Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
introduced two dangerous new domestic policy initiatives today during a news conference on the recent arrests seven would-be terrorists in Miami.
Calling them "homegrown terrorists," Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday that seven men had been charged with conspiring to work with al-Qaida to blow up Chicago's Sears Tower and five federal buildings.
"They were persons who for whatever reason came to view their home country as the enemy," Gonzales said at a news conference at the Justice Department. The suspects include U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.
By validating the notion of "homegrown" terrorism, Gonzales has proposed unleashing the full force of the United States' military response to terrorism on American citizens within the context of routine law enforcement.
More after the jump...
A decade ago, the arrests of an organized group bent on mass-murder would certainly have been framed as a success for law enforcement and an opportunity to validate our approach to justice and the due process of law. Today, by moving early to classify these men as terrorists associated with a foreign enemy, the federal government is hoping to use their crimes to validate their use of unlawful wiretapping, covert surveillance of citizens' groups and secret incarceration without charges or trial as viable options for domestic law enforcement.
Gonzales has also introduced a new means of segmenting Americans into acceptable and unacceptable groups, while leaving completely undefined the boundaries of each category. By declaring that it's possible for some Americans "to view their home country as the enemy," he's introducing the need to both ensure that each citizen is in fact a loyal American and to locate and isolate any citizens that may potentially not support America's direction or goals. It may take some time before you are officially queried as to your loyalties, but now that it's been introduced to the public discourse by America's leading law enforcement agent, it's almost inevitable that at some point you will be.
The only way to prevent the advancement of these domestic policy initiatives is to take away the administration's control of as many government functions as possible, as quickly as possible. The next opportunity for serious progress in this regard comes in November of this year, when it may still be possible to change course by voting the current regime out of power.
[Cross-posted at Chaos Digest]
