by Beck, Glenn
FDR Wasn’t Alone
Our history is littered with examples of our leaders shredding the Constitution in reaction to the threat of the day:
When the United States was busy fighting France in the undeclared war in the late 1700s, President John Adams pushed for the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which allowed him to criminalize political dissent.
President Abraham Lincoln, who suspended the writ of habeas corpus during the Civil War, set up military tribunals for civilians.
In 1916, before the United States entered World War I, Woodrow Wilson supported legislation to suppress disloyalty. He requested that Congress give the president complete authority to censor the press should America enter the war. He wanted to make it a federal crime to mail any material deemed “of a treasonable or anarchistic character.” Wilson argued that this power was “absolutely necessary to the public safety.”
Could you trust any president or politician (outside of maybe George Washington) with the absolute authority to decide what thoughts and words should be allowed in a debate over war and peace—or anything else for that matter?
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It’s amazing to think just how fast a freedom-loving country is willing to turn its back on the very document that formalized that freedom in the first place. Plenty of blood has been shed, and many people have died to secure and protect our Constitution, yet the mere threat of bloodshed or death now causes us to trample it.
AN OPEN-ENDED INVITATION TO TRAMPLE OUR RIGHTS
When we’ve sold out the Constitution in the past we’ve always eventually come to our senses once the “hobgoblin” has subsided. We’ve been like a guy waking up in the morning after a night of heavy drinking—and thinking, What happened? What did I do last night? And then we pledged that we’ll never have another drink again.
A RAND Corporation study made the same point in a slightly more formal way: “Throughout U.S. history in times of national security crisis, civil liberties have been curtailed in exchange for perceived greater security, the balance between liberties and security generally being restored after each crisis.”
“The Japanese in California should be under armed guard to the last man and woman right now—and to hell with habeas corpus until the danger is over.”
—Columnist Westbrook Pegler, 1942
The Japanese internment camps were shuttered. Habeas corpus was restored. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt came to an end. But today it’s different. That’s because the War on Terror does not have an end. And that’s a tremendous problem if you’re someone like me who cares not just about the “spirit” of the Constitution, but the actual letters of it.
When you’re fighting a war on an abstract concept, there’s no way to determine when you’ve won. Terror isn’t a country that can be conquered. It doesn’t have the capacity to wave a white flag and surrender. You can’t put terror in prison or execute it. If you’re fighting an enemy that can’t be conquered and can’t surrender, you really have no exit strategy from your war.
The definition of terror and terrorism is amazingly broad and it will continue to grow as the government redefines what constitutes terror and who a terrorist is. Today it’s Muslim extremists—as it absolutely should be—but tomorrow the definition could easily include other groups. Why aren’t Mexican drug cartel members labeled “terrorists”? What about computer hackers? Or people who protest the government too much. Or gun owners. Or whistle-blowers. Or tax evaders. Or (gasp!) people who spend a lot of time criticizing politicians on radio and television.
If we’re being honest with one another then we should drop the “War on Terror” moniker and call it what it really is: a “War on Freedom” that has killed lots of terrorists in the process.
THE ENDURING CONSEQUENCES OF 9/11
A religious madman about seven thousand miles away in a dysfunctional, practically medieval country hatched an evil plot: Send a message to America by hijacking planes and flying them into famous symbols of American financial and military power. From conception to execution, 9/11 is estimated to have cost between $400,000 and $500,000—plus the expendable lives of the nineteen terrorists. For that investment, they got not only a day of terror and the lives of 3,500 innocent people, they also got:
Legislation that reduces or eliminates judicial oversight in order to allow the intelligence agencies to spy on foreign nationals and citizens alike.
Legislation that gives the government the power to imprison American citizens without a trial. Erik Kain of Forbes.com described this as “the greatest threat to civil liberties Americans face.” To soothe people’s concerns, President Obama assured us verbally that he wouldn’t use that power. Since he’s lived up to all his other promises, we don’t have to worry, right?
Assassination of American citizens abroad without judicial review. The government just has to declare that the target is a “terrorist” before targeting the individual.
Airport “security” that subjects travelers in the United States to a litany of indignities at the hands of a motley band of (mostly) ineffective, unskilled bumble-bots. Case after case has documented their harassment and humiliation of passengers, arbitrary enforcement of rules, flagrant violations of duties, and an overall contempt for the Fourth Amendment.
A security industry filled with government officials turned lobbyists. These individuals use their connections to sell their wares to the government at taxpayer expense. Michael Chertoff, former DHS chief turned lobbyist, made a fortune peddling invasive screening equipment to the TSA. As a bonus, this equipment has been banned in Europe because of cancer concerns.
