Quotulatiousness

October 27, 2011

Ten years of Patriot Act intrusions into civil liberties

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:08

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation marks the tenth anniversary of the awful Patriot Act:

Ten years ago today, in the name of protecting national security and guarding against terrorism, President George W. Bush signed into law some of the most sweeping changes to search and surveillance law in modern American history. Unfortunately known as the USA PATRIOT Act, many of its provisions incorporate decidedly unpatriotic principles barred by the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution. Provisions of the PATRIOT Act have been used to target innocent Americans and are widely used in investigations that have nothing to do with national security.

Much of the PATRIOT Act was a wish list of changes to surveillance law that Congress had previously rejected because of civil liberties concerns. When reintroduced as the PATRIOT Act after September 11th, those changes — and others — passed with only limited congressional debate.

Just what sort of powers does the PATRIOT Act grant law enforcement when it comes to surveillance and sidestepping due process? Here are three provisions of the PATRIOT Act that were sold to the American public as necessary anti-terrorism measures, but are now used in ways that infringe on ordinary citizens’ rights

September 12, 2011

9/11 aftermath: “No matter how long I looked, some part of my brain never stopped waiting for the credits to roll”

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:06

Megan McArdle tries to put into words what it felt like to be in New York in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks:

At ground level, there was the tangible reminder — that multistory shard jutting out of the smoking rubble that became one of the iconic images of 9/11. But somehow, that didn’t make the absence any more real. I worked down at Ground Zero for a year, from shortly after the attack, to just after the first annual memorial. I stood right next to that monumental fragment when the ground was still smoking and firefighters were spraying it with hoses to keep the smoke and ash at bay. I smelled the odor that pervaded Ground Zero for weeks, maybe months — burning office fixtures and damp embers. And yet in my deepest mind I never connected any of it with the buildings where I had worked on and off throughout the 1990s — even though I stood looking at it from the very familiar streets where I’d eaten lunch so many times. It didn’t look like a building, or even the ruins of a building. It looked like a scene from a movie about the destruction of the World Trade Center. No matter how long I looked, some part of my brain never stopped waiting for the credits to roll.

As the rubble was cleared away, and all that was left was two concrete-lined holes in the ground, I spent a lot of time walking around the site trying to come to grips with what happened. I was waiting for that moment that always happens in the movies — the one where the music swells and the main character, silhouetted against a rolling sky, finally grasps everything that has been lost.

It never happened, maybe because I was not the main character. I am one of, I think, a relative few — the perhaps tens of thousands of Americans who can plausibly claim that 9/11 utterly changed their life. Without 9/11, I would not have worked at the World Trade Center’s disaster recovery effort; I would not have started blogging; I would not now be a journalist. I would not have had most of the relationships I had in the past ten years, be married to my current husband, or live in the city I now call home. I would be in all visible ways a completely different person if those towers had not come down. But in the story of 9/11, I am not even a bit player. I’m maybe an extra.

The increasing militarization of the police

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:50

Radley Balko shows how the tools given to the authorities to fight the war on terror have instead been used to further expand the war on drugs:

New York magazine reported some telling figures last month on how delayed-notice search warrants — also known as “sneak-and-peek” warrants — have been used in recent years. Though passed with the PATRIOT Act and justified as a much-needed weapon in the war on terrorism, the sneak-and-peek was used in a terror investigation just 15 times between 2006 and 2009. In drug investigations, however, it was used more than 1,600 times during the same period.

It’s a familiar storyline. In the 10 years since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the government has claimed a number of new policing powers in the name of protecting the country from terrorism, often at the expense of civil liberties. But once claimed, those powers are overwhelmingly used in the war on drugs. Nowhere is this more clear than in the continuing militarization of America’s police departments.

The trend toward a more militarized domestic police force began well before 9/11. It in fact began in the early 1980s, as the Regan administration added a new dimension of literalness to Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs.” Reagan declared illicit drugs a threat to national security, and once likened America’s drug fight to the World War I battle of Verdun. But Reagan was more than just rhetoric. In 1981 he and a compliant Congress passed the Military Cooperation with Law Enforcement Act, which allowed and encouraged the military to give local, state, and federal police access to military bases, research, and equipment. It authorized the military to train civilian police officers to use the newly available equipment, instructed the military to share drug-war–related information with civilian police and authorized the military to take an active role in preventing drugs from entering the country.

