Evoking the images of our Orwellian present, Jay Bookman sees us surrending our liberty for a fictional security. All I can say is: Dude, come on.
I noted in my last post that I was going to discuss "National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies"--the report that "proves" social dysfunction and religiosity go hand-in-hand next, and I'm still planning to, but I want to give that an appropriate level of attention, and I just wanted to quickly deal with Sacrifice Liberty For Security? Not Without a Fight by Jay Bookman.
His main point is summed up thusly:
Admittedly, there is a reason for that willingness to let governmentvastly expand its oversight of our lives, and that reason is fear ofterrorism.So why'd we go along with it when most of the programs in question, like Echelon, were created, pre 9/11 and pre-Dubya? And while the Republicans and conservatives like to yell "Clinton! Echelon!" it hardly starts and stops there.
And what amazes me about the phone number database . . . what did people think the DHS was talking about they made the alert level mauve-with-gold-trim because "chatter" was up? They would be talking about data mining.
And Jay Bookman is going along with it? I just find it odd when a writer's core point is that we're all doing something (that the writer is too noble and thoughtful to do) for these particular reasons (that, as it turns out, aren't remotely motivating to the writer).
As Bookman says: "But there's always a reason, isn't there?" Yes, there is, and there's always a rhetorical device like that. There's always a reason to redistribute wealth, appease dictators, maintain porous national borders, and surrender national sovereignty to foreign bodies. There's also always a reason to eat food, breathe air, take a shower, learn a skill, get a job, and pay the bills. The thing is, some reasons are better than others.
Bookman writes:
There is always some threat to security that is said to justify the surrender of liberty to government. In every nation that has ever lost freedom to government, there has always been a reason.That skips the question of whether or not such losses are justified. Are they ever justified? What about surrendering some freedoms for the common good? For example, surrendering 20%-40% of our paychecks to ensure the benefits of those who cannot provide for themselves? Certainly, that's giving up a portion of our livelihood that we've traded blood, sweat and tears for, and that's money we could spend on donating to radical causes or buy supplies for painting signs when we go out to protest "the man". It's the surrendering of a degree of freedom.
What freedoms do you surrender when you get a driver's license? Is it worth it? What freedoms do you surrender when you move into an area with zoning restrictions? How can we possibly justify these limitations on our freedom and liberty?
Bookman continues (from the "well, duh" school of analogous rhetoric):
There was a reason that the soldiers of King George III burst into the homes of colonial Americans without warrants or reasonable cause. And back then, there were also those who saw nothing wrong with that practice, who believed that only those who had done something wrong had anything to fear.This will always be the case. There are people who see nothing wrong with blowing up infidels. There are people who see nothing wrong with putting people do death for capital crimes. There are people who see nothing wrong with abortion. There are also folks who see nothing wrong with eating fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Clearly, enough people saw something wrong with it, because we're no longer a colony of England.
Another example the author could have cited was the suspension of Habeas Corpus by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, as well as the arrest of critical journalists and the deportation of sympathetic congressmen to the south. Talking about curtailing your constitutionally guaranteed freedoms! Some people thought that was justified. Some people obviously didn’t. Makes you think, doesn't it? Yet, here we are, all one country. And Lincoln is generally revered. Indeed, a common criticism of the Republicans is that "they are no longer the party of Lincoln". Which I suppose is true: we no longer suspend habeus corpus, have journalist thrown in jail, and deport hostile congressmen.
Bookman demonstrates he has no interest in even trying to treat the issue seriously when he writes:
This America, this increasingly strange America, is looking more and more like the land of the cowed and the home of the silent.Like Mr. Bookman? He's keeping quiet? He's cowed? What about Howard Dean? James Carville? Noam Chomsky? Al Franken? Alternet? Daily Kos? Democrat Underground? Mother Jones? The Nation? Air America? Who, exactly, is silent and cowed in this situation? Either folks agree, disagree, or don't care. But when people can write books fantasizing about the assassination of a sitting president and some fine American's can put on a play about the assassination of the sitting president, nobody should take the assertion that there's some sort of Orwellian fear of jackbooted government thugs breaking in and arresting them because they did a search on the anarchist's cookbook. Or publicly announced there contention that "Bush sucks!"
