Terrorism

[pmb]

Every now and then, I get pissed off enough about the news to go on a ranty tear about it. Read this or not at your pleasure.

I feel like I'm living in some kind of imaginary dystopia that I will wake up from - this is Pottersville or Bifftown or something. Terrorism is not scary. Nuclear war is scary. Terrorism is only scary if you don't evaluate risk well and your government helps make you afraid. And terrorists seem to be pretty incompetent. You know what's really creepy? Police states leveraging modern surveillance technologies to monitor everyone without oversight while at the same time making it illegal for people to look back. So what is bringing this all to a head?

The fact that our representatives are rolling over and trying to make it legal suspend habeas corpus and torture suspects for information and then try them in tribunals where they can't see the evidence against them makes me seriously scared. The fact that they only want to do this to foreign nationals is no comfort because a) those are people too, and b) this administration has maintained their right to strip US citizens of their citizenship (in contravention to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which we are a signatory). I think one of the main reasons that people aren't up in arms about this crap is that it just seems so unbelievable - most people wince a bit at stuff like this but generally think of America as A City Upon a Hill, and that's a hard belief to shake. But c'mon people - let's at least agree on some facts:

1. The president illegally authorized the collective wiretapping of every phone in America despite being told that it was illegal by BOTH of the other branches of government
2. The president, in direct contravention to the Geneva conventions, has established a third category of person for whom he says there exist no rules
3. We're embroiled in a war in Iraq with no short or medium-term goals, and no strategy to reach the long term ones.
4. We've pretty much LOST the war in Afghanistan. (Afghanistan? Yup, it's still a shooting war over there, except the Taliban is back in power and heroin production is way way up)
5. Every other country resents us for throwing our weight around, even our oldest friends. The UK, with whom we've maintained a "special relationship" for so long has actually decided to force their Prime Minister to resign because he went along with us.
6. Terrorists don't "hate freedom", they hate specific US policies. Those policies may or may not be things that, when looked at in the light of day, we actually think are good ideas. Not acknowledging this fact means that we will forever be playing wack-a-mole with suicide bombers and never understanding why.
7. Terrorists aren't soldiers - they have no army, no country, and no chain of command. (Perhaps they are then CRIMINALS, and should be dealt with as such?!?)
8. Secret jails with secret "not torture we promise" chambers extracting evidence from guilty-unhtil-proven-innocent suspects are really creepy and, if necessary, should be dealt with sub-rosa and not openly endorsed.
9. By focusing on Iraq we've dropped the ball on the GWOT/GSAVE/permanent struggle with Eurasia (fortunately Oceania is our ally) and Osama Bin Laden is still at large

With a track reord like this, why are people trying to give the executive branch MORE power? How much of this would fly if a *gasp* DEMOCRAT were doing it? Is it that people think that 24 is real and that Jack Bauer will save them and that he needs to be allowed to torture? Do people really think that the right way to bring freedom to the world and safety to ourselves is by eliminating freedoms and our sense of safety domestically?

meme alert: "The Bill of Rights is not a suicide pact" is going to be used in an attempt to justify the elimination and curtailment of the rights enumerated therein. The proper response is either: "The Declaration of Independence IS a suicide pact" or "We will not walk in fear, one of another [...] if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men".

I'm genuinely worried about how far this could go, especially if there is a Republican majority after this November, as there probably will be. Republicans need to decide who really stands for them and who is a fascist. According to David Brin, the Democrats did this with communism in 1947, and it would be really nice to see Republicans toss out the Neocons in 2006. But right now Karl Rove is explicitly planning an October Surprise and we seem to already be conducting operations in Iran, so it looks like business as usual.

Does anyone else get an "après moi le deluge" feeling about the way politics are being conducted? Short-term fixes, terror alerts correlated with spikes in opponents' popularity, massive expansion of executive powers, massive increase in secrecy, torture, wars based on lies, huge deficits, ignoring and distorting science, exposing CIA operatives for political gain, and claiming that to disagree with these policies is to agree with the terrorists. It seems like something has to give, but I've been waiting for years and it's still holding up.

How much longer can this hold up? What will the flood hold? Any thoughts?

Comments

[snailprincess.livejournal.com]

I don't know man. It really is scary sometimes.

I've been thinking alot about how we've let ourselves be lulled into this 'we're at war' mentality. How Bush can act as though we're fighting to survive against terrorists and no one calls it. I mean, in their best year, terrorists killed about 3000 Americans. 40,000 Americans died in car accidents that year, 17,000 because some asshole was drinking. So in their best year ever, terrorists didn't even come close to matching drunking assholes as a danger. Since September 11th, they've managed to kill no one in America and perhaps a few hundred world wide. Since September 11th, 2001 drunk drivers have killed approximately 85,000 people in America alone.

Street gangs kill far more people than terrorists. Our way of life is not being threatened by terrorists. It's really frustrating to see politicians pretending it is. Even the most liberal elements seem to take it as a given that we're locked in some life or death struggle. Even those politicians making a name for themselves by opposing the Iraq war, no one even hints at questioning the term 'war on terror.'

I don't think anything will really change unless we can escape the mentality that we are 'at war' with terrorists and that our way of life is being threatened. The first step might be just insisting to everyone you can find that they stop referring to it as a 'war on terror'.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

A really interesting part of the movie Fog of War was a clip of LBJ stating that the war in Vietnam was a war on "tyranny and aggression". Thus, we've been fighting wars on abstract concepts and losing for 50 years now: "tyranny and agrression", "poverty", "drugs", and now, "terror".

Well, not really

[akjdg.livejournal.com]

1. "perhaps a few hundred worldwide" isn't really all that perhaps. A few hundred in Spain, a few dozen in London, a few hundred in Se Asia at various hotel and resort bombings, 'perhaps a thousand worldwide' is a better guesstimate.

2. Terrorists have killed in the U.S. since 9/11. We had the anthrax killings, the Virginia sniper killings, the midwest mailbox pipe bomb... killings? Of course, these aren't the terrorists we're looking for.

I agree with all your points, just keeping a lid on exaggerations...

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

the statistics from the NHA on alcohol involvement with deaths are totally bogus. There is a whole movement for exaggerating the dangers of alcohol, led by groups like MADD, which grossly distort the facts in pursuit of their cause.

Specifically, if any individual, driver or passenger, in any vehicle involved in the accident, has any amount of alcohol in their system, then alcohol is labeled as a cause.

When you actually study the effects, say by putting people in driving simulators, you find that at 0.08 BAC, there is *no* increased risk of accident.

Not to say that driving truly drunk (say, > 0.12 BAC) is ok, or that drunk drivers don't kill lots of people. But 17,000 is a grossly distorted number.

Anyway, not that this really has anything to do w/ your main point...just trying to correct a common misperception...