Spying on American citizens is now the “Terrorism Prevention Program”
So the Bush administration has been on a barn-storming PR campaign to create credibility for the President’s order to spy on US Citizens without congressional or judicial oversight. We return to 1984-esque arguments and double-speak here. The actions were justified because we are at war. The War On Terror is an unending war against a dispersed enemy. A war that can never be won, and even if it was won, we couldn’t be sure that it was. Using a “War On Terror” for extra-legal actions is basically declaring the presidency above the law for all time and administration knows it. If the president gets away with this, the President can do anything he wants under the guise of “protecting our freedoms.” They already claim that people who disagree with their policies are “giving aid and comfort to our enemies.” The next logical step is to jail dissidents. That is what Big Brother, The Cold-War-era Soviet Union or Saddam Hussein would do. Maybe Bush will declare himself “Leader for Life” because no one else could protect the American People. After polling showed that the American people weren’t so incensed if the spying on Americans was done to find terrorists the spying policy was renamed the “Terrorism Prevention Program” and that talking point was hammered home over and over on TV. The problem is that we already know that the NSA net was cast far wider than the Bush Administration would have us believe. They refuse to give out the details for fear of alerting our enemies to our tactics, but that has become boilerplate for the administration preventing the American people from knowing anything about what is really going on.
If we want to truly show the world the power of democracy and freedom, we should be doing whatever we can to protect the people while making civil liberties and general welfare the highest priorities. The government should be welcoming light being shown into its practices, not obstructing truth everywhere it can. The US looks more like the oppressive regimes of the Middle East these days than the freedom-loving, liberty-preserving beacon of hope that we claim to be.
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