few innocent people in order to get revenge as fast as possible against several dozen guilty people, well, that’s a good deal, right? … I’ll just go ahead and answer my own question: No, Florida, it’s not.”
This was supposed to be the administration of unprecedented transparency. President Obama promised that when he took office, and the White House’s Web site says so on this very day. It reads:
My administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in government.
Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their government is doing.
Instead, it’s turning out to be the administration of unprecedented secrecy and of unprecedented attacks on a free press.
Each U.S. President According to Their Assumed NFL Allegiance:
Anwar al-Awlaki Is the New Aluminum Tube:
It’s all very convenient, that the NYT worked so hard to preserve the Administration’s narrative spinning its action as reasonable, just before Obama will reportedly make a speech about it. Any bets that what Obama says will match the story told here?
Dave Zirin on “Newtown and the horrible irony of the NFL’s tribute to the victims”:
But, as we try to understand the numbing regularity of these mass shootings, there is also a question that goes beyond just gun control and mental health. Should our culture, and in particular the violence of the sports we consume, shoulder some of the blame? It’s an increasingly recognized fact that our most popular sport, football, is also our most violent. Every new study reveals that on Sundays we are watching people become mentally and physically crippled for our entertainment. In addition to the violence between the lines, this is a league that drapes itself in the trappings of war, from military flyovers before games to the constant slickly produced recruitment ads for the US armed forces.
Given all of this, can the NFL as an institution be a credible voice of peace? The answer is simply “no”: not even when they silence their muskets. The NFL cannot be a force for nonviolence because its popularity is the perfect reflection of what we’ve become as a country. We are a nation that has outsourced war overseas to remote control killer drones we overwhelmingly support, private security forces we don’t control and an armed forces we barely acknowledge. Meanwhile, a host of basic freedoms have been eroded over the last decade except the freedom to arm ourselves to the teeth. We can’t assemble with our neighbors in protest, but we can assemble military-style weapons alone in our apartments.
As we become further atomized and further desensitized to the daily violence that surrounds us, we also further worship a sports league that acts as the perfect metaphor for this state of affairs. We don’t have to see the glassy eyes or faces contorted with pain on the field, as they are safely hidden under helmets for our consumption. We also don’t have to see the broken bodies and lives off the field. We just get three and a half hours of incredibly entertaining, highly commodified violence in a safely consumable package. The true costs are hidden from us until they erupt into view, as in the case of Jovan Belcher or the suicide of the great Junior Seau. Similarly, the true costs of worshiping the way of the gun are only dragged into open view when it comes home to places like Newtown, Connecticut. We don’t have to see the faces or learn the names of the children killed in the drone strikes in Pakistan. We aren’t asked to care about the young black teenagers who die on the corners of Chicago. No NFL player writes their names on their shoes. But now we have to look in the mirror and either reckon with what we see or recoil and turn away.
There’s something unsettling about reviews like this:
Part of the power of Zero Dark Thirty is that it looks with disturbing clarity at the ”enhanced interrogation techniques” that were used after 9/11, and it says, in no uncertain terms: They worked. This is a bin Laden thriller that Dick Cheney and Barack Obama could love.
That doesn’t really jive with what a certain American torture victim said about the information that was gleaned:
In fact, the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Khalid Sheik Mohammed produced false and misleading information. He specifically told his interrogators that Abu Ahmed had moved to Peshawar, got married and ceased his role as an al-Qaeda facilitator — none of which was true. According to the staff of the Senate intelligence committee, the best intelligence gained from a CIA detainee — information describing Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti’s real role in al-Qaeda and his true relationship to bin Laden — was obtained through standard, noncoercive means.
