>> I found problems with the "waiting to be dead" idea right off the bat.
>> Too subjective. Too poetical. Unreal. Bullshit. Childish. Came to the
>> same conclusions as a teenager.
>
> Ha, with all the cool books floating around on mainstream shelves, who
> needs a conspiracy movie? I was just reading this cute little book,
> about the tenth one like it.
>
> How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President
> Run Amok
> by Glenn
Greenwaldhttp://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Defending-American-Values-President/dp/...
>
> In an excerpt from his new book, Greenwald explores how fear-mongering
> became the most potent political tool in Bush's arsenal;
>
> In one sense, it is difficult to understand how the Bush
> administration has been able to embrace such radical theories of
> executive power, and to engage in such recognizably un-American
> conduct -- first in the shadows and now quite openly -- without
> prompting a far more intense backlash from the country than we have
> seen
>
> That is because the Bush administration has in its arsenal one very
> potent weapon -- and one weapon only -- which it has repeatedly used:
> fear. Ever since September 11, 2001, Americans have been bombarded
> with warnings, with color-coded "alerts," with talk of mushroom clouds
> and nefarious plots to blow up bridges and tall buildings, with
> villains assigned cartoon names such as "dirty bomber," "Dr. Germ,"
> and so on
>
> We have to invade and occupy Iraq because the terrorists will kill us
> all if we do not. We must allow the president to incarcerate American
> citizens without due process, employ torture as a state-sanctioned
> weapon, eavesdrop on our private conversations and even violate the
> law, because the terrorists are so evil and so dangerous that we
> cannot have any limits on the power of the president if we want him to
> protect us from the dangers in the world.
>
> Here is Dick Cheney in early January 2006, proudly defending the
> administration's illegal eavesdropping program:
>
> Â Â "As we get farther away from September 11th, some in Washington
> are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our
> country, and to back away from the business at hand The enemy that
> struck on 9/11 is weakened and fractured, yet it is still lethal and
> trying to hit us again "
>
> Cheney never once addresses the fact that the administration had full
> leeway to eavesdrop on terrorists without breaking the law. He ignores
> that fact because he is not making a rational argument. He is
> attempting to play on the fears of Americans to justify their
> violations of law.
>
> President Bush has also been fueling the fires of fear in almost every
> speech he has given since September 11, 2001. Here he is on October 6,
> 2005, attempting to whip up as much fear as possible in order to try
> to prop up Americans' diminishing support for the country's ongoing
> occupation of Iraq:
>
> Â Â "The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the
> Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in
> the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from
> Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political
> power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to
> develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate
> Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our
> government into isolation.
>
> Â Â Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, "We will
> either achieve victory over the human race, or we will pass to the
> eternal life." And the civilized world knows very well that other
> fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole
> nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history
>
> Â Â With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global
> ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new
> challenges and unprecedented dangers."
>
> Islamic terrorists are depicted as omnipotent villains with quite
> attainable dreams of world domination, genocide, and the obliteration
> of the United StatesFor four years, this is what Americans have heard
> over and over and over from our government All of our plans for the
> future, dreams for our children, career aspirations, life goals --
> these are all subordinate unless we stand loyally behind George Bush
> as he takes the extreme and unprecedented measures necessary to
> protect us from these extreme and unprecedented threats.
>
> It is that deeply irrational, fear-driven view of the world that has
> been used to convince Americans to acquiesce to the administration's
> excesses and abuses of power. And it is not difficult to understand
> why it works.
>
> After all, if it really were the case that terrorism constituted the
> sort of imminent, civilization-ending threat the administration has
> spent the last four years drumming into everyone's head, then it might
> be extremely difficult to gin up much outrage over an eavesdropping
> program -- warrants or not -- or over a few American citizens being
> rounded up and put in military prisons without any charges
>
> In fact, it has become unacceptable in polite company to even raise
> the prospect that the threat of terrorism may be exaggerated. During
> the 2004 election, John Kerry stumbled in his clumsy way towards
> challenging this fear-mongering when he was quoted in The New York
> Times Magazine as saying, "We have to get back to the place we were,
> where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a
> nuisance." This provoked predictable outrage from the Bush camp that
> Kerry, along with Bush's other opponents, was not serious about
> fighting terrorists and was too weak to protect our children from this
> unparalleled menace
>
> Despite the dire warnings of the Bush administration, people in rural
> Kansas and Georgia are beginning to realize that on the list of
> problems and threats that endanger their children, the potential of a
> terrorist attack does not predominate.