An absolutely enormous security apparatus that numbers some 854,000 people in nearly 1,300 government organizations and 2,000 private companies dedicated to intelligence, counterterrorism, and homeland security that comes with an absolutely staggering price tag.
The National Security Agency, once tasked with monitoring communications abroad, which now focuses much of its effort domestically.
An increasingly militarized police force equipped with weaponry and vehicles once reserved for the country’s armed forces. Machine guns, grenade launchers, battle-dress uniforms, military tactics, heavy use of SWAT teams, and an overall attitude that prompted one police chief to opine, “The police culture in our country has changed.”
A wanton disregard of the First and Fourth Amendments by government officials and citizens alike.
Of course, those are just the changes that are glaringly obvious. Plenty of other items fall under the radar or simply have yet to be discovered. Did you know, for example, that the government now keeps track of all your pharmacy prescriptions? They do, thanks to a law passed in 2005. Enjoy that Xanax!
THIS IS STILL AMERICA, RIGHT?
Under the administration of George W. Bush, and continuing enthusiastically (and then some!) under Barack Obama, the United States has embarked on one of the most dangerous attacks on civil liberties in its history. Too many Republicans gave Bush a free pass when he started to trounce the Constitution. And today, too many Democrats are turning a blind eye as Obama does the same thing. This should not be a partisan issue. The only issue should be whether you want to live in a country that respects the Constitution and values liberty. If you do, then here are a few things to get outraged about:
Warrantless Wiretapping
Less than a month after 9/11, and under the express direction of George W. Bush, the FBI began unprecedented warrantless domestic surveillance. Spying on Americans with absolutely no judicial oversight made each incident of warrantless wiretapping a felony—or at least it would have been a felony if it had been prosecuted.
But when you’re fighting a war on terror, all options are on the table. Concerns were met with reassurances that only suspected terrorists were going to be targeted. Nevertheless, with the floodgates open, and the Constitution drowning, it didn’t take long before people who didn’t fall into the “terrorist” category began to have their communications intercepted. At the t
ime, then-senator Barack Obama rightly called the program illegal and demanded an investigation. But when he got the president gig he completely changed his mind. I guess it wasn’t the warrantless wiretapping that bothered him, just that the Republicans were doing it.
Warrantless Cell Phone Tracking
Most of us know that a cell phone company can find your phone by figuring out which towers it is connecting with. But I doubt most people know that some police departments are asking phone companies to do that for routine calls, without a warrant, and with very little oversight.
A recent investigation into the practice by the A.C.L.U. yielded 5,500 pages of documents that were turned over to the New York Times. Among them was evidence that small towns were not only spending money on equipment to execute this tracking (Gilbert, Arizona, spent $244,000, for example), but that they were also purposefully keeping their activities secret from the public. The Iowa City Police Department, for example, told officers to keep the tracking out of police reports and to “[N]ot mention to the public or the media the use of cellphone technology or equipment used to locate the targeted subject.”
After the Times called local police departments to ask about their use of cell phone tracking they reported that some “law enforcement officials said the legal questions were outweighed by real-life benefits.”
Suspicionless Searches of Your Electronics
David House, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was returning from a trip to Mexico when he was stopped by border agents who seized his laptop and mobile phone. He didn’t get them back for forty-nine days. During that time the government had access to his emails, documents, photos, contacts, and everything else you’d expect to find on such devices.
House was presumably targeted by the border agents because he’s involved with the Bradley Manning Support Network. Manning stands accused of leaking huge amounts of classified information to WikiLeaks (and if he’s found guilty, I hope he spends some quality time in prison), but I don’t know of any law that makes it illegal to be involved with the Bradley Manning Support Network.
In a similar incident, the head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers was also forced to surrender her computer at the border—which, as many attorneys know, is often referred to as a “Constitution-free zone” because the Supreme Court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply there.
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Better Rethink That Trip to Canada
Here’s how two attorneys have described the government’s powers at our borders: “Now, even without reasonable suspicion of any wrongdoing, the government can search, copy and seize travelers’ laptops and other electronic devices at the border and can potentially continue to access personal and work data and information stored in the cloud, indefinitely and in an ongoing manner.”
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But no matter what you think of criminal defense lawyers or Bradley Manning—this is not about them—it’s about an overt attack on the Fourth Amendment. It’s also a classic embodiment of the famous Martin Niemöller quote, “First they came . . .” You’re next, Tea Party leaders, NRA members, or evangelicals who attend a certain church that the government doesn’t like.
