With civil liberties, one size fits all. Yesterday I was on a panel about civil liberties with three other panelists including Malou Innocent of the libertarian Cato Institute. Most of the time I am busy criticizing the Cato Institute because I see it promoting a type of right-wing economic theory. Cato claims that libertarianism is neither left nor right.
LOL.
OK, we agree to disagree.
But on the civil liberties panel Innocent and I were mostly on the same page. Why,? Because we both know that the government is far too tempted to use its power to spy on us, and that current laws give them much too much power, and not enough oversight.
We would like to see provisions of the PATRIOT Act erased. Actually, I would like to see the entire PATRIOT Act erased. It was passed during the panic after the terror attacks on 9/11. Hardline government officials frequently use fear and panic to grab more power.
This goes back all the way to the late 1700s and the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts that targeted dissent and “foreign” ideas.
We have had an obsession with subversion in this country ever since. There is a repressive streak throughout U.S. history,, and it targets dissidents of the left and right. Before the McCarthyite political Witch Hunts of the 1950s during which communists and suspected communists (read liberals) , there was the Brown Scare that targeted suspected fascists. While some of those targeted were fascist sympathizers, the procedures and justifications used in that episode paved the way for McCarthyism’s targeting of the left. Leo Ribuffo has written eloquently on this topic.
We always look the other way when our enemies are targeted and it’s a bad idea, because we’re always next. The current “War on Terrorism” also targets the unpopular and the foreign, especially Muslims and Arabs.
Some of the premises that undergird certain surveillance strategies being used to pursue the “War on Terror” are based on a superficial analysis of previous dissident violence on the political right in the United States. I have explored this in a collection of webpages titled “The ‘War on Terror,’ Civil Liberties, and Flawed Scholarship:
http://www.publiceye.org/...
To summarize: The effectiveness of counterterrorism efforts by the Bush Administration is compromised by flawed analyses based on sloppy scholarship by two leading experts relied on by policymakers: Marc Sageman and Bruce Hoffman.
The resulting programs of government surveillance and computerized data-collection are unnecessarily undermining the civil liberties of millions of Muslims and Arabs living in this country…as well as the rights of all Americans.
This is because different investigative techniques with different levels of government intrusiveness are justified as appropriate depending on the specific social movement configurations of potential terrorists. Both Sageman and Hoffman have made errors in analyzing Leaderless Resistance and right-wing insurgency in the United States, and how domestic terror cells are organized. The government polices based on these flawed analyses therefore need to be rethought.
For example, under current analytical models, the government is focused on discovering underground cells that use a structure called “leaderless resistance.”
The terms “Leaderless Resistance” or “Phantom Cells” have a precise meaning: spontaneous, autonomous, unconnected cells seeking to carry out acts of violence, sabotage, or terrorism against a government or occupying military force.
Yet the ultra-right and neonazi activists who committed acts of violence and terrorism against the government in the 1980s and 1990s did not employ Leaderless Resistance, as scholar Simson Garfinkel has demonstrated.
http://www.uic.edu/...
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted for their roles in the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995 had a business selling militia materials to militia people at gun shows This isn’t underground. It’s not subtle.
So the government is using the wrong analytical lens to find potential terrorists. Yet Sageman’s model is used by federal agencies, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, and the New York City Police Department which has named Sageman a Scholar in Residence. Senator Lieberman who co-chaired the Senate Committee that pushed Sageman’s analysis, also has been promoting draconian measures that he claims are needed to stop “Homegrown Terrorism.”
Sageman especially has been influential with his thesis in Leaderless Jihad, but the policy recommendations emerging from his flawed analysis may be doing more harm than good. In some cases there are anti-terrorism policy advisors who are using a superficial reading of Leaderless Resistance, while ignoring some of Sageman’s more sensible recommendations.
Scholar Simson Garfinkel in 2003 observed that:
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..the U.S. appears to be fighting Leaderless Resistance networks… with an eradication strategy based on crime-fighting: the goal is to create very high penalties for individuals who participate in direct action. The danger of this approach is that the eradication effort itself may inadvertently serve to attract new recruits to a violent ideology, by making the cause appear a just response to an unjust enemy.
The entire operation is flawed, and we’re not protected, because they’re not looking for the right groups of people and the right networks.
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If you are interested in the high stakes poker of intellectual discussions where disagreement is encouraged while civility is respected, drop in on the week-long Conference on World Affairs:
http://www.colorado.edu/...