http://www.salon.com/2012/07/31/extremism_normalized/Extremism normalized
How Americans are efficiently trained to acquiesce to ideas once deemed so radical as to be unthinkable
By Glenn Greenwald
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 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: 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 Cons ution’s guarantee that a life will not be taken without due process of law.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? Recall that when The New York Times first confirmed Obama’s targeting of citizens for assassinations in 2010, it noted, citing “officials,” that “it is extremely rare, if not unprecedented, for an American to be approved for targeted killing.” No longer. That presidential power — literally the most tyrannical power a political leader can seize — is also now a barely noticed fixture of our political culture.
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.
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 a given — 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.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 stealthy, 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 su ious 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.”
“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.
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.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Edmund_Burke
Everything above, and anything else NSA/FBI/CIA does, goes pretty much unnoticed by 300M+ Americans, even when it's ing Americans hard.
I can't see any way to stop the trend, nor even reverse it. It's a ratchet. Just claim "anti terrorist" or "national security" and Americans give it a pass.
What story do you believe about 9/11?
Inside jerb?
Who did it and how?
You do realize that many people in Congress were pushing for a war in Iraq as early as 1997.... if the government was going to fake an attack, wouldn't they have just done it then? That's just one reason why the "inside job" theory is bull ... then there's the fact that the government has been poking its nose into the world's business for decades without needing to fake an attack, and considering how big and incompetent our government is, there's no way THAT many people could be kept quiet, tbh....
I don't see how we can prevent this sort of widespread tracking/detection. In the future, more things will become technological in nature, meaning more things to track. And users tend to prefer ease of use over security.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/...-killing-memosCongress is finally standing up to President Barack Obama on targeted killing. Almost a year after three American citizens were killed in US drone strikes, legislators are pushing the administration to explain why it believes it's legal to kill American terror suspects overseas.
Congress is considering two measures that would compel the Obama administration to show members of Congress what Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) calls Obama's "license to kill": internal memos outlining the legal justification for killing Americans overseas without charge or trial. Legislators have been asking administration officials to release the do ents for nearly a year, raising the issue multiple times in hearings and letters. But the new proposals, including one from Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) first flagged by blogger Marcy Wheeler and another in a separate intelligence bill, aren't requests—they would mandate disclosure. That shift shows both Republicans and Democrats are growing impatient with the lack of transparency on targeted killings.
After radical American-born clericAnwar al-Awlaki, alleged American Al Qaeda propagandist Samir Khan, and Awlaki's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, were killed by drone strikes in Yemen in September and October of last year, Republican and Democratic members of Congress sent letters asking the Obama administration to explain the legal justification for targeted killing of American citizens. "We got a license to kill Americans, and we don't know the legal basis for the license to kill Americans…because our letters haven't been answered," Grassley complained during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week.
The issue is the cover of 'war' and not what becomes acceptable during war time. Antisedition acts and the like have been staples of US society during wartime for over 200 years.
It's an issue certainly but the problem is the manufactured 'wars' that are used to justify the social control on an open ended basis.
the national security/surveillance state keeps us on a permanent war footing, has for the last 65 years anyway, and will for the foreseeable future -- so that's a distinction without any practical difference.
I was so out of sorts after this I didn't notice what a jerb it was:
buildings aren't supposed to fall at the speed of gravity
The Repugs, like PNAC, were pushing Clinton to go after Iraq, but Clinton was going after OBL (who didn't have any oil, so no interest to Repugs), then the 200q Repugs ignored OBL, but, eg head, used OBL's 9/11 to justify busting into Iraq for oil.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 08-01-2012 at 02:39 PM.
Note, your MJ article mentions only 2 Repugs, who'd support vociferously a Gecko President murdering anybody anywhere with nothing because "some say" that "them folks" is "bad guys" thinking bad things about USA.
Repugs don't GAF about the the murdering, they're only playing politics.
The NSA/FBI/CIA data collection is augmented (just by asking for it) by the data collected by ISPs, Google, MS, cellphone/network operators, etc.
Why the do conspiracy theories get brought into every second conversation almost? What is so hard to believe that a group of crazy people wanted to kill a bunch of people. Why does it always have to be about inside jobs and the such
Another mega-corp always ready to kowtow to the police.
Skype makes chats and user data more available to police
Officials of the United States and other countries have long pushed to expand their access to newer forms of communications to resolve an issue that the FBI calls the “going dark” problem.
Microsoft has approached the issue with “tremendous sensitivity and a canny awareness of what the issues would be,” said an industry official familiar with Microsoft’s plans, who like several people interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss the issue publicly. The company has “a long track record of working successfully with law enforcement here and internationally,” he added.
The changes, which give the authorities access to addresses and credit card numbers, have drawn quiet applause in law enforcement circles but hostility from many activists and analysts.
Authorities had for years complained that Skype’s encryption and other features made tracking drug lords, pedophiles and terrorists more difficult. Jihadis recommended the service on online forums. Police listening to traditional wiretaps occasionally would hear wary suspects say to one another, “Hey, let’s talk on Skype.”
Hacker groups and privacy experts have been speculating for months that Skype had changed its architecture to make it easier for governments to monitor, and many blamed Microsoft, which has an elaborate operation for complying with legal government requests in countries around the world.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...39W_story.html
Its a matter of cause. Without 'war' there is no justification for the police state. Be it commies, central americans arabs militias mexicans etc.
Perhaps that has been going on so long that people would accept it without cause but I doubt it.
Drones kill civilians:
http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-cont...DER_DRONES.pdf
The irony, as Foucault points out, is that the necessity to root out and expurgate one's own "citizens" (although they can no longer be classified as such at the moment of their exclusion) arises from the neo-liberal apparatus so many here support.
the state takes liberties against the governed. how ironic and profound.
that's a facile and incorrect gloss of the argument
well then, correct it
Well, I'm not so sure I understand what you mean by "liberties." The point that I was making was that the neo-liberal insistence on caring for the citizenry, making it grow and prosper, indoctrinating it into proper modes of behavior (through schools, hospitals, culture, etc...) is the flip side of a power that necessitates surveillance, discipline, and ultimately destruction of everything considered hostile or threatening. The font from which neo-liberal (policies many here favor) sprouts also brings forth the destructive police practices described in the OP. At least that's how I read Foucault.
neo-liberalism sows the seeds of its own contradiction and the conditions of its development tend to ripen the contradictions?
smug, garden variety ideology critique, tbh.
Well, I'm sorry you are disappoint
I am disappointed. I hoped at least to get a cite. Apparently, you're content to crib from the back of the book, like a lazy undergrad.
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