[. . .]

The problem with this mingling of domestic policing with military operations is that the two institutions have starkly different missions. The military’s job is to annihilate a foreign enemy. Cops are charged with keeping the peace, and with protecting the constitutional rights of American citizens and residents. It’s dangerous to conflate the two. As former Reagan administration official Lawrence Korb once put it, “Soldiers are trained to vaporize, not Mirandize.” That distinction is why the U.S. passed the Posse Comitatus Act more than 130 years ago, a law that explicitly forbids the use of military troops in domestic policing.

Update: Also from Radley, a look inside the SWAT team leader’s world.

[. . .] note the complete disregard for the rights of the people being raided in the excerpt above. The author is actually suggesting SWAT commanders lobby to have their teams deployed in situations for which they normally wouldn’t be to ensure they’re in good practice. Put another way, he suggests they practice their door smashing, room-clearing, flash-grenade deploying, and other paramilitary tactics on less-than-violent people, so they’re in better form when a real threat arises. Never mind that there are going to be living, breathing, probably bleeding people on the receiving end of these “practice” raids. There’s officer safety and “SWAT team profile” to think about. It’s just an appalling mindset.

September 11, 2011

QotD: Comparing September 11, 2001 to December 7, 1941

Filed under: History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:52

On Dec. 8, 1951, the day after the 10th anniversary of Pearl Harbor, The New York Times‘ front page made a one-paragraph mention of commemorations the day before, when the paper’s page had not mentioned the anniversary. The Dec. 8 Washington Post‘s front page noted no commemorations the previous day. On Dec. 7, the page had featured a familiar 10-year old photograph of the burning battleships. It seems to have been published because a new process made possible printing it for the first time in color. At the bottom of the page, a six-paragraph story began: “Greater Washington today will mark the tenth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack by testing its air raid defenses.” The story explained that “the sirens are part of a ‘paper bombing’ of Washington” that would include “mock attacks by atom bombs and high explosives.”

The most interesting question is not how America in 2011 is unlike America in 2001, but how it is unlike it was in 1951. The intensity of today’s focus on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 testifies to more than the multiplication of media ravenous for content, and to more than today’s unhistorical and self-dramatizing tendency to think that eruptions of evil are violations of a natural entitlement to happiness. It also represents the search for refuge from a decade defined by unsatisfactory responses to 9/11.

George F. Will, “Commemorating the past to forget the present”, National Post, 2011-09-11

March 8, 2011

Helicopter footage of 9/11 just released

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

The Guardian explains:

Previously unseen footage of the 9/11 attacks, filmed from a police helicopter hovering above the burning World Trade Centre, has emerged almost a decade after the terrorist atrocity.

The New York Police Department air and sea rescue helicopter was dispatched to the scene of the attack to see whether any survivors could be rescued from the rooftops.

[. . .]

The video is part of a cache of information about the attack handed over by city agencies to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that investigated the collapse.

It was released by NIST on 3 March under a Freedom of Information Act request, but it remains unclear who published the footage online.

September 11, 2010

Nine years on

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:04

Video by James Lileks.

But every so often — every week, really — I remember the event in some odd echo of the emotions I felt on September 11. It might be the closing credit music of a BBC comedy, or an old movie about New York, or driving past a building designed by the architect of the WTC, or just standing in the spot where I stood when I saw the towers fall. Or more: for God’s sake, the Gallery of Regrettable Food’s publication date was 9/11; half the time I look at the book on the shelf I recall being in the shower, thinking of the interviews I had lined up, turning off the water and hearing Peter Jennings on the radio, wondering why they were replaying tape of the 91 attack on the towers. I remember what Natalie was doing — a happy toddler, she was digging through her box of toys and handing me a phone with a smile as bright as the best tomorrow you could imagine. I remember Jasper on his back, whining, unsure. I remember these things because I picked up my camera and filmed them, because this was a day unlike any other. Today I answered the phone in the same spot where I stood when I called my Washington bureau, told them I’d be rewriting the column — obviously — and wished them well. They were four blocks from the White House. Impossible not to imagine the Fail-Safe squeal on the other end of the line.

