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Early Warning
9/11 Gone Wild
By William M. Arkin
12/22/05 "Washington
Post" -- -- The New York Times
editorial on National Security Agency spying in the United States
refers to "your mail and your e-mail" and "your telephone
conversations" being monitored.
The connotation of course is that the "you" is some New York Times
reading Cappuccino drinking upper middle class Manhattan
intellectual, that thousands if not tens of thousands of similar
Americans are having their phones tapped and e-mails intercepted.
Come on. The government is not just repeating the targeting of
political opponents a la J. Edgar Hoover or Richard Nixon. It is not
picking out a Seymour Hersh or a Cindy Sheehan to find their links
to foreign influences nor seeking to ruin their lives by developing
incriminating evidence on them.
I know I sound like some Fox news watching, flag waiving, gun
toting, Cappuccino hater defending the national security state.
The New York Times and the government may not want to say the
obvious, that by and large, it is Muslims in America who are being
monitored in the 9/11 Order. It is not the liberal or the literary
in the back of the New York City taxicab that is the target. It is
the driver.
If the government is going to find the next Mohamed Atta in our
midst, it is going to do so, it thinks, through the intercepted
phone call to uncle Mohamed in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. It is going
to correlate the purchase, the airline ticket, the license plate at
the Mosque.
What has happened since the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks
is as pernicious and as damaging as any abuse or panic or misstep of
the past: We must pledge allegiance to a certain post 9/11 Order,
abandon the rule of law, compromise our values, turn against our
neighbors, enlist in a clash of civilizations, all in the name of
defeating the terrorists.
We are being asked to destroy our country in order to save it.
In October 2001, President Bush secretly authorized the National
Security Agency to collect intelligence on U.S. persons -- citizens
and residents -- suspected of having connections to al Qaeda and
other terrorist organizations.
As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday on NBC's Meet
the Press, government counter-terrorism fighters complained about a
"seam" between intelligence and law enforcement agencies that
allowed al Qaeda to infiltrate. This is the central paradigm of the
9/11 Order: The government isn't to be held responsible for its
incompetence and failure to protect Americans. It is the laws and
the handcuffs placed on the government that is the problem.
Soon we all became agents of "actionable intelligence." On NBC's
Meet the Press on Sept. 30, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld introduced the term and referred to the measures the
government was taking "so that, in fact, things can be done" against
terrorist networks. Terrorist networks operating not just in
Afghanistan or the Middle East, but also in Buffalo and Detroit.
Actionable intelligence is data: Intercepted phone calls and
e-mails, credit card receipts, library transactions, web
preferences, and associations. The 9/11 Order is all about the data.
An ever larger and unleashed government vacuum cleaner sucks up the
words and the actions and collects the material in giant databases.
The government tells us that plots have been uncovered and new
attacks thwarted. They say that the old rules were too cumbersome,
that they just couldn't wait the extra hours.
Tonight on ABC's "Nightline" Vice President Dick Cheney will make
the precise argument that the new surveillance was necessitated by
the old rules.
"It's the kind of capability if we'd had before 9/11 might have led
us to be able to prevent 9/11," the Vice President says.
It is a giant fishing expedition as much as it is a highly targeted
campaign. The hundreds of millions of intercepts and data points are
massaged by the data miners and link analyzers and churned through
banks of computers and dozens of new software programs in pursuit of
the holy "connecting of the dots."
They just might track a license plate to a cave in Pakistan.
It's all here in the seams, in the dots, this actionable
intelligence: ghost detainees, renditions, coalitions of the willing
to torture, special authorities and special operations, warrantless
surveillance, corners being cut and laws being broken.
"These are stateless networks of people who communicate, and
communicate in much more fluid ways," Secretary Rice said yesterday.
Stateless networks of people in our midst. We are not safe and the
government is doing God's work to protect us. That is the message.
The reasonable answer will be congressional hearings and government
contrition and revised laws to continue the 9/11 Order.
The right answer is to challenge the presumption of a terrorist
threat that is so potentially destructive that it demands we destroy
ourselves to fight it. Terrorists will continue to exist, they will
continue to live in our midst and there will be terrorist incidents,
probably even terrible ones, in our future. If we just stopped
providing ever more excuses for the America haters and the haters of
democracy, that would be a far more effective counter-terrorism
strategy.
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