The press needs to expose the siege of democracy, not abet it
By John Hanrahan
Have we in the United States cut down much of “Man’s laws” – our Bill of Rights – in the name of protecting ourselves from, and attacking, those whom our government has identified as our modern-day devils?
Has the mainstream press largely ignored the chilling story that, pushed by the alarmist warnings of national leaders since the September 11, 2001 attacks, we have become overly fearful, willing to surrender many core freedoms for the illusion of absolute security against what we are told is a never-ending terrorism threat? Never mind reality, we’re scared, as polls show: Do whatever you need to do to keep us safe, please, no questions asked.
Wage secret wars and semi-covertly unleash cyber attacks and drone strikes in any country against any putative enemies – as defined by the Obama administration – and don’t worry about international and national legal niceties or congressional approval, much less having open, public debate about our overt and covert war-making? Fine, as long as you keep us safe and don’t tell us about the civilian casualties we and our NATO allies cause or the number of new enemies we create through our military adventurism – unless, of course, those civilian casualties are caused by governments in Libya or Syria or the like. After all, we are the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, and the rules don’t apply to us.
Have we as citizens collectively assumed an “I’m-doing-nothing-wrong-so-why-should-I-worry” attitude, firm in the knowledge that it’s mainly Muslims, activists and foreigners who are affected by civil liberties abridgments and targeted assassinations – at least for now? Are we Americans stumbling obliviously into authoritarianism, with few in government or in the mainstream press willing to warn us about it? Is the real ticking time bomb that should concern us the one attached to our Bill of Rights, rather than the hyperbolic one wielded by Muslim extremists? Has the mainstream press been as vigilant in alerting us to the dangerous policies and tendencies in our own government over the last decade as it has been in alerting us to abuses in, say, China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and on and on? We’re not arguing moral equivalencies here, but rather asking: Has the mainstream press overall met what is supposedly its role of serving as watchdogs over our own government and the military-industrial-homeland security apparatus that feeds so profitably off of it?
Call it whatever you will and, if you feel President Obama is acting in your interest, and that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did so before him, and presumably that Romney will if he is elected, then go ahead and defend this diminution in civil liberties as being necessary. But it seems indisputable that we as a nation are less free than we were 11 years ago. And the mainstream press needs to say so, needs to explore this vital-to-democracy topic in news articles, as well as editorially and on the op-ed pages and in the broadcast media.
The loss of civil liberties: just collateral damage
Among civil libertarians, constitutional scholars, activists, alternative media commentators (such as Democracy Now on Pacifica, the Alyona Show on RT) and widely-read progressive bloggers and reporters (such as Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt, and the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill), the diminishment of our civil liberties and the unchecked war-waging by the United States since the September 11, 2011 attacks is, rightly, a topic of constant discussion. One wonders how much worse the civil liberties picture would be were it not for the heroic efforts of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In theory, a majority of the American people today appear to still hold to the ideals embodied in the Bill of Rights, even as those rights have been whittled away in the decade-long climate of fear.
In a Pew Research poll last September on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, 54 percent of respondents said "no" when asked whether it was "necessary to give up civil liberties in order to curb terrorism” – up from 35 percent right after the attacks and 45 percent at the one-year mark. But within Washington’s tightly-closed inner circle – the mainstream news outlets, the president, the Congress, the military-industrial-security state complex – civil liberties and the rule of law are just so much unacknowledged collateral damage.
Why, in our mainstream press, don’t we see more news articles and op-ed pieces along the lines of the opinion piece that Professor Jonathan Turley wrote in January and that, miracle of miracles, actually found its way into The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section with this provocative headline: “10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free.”
In this remarkable piece Turley, the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and one of the nation’s leading authorities on civil liberties, noted:
“In the decade since Sept. 11, 2001, this country has comprehensively reduced civil liberties in the name of an expanded security state...While each new national security power Washington has embraced was controversial when enacted, they are often discussed in isolation. But they don’t operate in isolation. They form a mosaic of powers under which our country could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian.”
I call the Turley piece remarkable not only because of its tightly-reasoned, sobering arguments but for the fact that one hardly ever sees such notions raised in daily mainstream newspapers, or on mainstream television news. As Turley wrote: “We seem as a country to be in denial as to the implications of these laws and policies. Whether we are viewed as a free country with authoritarian inclinations or an authoritarian nation with free aspirations (or some other hybrid definition), we are clearly not what we once were.” We would be wise, Turley said, to follow the Chinese proverb: “The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right names.”
Turley noted similarities between rollbacks of civil liberties in this country and the civil liberties abuses in other countries such as Iran, Russia, China and Cuba:
“Every year, the State Department issues reports on individual rights in other countries, monitoring the passage of restrictive laws and regulations around the world. Iran, for example, has been criticized for denying fair public trials and limiting privacy, while Russia has been taken to task for undermining due process. Other countries have been condemned for the use of secret evidence and torture.”
Sound at all familiar?
Despite the similarities between powers assumed by or granted to the U.S. government over the last 10 years, Turley noted: “Even as we pass judgment on countries we consider unfree, Americans remain confident that any definition of a free nation must include their own – the land of the free.” But, he cautioned: “The list of powers acquired by the U.S. government since 9/11 puts us in rather troubling company.”
Turley went on: “Americans often proclaim our nation as a symbol of freedom to the world while dismissing nations such as Cuba and China as categorically unfree. Yet, objectively, we may be only half right. Those countries do lack basic individual rights such as due process, placing them outside any reasonable definition of ‘free,’ but the United States now has much more in common with such regimes than anyone may like to admit. These countries also have constitutions that purport to guarantee freedoms and rights. But their governments have broad discretion in denying those rights and few real avenues for challenges by citizens – precisely the problem with the new laws in this country.”
“Since 9/11, we have created the very government the framers feared: a government with sweeping and largely unchecked powers resting on the hope that they will be used wisely...Dishonesty from politicians is nothing new for Americans. The real question is whether we are lying to ourselves when we call this country the land of the free...”
Read more:
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=00644&stoplayout=true&print=true
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