On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn’t diminished a joule. This doesn’t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then — and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivo’d, and the day is bright and real and true again.

Update: How Twitter can be almost poetry. Disturbing, yet moving.

September 7, 2010

A different kind of “outreach”

Filed under: Asia, Military, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 07:42

Looks like Terry Jones and his Dove World Outreach Center got exactly the level of attention he was looking for:

The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said the planned burning of Qurans on Sept. 11 by a small Florida church could put the lives of American troops in danger and damage the war effort.

Gen. David Petraeus said the Taliban would exploit the demonstration for propaganda purposes, drumming up anger toward the U.S. and making it harder for allied troops to carry out their mission of protecting Afghan civilians.

“It could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort,” Gen. Petraeus said in an interview. “It is precisely the kind of action the Taliban uses and could cause significant problems. Not just here, but everywhere in the world we are engaged with the Islamic community.”

Over at Fark.com, they have a highly appropriate term for people like Mr. Jones: they call them “attention whores”. Seems to fit.

On the other hand, wouldn’t an appropriate counter-protest involve a small mosque in Kabul burning some Christian bibles? I wonder why nobody’s doing that instead of the mass protests being threatened? It should probably be noted that this church has fifty members: hardly the mainstream of American religious belief.

September 12, 2009

Is it non-partisan when both parties are at fault?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 20:55

Belatedly, from a post at Gates of Vienna on September 11, 2009:

After eight years that hole in ground in Lower Manhattan is still there. That’s more than twice as long as it took America to mobilize, rearm, go to war, and defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War Two.

In the eight years following John F. Kennedy’s call to put a man on the moon, the United States went from having no manned space program, though designing and testing the Mercury and Apollo spacecrafts, to a successful landing on the moon.

The original Word Trade Center took six years to complete, from the ground-breaking to the ribbon-cutting.

In the past eight years we have seen plenty of candlelight vigils with teddy bears and flowers and tearful remembrances by the relatives of the slain.

But there’s still a hole in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be.

The bureaucratic wheels grind slow . . . but not necessarily very fine.

September 11, 2009

QotD: Eight years on

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:51

On the Hewitt show tonight I started talking about 9/11, and my mouth overran my head, because somewhere down there is a core of anger that hasn’t diminished a joule. This doesn’t mean anything, by itself — anger is an emotion that believes its justification is self-evident by its very existence. Passion is not an argument; rage is not a plan. But as the years go by I find myself as furious now as I was furious then — and no less unmanned by the sight of the planes and the plumes. Once a year I watch the thing I cobbled together from the footage I Tivo’d, and the day is bright and real and true again.

Or not. It’s all so far in the past, isn’t it? The ten-year-old you had to sit down and console and reassure is off to college. The President is retired — seems like he left two years ago. The wars grind on, but as far as the front pages are concerned, they’re like TV shows that lost their popularity but pull enough viewers to avoid cancellation. (The video store doesn’t even carry the DVD of the first two seasons anymore.) We’re used to the hole in the ground where the towers used to be, and if they announced they won’t rebuild, but will pave it over and use it for parking, people would shrug. We haven’t forgotten that the towers fell, but no one remembers what they planned to replace them with. The towers they planned looked empty in in the pictures — shiny, contorted, as if twisting away to avoid a blow.

Right after the towers fell, people who’d never liked them as architecture wanted them back just as they were. Get back up in the sky! But it hasn’t happened. Even if they build the replacement towers, there’s still a space in the sky where no one will ever stand again. We could stand there once. That we couldn’t stand there eight years ago was their fault. That we cannot stand there today is ours.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2009-09-11

« « Random links| Visiting HMCS Toronto » »

Powered by WordPress