Letters to the Editor

• Tiberius

  [Read the article: The al-Marri decision]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  I chose a page at random, and look what I found

  "no attacks in the U.S. I haven't had any of my rights stamped on and won't, unless I decide to sit at home with my wife and kids and plan violent acts against the USA and its citizens.

  You are all the same people that were ranting that we didn't do enough prior to 9/11. You can't have it both ways. We either have to actively track and stop people BEFORE the harm us or we have to shrug when thousands of us die."

  Wow.

  To start, its obvious that I will have to familiarize you with the fact that when stripped to its bare essentials, America is nothing more than approximately 300 million people and the Constitution. Everything else - the federal government, the military, the states, everything - is there to protect and support those 2 things.

  Understand? Good. Now lets move on.

  When you support the idea that the President has to be able to shred the Constitution to protect us from terrorism, you are saying that the terrorists have already won. Without the Constitution there is no America, so you feel that the terrorists have already succeeded in their goal of destroying the United States. That is absurd.

  You say that your rights have not been trampled - again, absurd.

  Every email you have sent in the last 9 years has been examined by the government. Any effort you made to maintain the privacy of those communications has made you a suspect. The FBI has never made a secret of that.

  Every phone call you have made in the last 3 years has been recorded and examined by the government. If you don't believe that you have no understanding of how these kinds of things work, how they have to work to be effective.

  Let's say you have to pick someone up at a major aiport. You know almost nothing about them, and they will do nothing overt to draw attention to themselves. All you can do is look for people who look like they have just arrived from a long trip, and you will have to look at everybody to determine that. You would have to start with the assumption that every single person in that airport is the person you are looking for, and then narrow the list, one by one. Then you would have to examine everyone in that group to determine if they could possibly be the person you are looking for. And finally you would have to approach a large percentage of them to find the one you need. That's what the wiretaps have to do, except you can replace the word "approach" with "detain indefinitely".

  Some say it isn't possible, overlooking the fact that a reasonable estimate would give NSA approximately 15 - 25% of all the computing power in the country and that in a post 9/11 world they have complete and unfettered access to every phone switch in the country - they are, after all, strategic and vital national assets. Some say they only record and monitor conversations that are suspicious, overlooking the fact that if that were the case they wouldn't have to be warrantless taps.

  So what, you say, I have never had a conversation or sent an email that I wouldn't want the government to hear or see. Again, you would be missing the point. By reading your emails, listening to your phone conversations (not by human means, but electronic ones) the government has presumed that you are guilty of a crime without probable cause, and there is where your rights have been trampled (in this instance).

  How big of a step is it from the government determining that a high frequency of the word "brother" in a conversation makes you a potential terrorist - and benign words will be well represented among the keywords, since terrorists often speak in code - to them determining that crack dealers live in blue houses or pedophiles drive red cars? Aside from being a violation of free speech, the use of the information from the wiretaps represents a conceptual slippery slope that is truly terrifying.

  As for what we can do instead, how we can stop terrorists before they act without shredding the Constitution, we could start by focusing on actual security instead of power grabs and fear mongering. Make physical security of our assets the number one priority after protecting the Consitution and the people. 6 years of this shit and the government still has yet to do that, only used security as the excuse for every crime and attrocity they have decided it was in their (not our) best interests to commit. Stop using national security as a means to apprehend illegal Mexicans and deadbeat dads. Give the police the tools they need to do their jobs within the system instead of "reallocating" funds to the projects they really want.

  Set the political goal and then take the politics out of the equation. That's how we won the first war in Iraq, according to Colin Powell, and that's the only way we will win this one.

  And finally, I am sick of neo-conservatives who think of themselves as patriots because they support the government regardless of what they do or who they do it to, regardless of how badly they mangle the Constitution. True patriots, the greatest patriots this country (and maybe the world) has ever seen, fought and died, sacrificed everything, to protect the Constitution - not the government, not the President, the Constitution. Anyone who thinks they can put anything before that document, those ideals, and still call themselves a patriot is a liar, a disgrace, and the lowest form of traitor.

  Permalink Thursday, June 14, 2007 05:16 AM