Traveling the "National Security" Route to November 7th

By Bernard Weiner
Created Oct 25 2006 - 11:47am

By Bernard Weiner, The Crisis Papers

Observations from abroad, which is where this journalistic traveler has been
for the past several weeks:

ITALY'S "CRAZY" INTERNET LAW

Before I was permitted to log on at internet points in San Gimignano and
Firenze (Florence), I was required to present either my passport or driver's
license, so it could be duplicated by the management.

A note taped to the cash register informed patrons that last year, as a
response to terrorists communicating with each other over the internet, the
Italian government passed a law requiring that anyone wanting to get on the
Web at such an internet business must provide photo I.D. that will be
duplicated and kept on file at the business until or if the police ask to
see it.

Reluctantly, I handed over my passport, a copy was made of my photo and
personal information, and I sat down to check my email.

In Florence, I asked the proprietor what was going on. "It's simply crazy,"
said the owner, whose near-perfect American-English came from studying in
the U.S. for many years. "My back room is stuffed with thousands of these
old duplicated pieces of paper, and I'm obliged to hang onto them forever.
It places an undue burden on those of us who run internet points. What on
earth do they think they're accomplishing?

"Any reasonably competent terrorist will find his way onto the internet
despite this stupid law. Phony passports or driver's licenses, disguises,
use of library terminals, wireless locations, whatever. This law was passed
mainly to make the politicians look like they're actually doing something to
protect us, when in fact nothing really has been accomplished except to
inconvenience the public and those of us businesses that now have to become
permanent paper repositories.

"Plus," he said, "it's just making it easier for the government, any
government, to turn its citizens into compliant robots. Take off your shoes
before you get on an airplane, take off your belt and let the X-ray machine
examine it, I'll bet if they required everybody to strip behind a screen
people eventually would get used to doing that, too. Freedom is being sliced
away, piece by piece, and we all participate in it, by doing what they tell
us. But I'm a businessman, what can I do? I have to comply. It's crazy."

We then got involved in a long and fascinating discussion about what was
happening in Italy and what was happening in the U.S. around the "war on
terrorism" question. Short sum-up: Italy under Berlusconi and the U.S. under
Bush were using the "war on terrorism" as cover for their own far-right
agendas. There are indeed bad guys out there that need to be caught, we both
agreed, but this incompetency and battering-ram approach wasn't really the
only way to go, and certainly not the best way.

THE LITTER ON HEATHROW'S CARPET

To get to Germany in the least expensive way for my address to Democrats
Abroad in Munich (see the text of my talk here (
www.crisispapers.org/essays6w/democrats-abroad.htm [1] ), I was routed
through London's Heathrow Airport. I didn't understand why the cheapest
tickets went through Heathrow until I was forced to endure the chaos of that
airport's security system.

Several hundred in-transit passengers from various arriving flights were
forced to stand in a mass traffic jam in a windowless corridor for 20
minutes, with no movement forward and with no indication of what was
blocking our way. Finally, a security official, perhaps sensing something
was wrong, peeked her head out from around the corner and spotted this mass
of seething humanity. A few minutes later, those snaking-line mazes were set
up and we began moving forward, or at least enjoyed the illusion that we
were moving forward, zig-zagging our way towards somewhere.

The whole process took more than an hour-and-a-half, making many passengers
miss their connecting flights. When the line finally got to the security
inspection area, large signs announced what one could not bring on the
aircraft, a holdover from the London scare several months ago about the
possible use of liquid bombs. Young employees walked back and forth
displaying boards affixed with samples of shampoos and toothpaste and water
bottles and such. (Some non-English-speaking passengers actually thought the
agents were offering to sell those items duty-free. Much fun.)

From that point on, the carpet became littered with toothpaste tubes and
shampoo bottles and the like. I jettisoned my toothpaste into a bin but kept
some medicinal ointments with me, figuring they might allow those 2-ounce
tubes through, as they do now in the States. Alas, my backpack was flagged
and I had to explain my possession of the forbidden items. The middle-aged
inspector, who gave the impression that he knew he was enforcing
non-sensical rules, sighed and made me a deal: "Give me the fungus cream,"
he said, "and you can take the antibiotic ointment with you." We smiled at
the charade. I handed over my dangerous athlete's-foot cream, and off I went
to make my connecting flight back to San Francisco.

The gentleman in front of me was not so lucky in his dealings and had a
run-in with a hard-nosed young inspector, a stick-to-the-book kind of guy.
After all the shouting, the passenger had to turn over several hundred
dollars worth of medicinal ointments and pills, since they weren't in
containers affixed with their authorized presciptions. He was steaming. Like
me, he will never fly through Heathrow again.

AMERICA'S SELF-DESTRUCTIVE REPUTATION ABROAD

As an American traveling over the past four or five years all around the
globe, I've experienced a reaction that I find curious and revelatory. It
didn't matter if I was in Southeast Asia, or villages in Crete, or towns in
Italy, or in the Sahara in Morocco. The minute locals found out that I was
American, they began commisserating with me, before I even said a word,
about how unfortunate I am to live in a country ruled by "Boosh."

They just assumed (correctly, as it turned out) that I agreed with them,
probably because most Americans they met over the past several years felt
the same way as they did.