>
> In a rational world, risk is equal to impact multiplied by
> probability. As the Linguasphere Dictionary puts it: "In professional
> risk assessment, risk combines the probability of a negative event
> occurring with how harmful that event would be." But the
> administration has spent four years urging Americans to ignore that
> way of thinking
>
> But one can protect against the threat of terrorism with courage, calm
> and resolve -- the attributes that have always defined our nation as
> it has confronted other threats. Hysteria and fear-mongering are the
> opposite of strength.
>
> Most people know individuals in their lives who live in this type of
> irrational, all-consuming fear -- people who are scared,
> pathologically risk-averse, always hiding and exerting excess caution
> lest something go wrong. In its more extreme version, that sort of
> fear manifests as a life-destroying mental disorder
>
> The Bush administration has been trying to reduce this country to a
> collective version of that affliction. And it is hard to imagine what
> a nation fueled by such fear can accomplish.
>
> The administration has managed to get away with the Orwellian idea
> that fear is the hallmark of courage, and a rational and calm approach
> is a mark of cowardice. They have been aided in this effort by a
> frightened national media and political elite that lives in Washington
> and New York -- two "target-rich" cities -- and that has been so
> petrified of further attacks that they were easily pushed into a state
> of passive, uncritical compliance in exchange for promises of
> protection
>
> Freedom fighters
>
> For a different vision of our nation, we need only look to the
> founders, who embodied courage and resolve. Most of them were wealthy
> and educated, and enjoyed the privileges of a gentrified upbringing in
> the British Empire
>
> But mere comfort and safety were not enough for them. What they lacked
> were the basic liberties that have now come to define America and that
> we now take for granted. Under the Bush administration, we have
> traveled as a nation from the towering heights defined by the courage
> of Patrick Henry (and other founding fathers) to a fearful basement
> where we are ready to give up our liberties and grant the government
> power without limits.
>
> Senator John Cornyn is a Texas Republican and, as such, one of the
> most loyal defenders of George Bush. On December 20, 2005 -- five days
> after the New York Times first revealed the president's lawless
> eavesdropping -- the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reported on the
> debates that had arisen in Congress over these issues:
>
> Â Â "Senators launched new salvos in the battle over national security
> and civil liberties yesterday as recent revelations of domestic spying
> continued to color the chamber's stalemate on an extension of the
> antiterrorism law known as the PATRIOT Act.
>
> Â Â "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead," said
> Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the
> president who sits on the Judiciary Committee."
>
> Contrast the American ethos as embodied by Patrick Henry and the other
> founders -- an insistence that our system of government adhere to the
> rule of law and preserve individual liberty -- with the fear-driven
> mentality peddled by the president's defenders in order to justify his
> conduct.
>
> We are told that we must give up our liberties and allow the president
> the power to break the law, because none of that really matters. Where
> would America be if, throughout our history, we had succumbed to the
> paralyzed, weak-willed fear being hawked by the likes of Cornyn and
> Roberts? We would not have risked our lives to win our freedom from
> the British monarchy. We would have acquiesced to the evils of slavery
> and the division of our country rather than risk our lives in the
> Civil War. After Pearl Harbor, we would have gone to war against Japan
> but not Nazi Germany
>
> On January 28, 2006, history professor and best-selling author Joseph
> J. Ellis published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he pointed
> out one of the most important and under-recognized truths about the
> way in which we view the threat of terrorism:
>
> Â Â "My first question: Where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of
> American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations
> it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat
> to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.
>
> Â Â Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it
> places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival
> of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to
> believe so."(Emphasis added.)
