Take the latest revelation about the FBI's abuse of those dreaded national security letters.
...[Justice Department Inspector General] Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed "exigent" circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.
In at least two cases, the officials said, Fine found that the FBI obtained full credit reports using a national security letter that could lawfully be employed to obtain only summary information. In an unknown number of other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to be released. The FBI "sequestered" that information, a law enforcement official said last night, but did not destroy it.
You can only bang your head against the wall so many times before you end up with brain damage over it all.
9/11 changed everything alright. It opened the door to the most corrupt, secretive, intrusive, destructive and downright fascist forms or powermongering that ordinary citizens just don't have much of a defence against anymore. Your mail is read. Your phones are tapped. Your phone records are seized. You're on camera whenever you step outside.
Those things have already been going on for a long time as everybody knows, but when government sanctions even more invasive methods of picking through every single detail of your mundane life, what do you have left? And beyond that, when agencies like the FBI already have far more legal powers than they ought to in what's supposed to be a free and democratic society and they take it upon themselves to go even further by trying to stetch the law when it's convenient for them, then what?
Oh, the Democrats will try to fix things that are so obviously wrong with the Patriot Act but, as with everything they'll try to reform or change, Bush will pull out his handy veto pen and basically flip them the bird with it. The courts aren't of much help either. Any controversial rulings that actually threaten Bush's unitary executive (kingly) power will be appealed by government attorneys and will eventually, way down the road, be taken up by the Supreme Court - a long and tedious process.
In the meantime, life ticks on and more people will have their rights and privacy violated while good old smirking attorney general Alberto Gonzales stares into the cameras and tells people not to worry - he's on top of things. And Bush will give even more speeches about the war on terror to scare people into compliance while their brains turn to nodding bubbles of mush. So it will go.
After all, if you're not one of the bad guys, why worry? Right? Now there's an attitude that's killing everything America is supposedly supposed to stand for, although it really hasn't stood for those ideals for a very, very long time if, in fact, those ideals were ever more than just comforting illusions that people had about their great country whose history of corruption goes back centuries to its very founding.
It's no wonder then that the energy to keep fighting those in the no longer hallowed halls of the White House is so hard to come by these days. So few take up the cause on behalf of so many and citizens hope that's enough. It isn't, of course, especially when that fight consists of continual below the belt punches from the opposing side. They don't play by the rules and that's how they win, something that those who want to set things right seem to have to do in order to get anywhere, but won't. It's a a painfully uneven match.
Maybe when those who get tired of watching it from the sidelines decide to join in with a willingness to start a massive proverbial rumble, things will change. Then again, the government will probably just send in the riot squads like they always do. But if no one takes that chance, how we will they ever know?
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