In 2006, this anti-Americanism is still largely directed at the U.S.
government, not its people, but it has become even more intense, and
virtually universal. In all my travels abroad, I've met only one person who
stood on Bush's side, a World War II veteran in England who thought "the
Islams" needed to be "whipped into shape." Other than that, it was fullout
denunications of American foreign and military policy under the
CheneyBushRumsfeld regime. Most of the time, I had trouble even getting a
word in until their rants began to run down.

In short, it's not liberal propaganda or an academic truism to point out
that the U.S. has lost all credibility and respect in much of the world
because of Bush&Co.'s excesses and arrogant bullying approach. The ordinary
folks I talked with in one corner of the world or another -- cab drivers,
small business owners, tourist gift-sellers, grocers, students, cafe
workers, etc. -- all felt perfectly free to tell me how they hated America's
government and how they admired the courage of those few leaders who stood
up to the U.S. in the world. Not that they liked or necessarily agreed with
Osama bin Laden, or Hugo Chavez, or Fidel Castro, or Hassan Nasrallah; they
just thought it important that the U.S. face some strong international
opposition.

In the various countries I've visited, I've been impressed by the average
person's grasp of daily events and the complex realities behind that news.
Unlike in this country, where a huge proportion of Americans get their news
filtered in the mass-media through a governmental prism, citizens abroad
have a great many intelligent media outlets that permit them to piece
together the reality of what's going on. Instead of Fox News, they have a
multitude of channels and networks and independent political points of view
to listen to.

My personal experience talking to people around the world over the past five
years underlines the common wisdom that virtually all the good will built up
for America after the terror attacks of 9/11 has vanished as a result of the
Bush Administration's disastrous foreign and military adventurism,
especially in Iraq and in blind support of Israel in the Middle East. That's
the reality.

If the GOP can be badly defeated at the polls on November 7, the situation
will not change overnight. But we, and the world's peoples, can at least
begin to see the beginning of the end of this reckless administration, and,
one can hope, a return to sanity and realistic foreign policy that sees war
as a last resort, not a political choice of first resort, as was the case
with Iraq.

A BANANA-REPUBLIC VOTING SYSTEM

Another aspect of American life that foreigners have trouble comprehending
is our slipshod election system. The U.S. has a reputation for
sophistication and technological smarts, but our current voting procedures
are so deficient, corrupted and easily corruptible, that we resemble a
banana-republic dictatorship in the way our rulers are chosen.

France, Canada, Germany, and so many other countries, are so far advanced in
how they tabulate the votes -- most by hand-counted paper ballots, with
tight security involved in doing so -- and how quickly they are able to
announce the winners. In the U.S., the Republican Administration in effect
has outsourced voting equipment and voting tabulation to three
Republican-supporting private corporations. They make the voting machines
and control the proprietary software that programs the way those work, which
means the way votes are registered and, most importantly, counted. Their
technicians have access to the machines, sometimes by remote control, and
can alter the programming without anybody ever knowing about the
manipulation.

Because of this flawed system, the past three U.S. elections (2000, 2002 and
2004) are suspect. Statistical and anecdotal evidence leads to the obvious
conclusion that each of those results were fiddled with, or in some states
such as Ohio and Florida, the Republican Secretaries of State declared
hundreds of thousands of likely Democratic voters ineligible to vote,
forcing them to legally fight for the right to have their choices counted.

"I simply find it incredible that your citizens put up with such rubbish,"
said a New Zealand businessman as we ate breakfast in the Sahara Desert in
southern Morocco two years ago. "Why on earth do they permit such a
scandal?" Other foreigners have said something similar whenever the subject
comes up.

And how does one explain why Americans are so lackadaisical about their
right to have their votes counted honestly? Even the nominal opposition
party, the Democrats, haven't taken the issue seriously enough to loudly
protest or take the case to court. It is a scandal, one that easily could be
repeated, at least in key districts, in next month's midterm election. And
if you think Karl Rove and his minions are not aware of their opportunities
in this regard, you're amazingly naive.

THE SLIDE OF THE AMERICAN DOLLAR

I've been traveling abroad for decades, ever since my college days -- always
useful for a writer in obtaining some fresh perspective on one's own
country -- and so can remember the era of the "mighty American dollar." If
you had dollars in your pocket, didn't matter how many, you felt wealthy
abroad.

Not so much anymore, and not just because everything costs way more now than
it did decades ago. There still are places where dollars are preferred (at
the nightly crafts market in Luong Prabong, Laos, for example), but in most
areas, the sought-after currency is the Euro.

As the dollar sinks in value and prestige, and the Euro rises, one can
anticipate even more of a slide in America's status abroad and some
dislocations in the American economy of potentially major proportions.

In short, even though America stands as the lone superpower colossus in the
world, it is somewhat musclebound and its influence and respect are
fast-waning. Changing Administrations in Washington might help bring back
some of that honor and influence, but it's equally likely that the "old
days" are over and that more intelligent U.S. administrations will have to
learn how to use America's economic and political power more creatively and
less aggressively.

We can start on that road back toward respect and international good-will by
a landslide defeat of Republicans on November 7. Make sure you and your
friends and neighbors vote, and that you demand, or sue for, an honest
balloting and verifiable tabulating of the votes. This is an election that
will determine our personal, national and global future; that's how
important November 7 is. We are making history here.#

First published by The Crisis Papers 10/24/06.

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson