[Peace-discuss] Fake liberals

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Our liberal light of a senior senator, Dick Durbin, will not
oppose the reauthorization of the Patriot Act, nor support the
filibuster against it proposed by Sen. Feingold.  --CGE]


   Rumsfeld warns that the enemy can succeed in changing 
   our way of life. It already has.
   by Nat Hentoff
   February 12th, 2006 12:53 PM

"There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were
being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what
system the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire
was guesswork ... But at any rate they would plug in your wire
whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from
habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every
movement scrutinized." --George Orwell


One morning, in his Supreme Court chambers, Justice William
Brennan was giving me a lesson on the American Revolution. "A
main precipitating cause of our revolution," he said, "was the
general search warrant that British customs officers wrote --
without going to any court -- to break into the American
colonists' homes and offices, looking for contraband."
Everything, including the colonists, was turned upside down.

He added that news of these recurrent assaults on privacy were
spread through the colonies by the Committees of
Correspondence that Sam Adams and others organized, inflaming
the outraged Americans.

Now, the Congressional Democratic leadership has finally found
an issue to focus on -- the vanishing of Americans' privacy,
as happened before the American Revolution, but currently on a
scale undreamed of by Sam Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the
other patriots in the Committees of Correspondence.

The rising present anger around the country, across party
lines, is reflected in a February 3 Zogby Interactive poll
that "finds Americans largely unwilling to surrender civil
liberties—even if it is to prevent terrorists from carrying
out attacks ... Even routine security measures, like random
searches of bags, purses, and other packages, were opposed by
half (50 percent) of respondents in the survey ... Just 28
percent are willing to allow their telephone conversations to
be monitored."

On the other hand, nearly half (45 percent) favored at least
"a great deal" of government secrecy in the war on terror. But
the public's awareness that the United States has increasingly
become a nation under surveillance is indicated by resistance
not only to random searches and tapping into our telephone
conversations. Zogby says: This is a "public obsessed with
civil liberties."

Well, not obsessed yet, but growingly apprehensive.

In 2001, for example, 82 percent of those surveyed by Zogby
favored government video surveillance of street corners,
neighborhoods, and other public places. By 2006, this approval
has dropped to 70 percent, still a formidable figure. But the
decline is part of an across-the-board change in public
willingness to give up civil liberties from 2001 to the
present awakening to the vanishing of the "reasonable
expectation of privacy" that used to be in our rule of law.

James Madison, the principal architect of the Bill of Rights,
warned: "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment in
our liberties." Because of the continually expanding
surveillance technology available to the government, no
administration in our history has been engaged in more
pervasive "experiments" on our liberties than Bush's regime.
And even more penetrating means of surveillance will be
available to future presidents who claim that their "inherent
powers" in a war on terrorism allow them to ignore laws and
the other branches of government. The present and future
dangers to Americans' individual liberties have been
underscored in a revealing speech by Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld on February 2 at the National Press Club in
Washington. (The ramifications of this analysis of our future
are deeper than he may have intended.)

Rumsfeld said flatly that this war to keep us secure from
worldwide, dedicated lethal terrorists can last for decades!
At last, this crucial difference from all the other wars in
which we have been involved is sinking into the American
consciousness.

In their February 3 Washington Post coverage of the Rumsfeld
address, Josh White and Ann Scott Tyson valuably added this
context: "Iraq and Afghanistan are the 'early battles' in the
campaign against Islamic extremists and terrorists, who are
profoundly more dangerous than in the past because of
technological advances that allow them to operate globally,
said Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon K. England in an address
on Wednesday [February 1]."

At the core of Rumsfeld's own remarks is this admission:
"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and
suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they
will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will
succeed in changing theirs." 

But our enemies are changing our way of life, beginning with
the 2001 Patriot Act that, among other invasions, expanded the
FBI's ability to use National Security Letters -- without
going to judges -- to collect personal information about us.
This marked the return of the "general search warrant" of our
colonial past.

Because the New York Times exposed how the National Security
Agency's spying is further changing our way of life, the
administration is intent on punishing the Times -- with the
support of Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee.

In an afterword to George Orwell's 1984, Eric Fromm
emphasized: "Orwell ... is not a prophet of disaster. He wants
to warn and awaken us. He still hopes -- but ... his hope is a
desperate one ... Books like Orwell's are powerful warnings,
and it would be most unfortunate if the reader smugly
interpreted 1984 as another description of Stalinist
barbarism, and if he does not see that it means us, too."

Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, in an interview
with the New York Times' Bob Herbert, tells how Orwell is
indeed speaking to us: "The more people grow accustomed to a
listening environment in which Big Brother is assumed to be
behind every wall, behind every e-mail, and invisibly present
in every electronic communication, telephonic or otherwise --
that is the kind of society, as people grow accustomed to it,
in which you can end up being boiled to death without ever
noticing that the water is getting hotter, degree by degree." 

Will the Democrats become a truly serious opposition party
before privacy disappears entirely?

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