Six More Months of Legal Terrorism

Congress has authorized the use of the Constitution-trampling Patriot Act for another six more months. It was a moment in time that our leaders had to make the right decision and allow the law to expire. It was meant to expire. The Congressmen who authorized the USA PATRIOT ACT without reading it in the first place did so with the expectation that it would expire by 2006.

While five years since 9/11 seemed like an eternity, it has whizzed by at a breakneck pace…and rather than do the right thing and allow the law to expire, we have extended the life of something that allows the President to do exactly what we chastised him for doing just one week ago and covered by this posting at eightandfive.com.

Why is covert action not always a good thing?

Police in NYC are infiltrating protests and getting away with it. More frightening, while participating in the protests they are inciting people to do things that they aren’t there to do. This article from the NYTimes details an officer inciting a crowd to action not once, but twice. The most chilling statement in the article is:

Charles S. Haight, a federal judge in Manhattan, ruled that the dangers of terrorism were “perils sufficient to outweigh any First Amendment cost.”

How can we let this occur?

What else is slipping by in the name of protection?

In the UK, a twenty-five year project is culminating with Orwell’s vision, and through it all the authorities say it will help to catch “criminals and terrorists.” And in the same article, they mention chips in cars for tracking purposes and how it can become as valuable as DNA or fingerprinting. But for what? Speeding?

What secret and covert actions in history have yielded satisfactory results? In 1979, the U.S. military began to fund Muslim guerillas. We had to smack down those commies and prevent them from getting a foothold in Afghanistan. That turned out well, the regime we supported in the 70s and 80s started purging all relics that didn’t agree with their mentality. This story dateline is just seven months before 9/11 yet it didn’t set off any alarms that something big was about to happen. All of our covert operations and secrecy couldn’t protect us from raging terrorists and yet five years later, we are asking for an extension of secrecy and covert powers.

Stephen Mercado, details open information vs. secrecy in an article at cia.gov that was unclassified in 2005. The two ideas that should be central to any governmental body are quality and cost. The yellow cake uranium theory advanced in the President’s State of the Union Address would have never occurred in an open-information system. Instead, someone would have said, “Dude, that’s from some old-ass term paper and the information is not valid.” Instead, we had a CIA operative’s cover get blown in an act of partisan skullduggery that should make everyone fearful about this administration’s motives.

Secrecy and lies only beget more secrecy and lies. Open the information and free the world.