While one can disagree with the policy and the process, it is simply counterfactual to assert that we're "cowed and silent". Maybe some folks are cowed and silent when it comes to discussing gender or race issues on college campuses these days, but, generally, you can discuss anything, as long as you can handle the fact that some folks are going to disagree with you.
Bookman writes:
In this America, we have a military agency, the National Security Agency, secretly tracking and analyzing every phone call or e-mail that is sent or received by hundreds of millions of American citizens, with records of all of those calls retained forever.That program, he neglects to mention, is part of a program called Echelon. It, in addition to some of the laws involved in the most recent hubbub, were created and passed under Clinton, by a near unanimous vote in congress. No doubt, just an oversight, as the issue is the program, and not the party in control of the government at any specific time.
Bookman continues:
And in this America, millions and millions of people profess to be quite comfortable living under a government that wants to know who every one of us is talking to, and has the technology to realize that ambition.Technology to do what? Listen to every conversation? Review every transaction? Even if technologically possible, it is not practically feasible. There are more conversation hours per day than could be reviewed in a year. And the government doesn't want to know who every one of us is talking to. Why would it? What good would that do, for noble or nefarious schemes alike?
Then, he gets weird:
But then again, we all have something to hide, don't we? My something may be different than your something, but we all have something we would rather keep to ourselves — the things we read or watch, the things we do or think or buy, the people we talk with or the Web sites we visit."I might prefer not to have folks standing over me when I'm oogling the underwear models in the Sears catalog, but if they found out, I'd live. I may not want to announce everything, certainly, but that's different from having something to hide. And what do folks need to hide in a world where they can publicly say they wished the president had choked to death on a pretzel without fear of any reprisal, except catcalls in regards to their poor taste?
Fortunately, Bookman has a good reason that the government shouldn't engage in data mining to try and identify potential terrorist activity:
But a strong people, a free people intent on remaining free, does not accept those reasons as sufficient. They are willing to accept the danger as the price of their liberty.So, we should be willing to accept the 9/11s, pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and congratulate ourselves that despite the huge cost in blood and treasure, the fact we checked out a risqué book from the library never went through some giant data mining program to be ignored as irrelevant. That's liberty!
Our fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers were such people. We tell ourselves that we today are still that people. We still celebrate ourselves as willing to fight and die for freedom, but the evidence accumulates that we are not.What sort of high school debating team is Mr. Bookman auditioning for? My father would make lemonade for the NSA guy tapping his phone from the other room, if it would prevent another 9/11, if it would stop the terrorists. Heck, his father probably would have, too, and I sure would. Either way, it's completely irrelevant. The real question is, of course, would the government listening in on my phone calls with prurient interest (easy job, though, as I don't talk on the phone much) be a productive use of resources to prevent terrorism? Probably not. And there's no indication that they actually do. If they do, it's less my "liberty" and "freedom" I'm worried about than what the hell are they doing wasting valuable terrorist-killing time listening to me call home to see if we have any chicken in the freezer?
And "fight and die for freedom"? Well, the folks willing to "fight and die" for freedom are our enlisted men and women. The rest of us just have to fight the good fight and home. It's not quite the same. But I've seen no evidence that the American fighting man (or woman) is not willing to fight and die for freedom. Even when the freedom they are fighting for isn't ours. But that's another tangent.
The infinitesimal danger that any one of us might be killed in a terror attack — a danger much smaller than that of getting killed by crossing the street — is enough to send too many of us scurrying to toss liberty onto the bonfire in the vain hope that the sacrifice might make us safe.Of course, such a point begs the question: why is the risk of us getting killed by a terror attack so compartively low? Could it be in part because we are preventing terrorist attacks? And wouldn't it also stand to reason that terrorists want to do general damage to all of us, and our lives, not just by killing Americans but damaging infrastructure and sabatoging the economy? While the risk of my getting killed by accident may be higher than my risk of getting killed by a terrorist act (in this country, at least), the likelihood of airplanes flying into the Whitehouse by accident, or a dirty bomb going off in a port city, or a series of coordinated attacks against the financial centers of our country happening by accident are pretty small. But the chance of them happening thanks to an undetected or unchallenged terrorist plot are fairly high, and the effects would be far reaching.