Targeted Assassination
Anwar al-Awlaki was a bad guy—there’s no doubt about it. He railed against the United States and urged terrorist attacks on American and Western interests and civilians. He was a vile, fiery, angry jihadi loon. He was also an American citizen and, like it or not, American citizens are entitled to due process of law. Even the loud, smack-talking Islamist, murder-sanctioning ones. Unless, apparently, the government decides otherwise.
The government labeled Awlaki a terrorist and declared that he was connected to al-Qaeda. They didn’t provide too many details on that, because what then-candidate Obama declared would be the most “transparent” administration in American history has actually become one of the least transparent administrations in American history. That’s not just Glenn Beck bad-mouthing the president: it’s a fact that has been bemoaned by plenty of Democrats.
While publicly declaring Awlaki a bad guy, the government was privately deciding his fate. With the approval of our Nobel Peace Prize–winning president, a meeting was held behind closed doors among people whose names we don’t know (classified) where it was decided that Awlaki would die. There was no trial. We don’t know what was said or how the decision was made (classified). We don’t know what the criteria are that get you on a U.S. government kill list (classified). And, if you try to actually ask any of those questions, the answer of course, is “Sorry, that’s classified.”
Shortly after that meeting took place a Predator drone in Yemen blew Awlaki to atoms. A couple of weeks after that, his sixteen-year-old son (who was born in Colorado) was also blown up. Apparently he’d also made the kill list—for reasons we can’t be told (classified). The government says that he was a terrorist, too. Maybe he was. But that’s why Americans are given trials.
Attorney General Eric Holder held a news conference to answer criticisms that these extrajudicial killings of American citizens are illegal and unconstitutional. His response can be summed up as “No, we don’t think so.”
Legal scholars were appalled. You should be, too. Is America better off without these guys on the planet? Probably. But our Constitution most definitely is not.
Email Harvesting
You can now safely assume that a copy of every email you send and a log of every phone call you make will be kept in a secret facility somewhere. There’s a really good chance it will someday sit in a $2 billion facility being built for the NSA in Utah, conveniently called the “First Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative Data Center.” At one million square feet, it’s the size of five Capitol buildings.
The government hasn’t come out and made any great proclamations about their amazing facilities, of course, but the evidence is there. Does that mean all of your emails will be read? Probably not, unless you have a habit of writing “bomb” and “Allah” a lot, but it does mean that, someday in the future, your emails could be used against you in some capacity by a hostile government. Just imagine what a field day President Nixon would have had if he’d lived in a time when he could have pulled up a copy of every single email sent by his rivals.
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Good Luck Finding Anything
The Utah facility plans on holding so much information that they laugh at the word “gigabyte.” They measure information in “yottabytes.” What, you’re not familiar with a yottabyte? Well, here’s a reference: All of the data in the entire World Wide Web takes up approximately one yottabyte.
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What gives the government the right to harvest our emails and intercept our telephone calls? National security, of course. They’re keeping us safe. You see, a terrorist might send a message through email—so the safest thing to do is keep a copy of everything. Don’t worry, we won’t look at it unless there’s a good reason. Trust us!
Perhaps we should all change our email signatures to “Sent by my iPhone, intercepted by the NSA.”
Whistle-blower Prosecution
Speaking of the NSA, the agency’s change in focus disturbed one agent so much that he decided he had no choice but to do something about it.
Thomas Drake reached out to Diane Roark, a staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and told her that he was concerned about the direction the agency was headed—in particular the dramatic change in policy from the strong protection of the privacy of Americans to the complete disregard for it.
The government’s reaction was predictable and, once again, the differences between candidate Obama and President Obama are clear: While running for office, candidate Obama had heaped praise on the nation’s whistle-blowers. Before assuming office, his website stated, “We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to p
rotect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.”
But—and I’m sure you’ll be surprised—President Obama has earned a reputation as one of the most aggressive prosecutors of whistle-blowers in recent history. What Obama once hailed as a noble act can now ruin your life. Thomas Drake knows this all too well. The government came after him with full fury, charging him with violating the Espionage Act and intent on putting him behind bars for decades. They ultimately failed (Drake never passed along any classified information, only unclassified, though embarrassing, information about fraud and abuse), but they made their opinion of whistle-blowers crystal clear in the process. As Drake told journalist Matthew Harwood:
[I consider Obama] [w]orse than Bush. I have to say that. I actually voted for Obama. It’s all rhetoric for me now. As Americans we were hoodwinked. He’s expanding the secrecy regime far beyond what Bush even intended, interestingly enough. I think Bush is probably like, Whoa.
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Translation: Too Many to Count
When Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall asked the U.S. government just how many law-abiding citizens had had their calls or emails monitored by a federal agency, the Obama administration couldn’t come up with a number. The national intelligence office answered the senators that it was “not reasonably possible to identify the number.”