James Wagner

[describing the imminent establishment of a “Department of Homeland Security”]
“ESTABLISHING NEW AGENCY IS EXPECTED TO TAKE YEARS AND COULD DIVERT IT FROM MISSION”
Even if the NYTimes relegates it and the entire story to page 14, reservng the front page lead story to a glorious account of the overwhelmingly successful passage of the bill through the Senate.
Ooops! The paper just altered/censored itself. The headline which now appears on their website article reads, “ESTABLISHING HOMELAND SECURITY AGENCY IS EXPECED TO TAKE YEARS,” making a subtle distinction from the original, much more alarming text.
So, why is this thing being done in Washington. I think we know. Senator Byrd has the words.

While his colleagues have debated the fine points of the domestic security bill, he has been virtually alone in asking the larger question: Why is this new department suddenly so necessary? What will the largest and hastiest reorganization of the federal government in half a century do besides allow politicians to claim instant credit for fighting terrorism?
“Osama bin Laden is still alive and plotting more attacks while we play bureaucratic shuffleboard,” Mr. Byrd told the Senate. “With a battle plan like the Bush administration is proposing, instead of crossing the Delaware River to capture the Hessian soldiers on Christmas Day, George Washington would have stayed on his side of the river and built a bureaucracy.” Mr. Byrd imagined Nathan Hale declaring, “I have but one life to lose for my bureaucracy,” and Commodore Oliver Perry hoisting a flag on his ship with the rallying cry, “Don’t give up the bureaucracy!”

Do we feel safer yet?
By the way, the comments of one Democratic Senator who didn’t have the courage of his (conviction?), declining to be named, should be enough to explain why there are virtually no principles still visible in that body.

“More and more of our members feel he’s dragging it on and on ad infinitum, which is not necessary,” that senator said. “Make your point. Have a vote. And move on. He’s not willing to do that. He’s from a different school. At some point you have to say, `Enough is enough.’ “

But the issues at stake in Congress are not those of a club or prom committee, and we should expect some people to take them very seriously.

Sure, the Europeans have a better understanding of the world, but can they make a difference? Edward Said observes the scene with intelligence, and an objectivity impossible for most Americans.

The second major difference I have noticed between America and Europe is that religion and ideology play a far greater role in the former than in the latter. A recent poll taken in the United States reveals that 86 per cent of the American population believes that God loves them. There’s been a lot of ranting and complaining about fanatical Islam and violent jihadists, who are thought to be a universal scourge. Of course they are, as are any fanatics who claim to do God’s will and to fight his battles in his name. But what is most odd is the vast number of Christian fanatics in the US, who form the core of George Bush’s support and at 60 million strong represent the single most powerful voting block in US history. Whereas church attendance is down dramatically in England it has never been higher in the United States whose strange fundamentalist Christian sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush’s government with its rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.
It is the coincidence between the Christian Right and the so-called neo-conservatives in America that fuel the drive towards unilateralism, bullying, and a sense of divine mission.

Said insists that this crusading impulse is without an equivalent in Europe.

The ideological position common to nearly everyone in the system is that America is best, its ideals perfect, its history spotless, its actions and society at the highest levels of human achievement and greatness. To argue with that — if that is at all possible — is to be “un-American” and guilty of the cardinal sin of anti- Americanism, which derives not from honest criticism but for hatred of the good and the pure.
No wonder then that America has never had an organised Left or real opposition party as has been the case in every European country. The substance of American discourse is that it is divided into black and white, evil and good, ours and theirs. It is the task of a lifetime to make a change in that Manichean* duality that seems to be set forever in an unchanging ideological dimension.

In an earlier paranthetical aside, we had been reminded:

Incidentally, I know no other country [than the U.S.] where the adjective “un” is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No one says unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all “love” our country. How can one actually “love” something so abstract and imponderable as a country anyway?

