Remember when, in the wake of the 9/11 attack, the Patriot Act was
controversial, held up as the symbolic face of Bush/Cheney radicalism
and widely lamented as a threat to core American liberties and
restraints on federal surveillance and detention powers? Yet now, the
Patriot Act is
quietly renewed every four years by overwhelming majorities in both parties (despite
substantial evidence of
serious abuse),
and almost nobody is bothered by it any longer. That’s how extremist
powers become normalized: they just become such a fixture in our
political culture that we are trained to take them for granted, to view
the warped as normal. Here are several examples from the last couple of
days illustrating that same dynamic; none seems overwhelmingly
significant on its own, but that’s the point:
After Dick Cheney
criticized John McCain this weekend for having chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate,
this was McCain’s retort:
Look, I respect the vice president. He and I had strong disagreements
as to whether we should torture people or not. I don’t think we should
have.
Isn’t it amazing that the first sentence there (“I respect the vice
president”) can precede the next one (“He and I had strong disagreements
as to whether we should torture people or not”) without any notice or
controversy? I realize insincere expressions of respect are rote
ritualism among American political elites, but still, McCain’s statement
amounts to this pronouncement:
Dick Cheney authorized torture — he is a torturer — and I respect him.
How can that be an acceptable sentiment to express? Of course, it’s
even more notable that political officials whom everyone knows
authorized torture are walking around free,
respected and
prosperous,
completely shielded from all criminal accountability. “Torture” has
been permanently transformed from an unspeakable taboo into a
garden-variety political controversy, where it shall long remain.
Equally remarkable is
this Op-Ed from The Los Angeles Times over the weekend, condemning President Obama’s kill lists and secret assassinations:
Allowing the president of the United States to act as judge, jury and
executioner for suspected terrorists, including U.S. citizens, on the
basis of secret evidence is impossible to reconcile with the Constitution’s guarantee that a life will not be taken without due process of law.
Under the law, the government must obtain a court order if it seeks
to target a U.S. citizen for electronic surveillance, yet there is no
comparable judicial review of a decision to kill a citizen. No court is
even able to review the general policies for such assassinations. . . .
But if the United States is going to continue down the troubling road
of state-sponsored assassination, Congress should, at the very least,
require that a court play some role, as the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court does with the electronic surveillance of suspected
foreign terrorists. Even minimal judicial oversight might make the
president and his advisors think twice about whether an American citizen
poses such an “imminent” danger that he must be executed without a
trial.
Isn’t it amazing that a newspaper editorial even has to say: you
know, the President isn’t really supposed to have the power to act as
judge, jury and executioner and order American citizens assassinated
with no transparency or due process? And isn’t it even more amazing that
the current President has actually seized and exercised this power with
very little controversy? That presidential power — literally the most
tyrannical power a political leader can seize — is also now a barely
noticed fixture of our political culture.
Meanwhile, we have
this, from the Associated Press yesterday:
Remember when
John Poindexter’s “Total Information Awareness” program –
which was “to use data mining technologies to sift through
personal transactions in electronic data to find patterns and
associations connected to terrorist threats and activities”: basically
create real-time surveillance of everyone – was
too extreme and menacing
even for an America still at its peak of post-9/11 hysteria? Yet here
we have the NYPD — more than a decade removed from 9/11 — announcing a
very similar program in very similar terms, and it’s almost impossible
to envision any real controversy.
Similarly, in the AP’s sentence above describing the supposed targets
of this new NYPD surveillance program: what, exactly, is a “potential
terrorist”? Isn’t that an incredibly Orwellian term given that, by
definition, it can include anyone and everyone? In practice, it will
almost certainly mean:
all Muslims, plus anyone who engages in any activism that opposes prevailing power factions.
That’s how the American Surveillance State is always used. Still, the
undesirability of mass, “all-seeing,” indiscriminate surveillance regime
was once viewed as undesirable — a view, in sum, that the East German
Stasi was a bad idea that we would not want to replicate on American
soil — yet now, there is almost no limit on the level of state
surveillance we tolerate.
In
The New York Times yesterday, Elisabeth Bumiller
wrote about
the very moving and burdensome plight of America’s drone pilots who,
sitting in front of a “computer console [] in the Syracuse suburbs,”
extinguish people’s lives thousands of miles away by launching missiles
at them. The bulk of the article is devoted to eliciting sympathy and
admiration for these noble warriors, but when doing so, she unwittingly
describes America’s future with domestic surveillance drones:
Among the toughest psychological tasks is the close surveillance for aerial sniper missions, reminiscent of the East German Stasi officer absorbed by the people he spies on in the movie “The Lives of Others.” A drone pilot and his partner, a sensor operator who manipulates the aircraft’s camera, observe the habits of a militant as he plays with his children, talks to his wife and visits his neighbors. They then try to time their strike when, for example, his family is out at the market.
“They watch this guy do bad things and then his regular old life
things,” said Col. Hernando Ortega, the chief of aerospace medicine for
the Air Education Training Command, who helped conduct a study last year
on the stresses on drone pilots. . . . ”You see them wake up in the morning, do their work, go to sleep at night,”
said Dave, an Air Force major who flew drones from 2007 to 2009
at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and now trains drone pilots
at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
That’s the level of detailed monitoring that drone surveillance
enables. Numerous attributes of surveillance drones — their ability to
hover in the same place for long periods of time, their ability to
remain stealth, their
increasingly cheap cost and tiny size
— enable surveillance of a breadth, duration and invasiveness unlike
other types of surveillance instruments, such as police helicopters or
satellites. Recall that one new type of drone already in use by the U.S.
military in Afghanistan — the Gorgon Stare, named after the “mythical
Greek creature whose unblinking eyes turned to stone those who beheld
them” — is “able
to scan an area the size of a small town”
and “the most sophisticated robotics use artificial intelligence that
[can] seek out and record certain kinds of suspicious activity”; boasted
one U.S. General: “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so
there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at,
and
we can see everything.”
There is
zero question that this drone surveillance
is coming to American soil. It already has spawned a
vast industry that is quickly securing
formal approval for the proliferation of these surveillance weapons. There’s some
growing though still marginal opposition
among both the independent left and the more libertarian-leaning
precincts on the right, but at the moment, that trans-ideological
coalition is easily outgunned by the combination of drone industry
lobbyists and Surveillance State fanatics. The idea of flying robots
hovering over American soil monitoring what citizens do
en masse is
yet another one of those ideas that, in the very recent past, seemed
too radical and dystopian to entertain, yet is on the road to being
quickly mainstreamed. When that happens, it is no longer deemed radical
to advocate such things; radicalism is evinced by opposition to them.
Read the full article with updates at Salon.com
© 2012 Salon.com
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil
rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times
Bestselling book "
How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "
A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy. His just-released book is titled
"With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful." He is the recipient of the first annual I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism.
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