>
> And the terrorists appear to be joined in that desire by President
> Bush. His administration continuously -- and irrationally -- depicts
> terrorism as the overarching threat around which we are constructing
> our entire foreign policy, changing the basic principles of our
> government, and fundamentally altering both our behavior in the world
> and the way we are perceived.
>
> As a result, one rarely hears anyone arguing that the terrorism
> threat, like any other threat, should be viewed in perspective and
> subjected to rational risk-benefit assessments
>
> In his op-ed, Professor Ellis makes another critically important
> point: Even with regard to the genuinely existential threats in our
> nation's history, we have at times allowed our fears to be exploited.
> But when we have done so, we have adopted excessive measures which
> have led to some of the most shameful episodes in our past. Among the
> examples he cites are the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, "which
> allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport
> foreigners during the 'quasi-war' with France," and the internment of
> Japanese Americans during World War II," which was justified on the
> grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national
> security."
>
> Life during wartime
>
> Supporters of the president often defend his lawless expansion of
> executive power by equating it to Abraham Lincoln's suspension of
> habeas corpus and other emergency measures taken to save the Union
> during the Civil War. [But] during Lincoln's presidency, the entire
> nation was engulfed in an internal, all-out war. Half of the country
> was fully devoted to the destruction of the other half. The existence
> of the nation was very much in doubt. Americans were dying violent
> deaths every day at a staggering rate. One million Americans were
> wounded and a half million others -- a full 5 percent of the
> population -- died, making it the deadliest war America has ever
> faced. …
>
> … The word "war" has become an all-purpose political tool, to the
> point where it is virtually impoverished of meaning. War is something
> we wage on cancer, on poverty, on drugs, and now on "terror "
>
> But whatever else one can say about our conflict with terrorists, it
> is nothing even remotely like the Civil War.
>
> More safe, less free
>
> In March 2006, researchers in the social psychology program at Rutgers
> University-New Brunswick offered some empirical evidence to
> demonstrate the critical role fear plays in driving people to support
> George Bush. Their study (more than 130 registered voters) sought to
> measure the impact fear had on voting choices in the 2004 election. As
> the summary issued by Rutgers recounted:
>
> Â Â "Their findings demonstrated that registered voters in a
> psychologically benign state of mind preferred Senator Kerry to
> President Bush, but Bush was more popular than Kerry after voters
> received a subtle reminder of death. Citing an Osama bin Laden tape
> that surfaced a few days before the election, among other factors, the
> authors state, "The present study adds convergent support to the idea
> that George W. Bush's victory in the 2004 presidential election was
> facilitated by Americans' nonconscious concerns about death " The
> authors believe that people were scared into voting for Bush.
>
> The Bush administration did not, of course, invent the use of fear as
> a weapon to justify its wrongful conduct and enhance its own power Nor
> is Al Qaeda the first enemy the United States has had. …
>
> On April 24, 1950, President Harry S. Truman gave a speech to the
> nation regarding the threat posed by domestic communism -- a threat at
> least as real as Islamic terrorism. Part of what he said:
>
> Â Â "Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight
> communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo
> secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not
> going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are
> not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian
> country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat."
>
> And the founders repeatedly warned of the danger, and the likelihood,
> that governments would attempt to exploit fear of external threats in
> order to justify abridgments of core liberties. …
>
> The apex of fear-wallowing came during the exceptionally well-staged
> Republican National Convention of 2004 … Here is Zell Miller, the
> former Democratic senator from Georgia, explaining how his fears drove
> him to support George Bush:
>
> Â Â "And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision,
> the willpower, and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? There
> is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that
> man's name is George W. Bush
>
> We do not have a government where the president can break the law in
> secret and then tell us not to worry about it because it is being done
> to "protect" us. We have never had a system of government operate on
> such paternalistic and blindly loyal sentiments. And we have never
> before been a nation living in such fear that, in exchange for
> promises of protection and safety, we are told that we must allow the
> president to seize those very powers which the Constitution prohibits.
>
> Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at
> Unclaimed Territory.
>
>
http://www.alternet.org/story/36070/?page=entire