Sigh.
He concludes with the hope that “…Europe will come to its senses and assume the countervailing role to America that its size and history entitle it to play. Until then, the war approaches inexorably.”
* (seeing things in good/evil, black/white terms)

Did we ever think we would see such a headline describing events in the land of the free?
The headline is from yesterday’s Reuters story, covering developments little noticed and less remarked upon by those people once described as free.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – In a victory for the Bush administration, a secretive appeals court Monday ruled the U.S. government has the right to use expanded powers to wiretap terrorism suspects under a law adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The ruling was a blow to civil libertarians who say the expanded powers, which allow greater leeway in conducting electronic surveillance and in using information obtained from the wiretaps and searches, jeopardize constitutional rights.
In a 56-page ruling overturning a May opinion by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the three-judge appeals court panel said the Patriot Act gave the government the right to expanded powers.

Horrible. Secret appeals court overturns secret court ruling in secret hearing and there is no appeal. The decision threatens, or rather wipes out, some of the most fundamental constitutional rights of citizenship.

The appeal hearing was not public, and only the Justice Department’s top appellate lawyer, Theodore Olson, presented arguments.
Although the court allowed “friend of the court” briefs to be filed by civil liberties groups and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, since the Justice Department was the only party the ruling can likely not be appealed.
“This is a major Constitutional decision that will affect every American’s privacy rights, yet there is no way anyone but the government can automatically appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court,” [said Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union].

How else do we account for the silence and obvious indifference of the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population in the face of the Republicans’ radical refashioning of the American economy, society and state?

November 19, 2002
Low-Turnout Mandate
To the Editor:
Re “Orwell Was Right” (letter, Nov. 16):
Decrying the continuing assault against our civil liberties, the letter writer asks, “Does a 40 percent voting turnout give the government a mandate to invade our privacy this way?”
The answer, of course, is yes. That low turnout is precisely what gives the government the mandate to act as if no one cares and no one is looking.
WILLIAM F. BENNETT
Somerville, Mass., Nov. 16, 2002

Remember fascism? Maybe it’s not yet in the house, but the boot is in the door, and it doesn’t look like anyone is going to slam that door shut until it has made it all the way in–invited in the name of “security.”

But this isn’t a column about the Gestapo, the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts. It’s about our new Homeland Security Department (due to be approved by the Senate today), government jobs and events in the state of Michigan.
In Michigan last week, federal agents started to use roving checkpoints to seek illegal immigrants, drug runners, weapons and terrorists.
Is this legal? Yes, according to the Detroit Free Press. “Under federal law,” the newspaper reported last week,” the Border Patrol can set up checkpoints up to 100 air miles from any international border, or from the shoreline. Within the first 25 miles, federal agents can stop drivers who seem suspicious, and they can search and conduct surveillance of private property.”
Who knew?
Think of the places within those 100-mile or 25-mile limits. To name a few: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Savannah, Jacksonville, El Paso, San Diego, Portland, Sacramento, Bangor, Buffalo, Detroit, Tucson . . .
….
Is there, uh, something basically wrong with this in the land of the free and the home of the brave? No, according to the mostly conservative voices I’ve been hearing since Sept. 11, 2001.
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, if you have nothing to hide, what do you care if they search you?” they ask.

Paul Reubens has been arrested again.
Once again you will be able to watch the witch-hunt from the (dis)comfort of your own home. The initial Reuters story is sketchy, but the American puritanical elements should be as alarming as they are unsurprising.

Reubens, whose career was nearly derailed in 1991 by a lewd conduct scandal, faces a misdemeanor count of possessing child pornography stemming from a search of his home by police in November 2001, a spokesman for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office said. [An acquaintence, actor Jeffrey Jones, was charged with hiring a teenager “to pose for sexually explicit photographs.”]
… Charges against the performers grew out of searches conducted by police at their homes in related investigations.

In 1991 Reubens was arrested for masturbating in a darkened porn movie theater, and his charge this past friday seems to have been for possessing ordinary vintage physique art photographs which often included images of males U.S. laws today consider to be children.
Putting it into perspective, none of the facts as reported eleven years ago or today would be against the law in most, if not all of Europe, nor would they have attracted much interest as a scandal.