And terrorism is not a zero-sum game. Successful terrorism will beget more terrorism. The first attack on the World Trade Center was in 1993, and our response was anemic, at best (the creation of Echelon under Clinton at about that time notwithstanding). Then the Kobar towers. Then Mogadishu. A soft touch certainly has it's place, but it does nothing to reduce, and probably increases, terrorism. Again, one of the reasons that the chance of any of us dying thanks to terrorist attack is so small is because we are working to foil terrorist plots at home and abroad.
I also object to the idea that reasonable precautions, and an understanding that the government should get to keep some things secret, is the same as "scurrying to toss liberty onto the bonfire". Or that we've sacrificed anything at all. While a few ordinary American's ability to consort and move cash through known terrorists organization may have been unreasonably compromised (boo-hoo), on the whole, who in this country has have their liberty curtailed? Who doesn't, in fact, enjoy much more general liberty today on almost every front than they would have in the 1950s? Way before the terrible Reagan-Bush-Bush era.
But this is about more than civil liberties, as precious as they might be. These violations of constitutional rights are made possible because of a still more fundamental problem: The system isn't working; the checks and balances built into government by our Founding Fathers have been dismantled.Again, this would be more concerning, if it were true. But saying it with a flourish does not make it so. The chief executive is certainly more restrained today than he has been in the past (Truman, FDR, Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, to name but a few who asserted, and used, wide executive lattitude) and much of what is under debate was passed by congress and done with oversight and awareness--even the NSA "domestic spying" program was done with the oversight of a congressional committee. Senator Rockefeller and Nancy Pelosi knew about it at the time! This is not, like it or not, an "above the law, out of control" executive branch. And to act like it is seems more election year posturing that practical concern, to me.
Congress has passed laws to ensure that any spying on the American people is conducted appropriately and within the Constitution; the executive branch simply proclaims it will not be bound by those laws.However, this isn't exactly true. The current NSA flap is about powers given to the executive branch (and programs authorized for the NSA) when Clinton was in office by a plurality of congressional votes, Democrat and Republican. This is not an issue of an out-of-control executive branch, but may be a cautionary tale (if accurately viewed) of letting the fact that you might not always be the party in power inform the sorts of decisions politicians make about giving too much power to one branch of government or the other.
Again, it may be a bad program, the NSA may have powers that are too broad, or the chief executive may have powers that are too broad, but to characterize the issue as being one of an out of control executive branch (coincidentally, occupied by a Republican at the moment, in an election year) is play politics rather than to engage in thoughtful debate.
Bookman points out:
Then Gen. Michael Hayden, the president's nominee as CIA director, told members of the Senate that he might be open to allowing debate on legalizing warrantless wiretapping, an ongoing practice that violates federal law.Oh, my gosh! He's open to debate on the issue! Liberty is threatened!
And the compromise in question? Congress would be allowed to legalize what the executive branch has already decided to do anyway.Or, more accurately, what congress already said the executive branch could do in 1994.
We need to have a fight about all this.Oh, please? Would you?
It won't be pleasant, it won't be fun, but we need to hash it all out in a down and dirty political brouhaha. As the party in opposition, the Democrats need to lead that fight using every tool at their disposal.Well, if you can convince them political victory lies in that direction, they'd eat their own children, so that's what you gotta do. If they believe that it might compromise electoral victory, they won't touch it, or will stake out the sacred "middle ground". And by "they", I mean the political class. It would be a strictly non-partisan consuming of their own young that I'm referring to.
If so, then they also lack the guts to lead this country, and I fear to think where that would leave us, forced to choose between one party with no courage and another with no brains or perspective."Well, I can't disagree with that, although I'd say the party without courage is the Republicans, and the party without brains or perspective is the Democrats, and I'm willing to bet that Mr. Bookman would say the reverse.
Other than that, we're in total agreement on that point. Who says we can't find common ground?
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