And it sort of recalls what Army Captain Ian Fishback wrote to Senator McCain in 2005:
Some argue that since our actions are not as horrifying as Al Qaeda’s, we should not be concerned. When did Al Qaeda become any type of standard by which we measure the morality of the United States? We are America, and our actions should be held to a higher standard, the ideals expressed in documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Glenn Greenwald sums up the problem with the widespread praise the film is receiving:
Over the last decade, nothing has produced more positive feelings among Americans about themselves than the killing of bin Laden. That’s why it was a centerpiece of Obama’s re-election campaign and multiple chanting sessions at the Democrats’ convention.
When it comes to “the hunt for bin Laden”, few people want their nationalistic pride to be diluted by criticisms of the agencies responsible or reminders of the war crimes their country committed (or the fake child vaccine programs on which it relied). Any film that powerfully and adeptly leads Americans to view their government and its intelligence and military actors as noble heroes is one that is going to produce gratitude and glee no matter what else it does.
Those who ordered and implemented torture were never prosecuted. They were actively shielded from all forms of legal accountability by the current president. They thus went on to write books, get even richer, and live the lives of honored American statesmen. Torture was thus transformed from what it had been - a universally recognized war crime - into just another pedestrian, partisan political debate that Americans have.
That’s the critical context in which a film can simultaneously be said to glorify torture using outright fabrications and be praised as the year’s greatest film. The normalization of torture - and of all crimes committed by the US government in the name of war - is both a cause and effect of this film’s success. That normalization is what enables a film like this to be so widely admired, and it will be bolstered even further as the film gathers more accolades and box office riches.
“Mr. Brennan’s assertion was either shockingly naïve or deliberately misleading. Testimonies from Qaeda fighters and interviews I and local journalists have conducted across Yemen attest to the centrality of civilian casualties in explaining Al Qaeda’s rapid growth there. The United States is killing women, children and members of key tribes. “Each time they kill a tribesman, they create more fighters for Al Qaeda,” one Yemeni explained to me over tea in Sana, the capital, last month. Another told CNN, after a failed strike, “I would not be surprised if a hundred tribesmen joined Al Qaeda as a result of the latest drone mistake.” … Rather than promote the author of a failing strategy, we need a C.I.A. director who will halt the agency’s creeping militarization and restore it to what it does best: collecting human intelligence. It is an intelligence agency, not a lightweight version of Joint Special Operations Command. And until America wins the intelligence war, missiles will continue to hit the wrong targets, kill too many civilians and drive young men into the waiting arms of our enemies.”
Assuming Obama can hang on to the reasonably safe states of Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin, he needs to do ONE of the following:
- Win Ohio, or
- Win Virginia, or
- Win Florida, or
- Win Colorado.
If he wins Ohio or Florida there’s some room for error in the other states. Of those options, an Ohio victory is most probable. Florida is the least probable.
If I’m able to get to bed before midnight, I guess I might have to thank this guy:
“The problem for Romney is he is culturally so opposite from most voters in Southside Virginia that there is an area for Virgil Goode to win votes,” said David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “In 2008, there were close to 40,000 votes cast for third-party candidates in Virginia. What if Virgil Goode took 25,000 votes? That could be a potential difference maker.”
The Romney campaign says it is not worried. “This election is a very clear choice between two candidates,” said Rich Beeson, Mr. Romney’s political director. “We are running a campaign that will ensure Mitt Romney wins regardless of who is in the race.”
But Tom Davis, a former Republican congressman from Virginia, is more cautious. “I don’t think his candidacy is helpful,” Mr. Davis said of Mr. Goode.
Yeah, so who’s to say he can’t sue his way into the debates?:
Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson has filed a lawsuit to win a spot in the presidential debates that start in Denver on Oct. 3.
It’s unlikely that he will succeed, but Johnson argues that the private Commission on Presidential Debates, along with the Democratic and the Republican parties, are unfairly blocking him from participating. Only President Barack Obama and GOP challenger Mitt Romney are being allowed to debate.
“Someone has to stand up and call this what it is—a rigged system designed entirely to protect and perpetuate the two-party duopoly,” says Johnson spokesman Ron Nielson. “That someone will be the Johnson campaign.”
