The extortion of freedom's ideal
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By Scott D. Snitzer Contributing writer for End the Lie [caption id="attachment_39234" align="alignleft" width="214" caption="(Image credit: Anthony Freda)"] [/caption] President George W. Bush's famous 2001 quote, "they hate us for our freedoms" reverberates a decade later as we are confronted with two simple questions, "What freedoms do ‘they’ hate us for? And what civil liberties have the American people lost to protect those self-same freedoms?” President Bush's 2001 speech also included, "We will direct every resource at our command, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the destruction and to the defeat of the global terror network." The aftermath of 9/11 ushered in a succession of legislation which was purportedly for the protection of American citizens and the republic. These included the Patriot Acts I and II, the Military Commissions Act of 2006, NSPD 51 and in 2007, a rapid succession of unprecedented powers were granted to the state: Protect America Act of 2007, the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, and the Homegrown Terrorism and Radicalization Act, bringing us to the now infamous National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012 (NDAA). President Obama, who harshly criticized the Patriot Act as a candidate, renewed it citing that "any delay of the complete and absolute renewal of the Act -- or even the addition of a single privacy protection would endanger American lives." The Patriot Act’s broad authorization to mine the private data of Americans only served to clarify what the U.S. government had done from the inception of the Cold war to 9/11: The investment of a tremendous amount of money into an enormous surveillance network supposedly designed to catch any terrorist plots. From the Patriot Acts to the NDAA, the United States has seen the birth of limited free speech zones. People have been brutalized and arrested en masse at Occupy Wall St. and Tea Party protests, violating our rights to free speech. We've seen the "enemy" morph from mainly Muslim extremists to a growing list of Americans whose behavior or habits could be classified as a potential domestic terrorist such as buying a firearm, using cash in lieu of a credit card, calling themselves a “sovereign citizen” or being a Ron Paul supporter. There are so many government issued warning signs for domestic terrorists that over half the population of America could be suspected of terrorist behavior. Protections against unreasonable search and seizure, which once required a judicially sanctioned warrant and probable cause, have been lost under the NDAA and Patriot Act as have the Sixth Amendment's right for the accused to confront those who witnessed his alleged crime. What freedoms can U.S. citizens be “hated for” if those freedoms have quickly dwindled in breadth and scope to the narrow set of rights we have left? Or in simple language, "how can someone be jealous of a possession another person does not own?" An angry group of radicalized terrorists' attack on the U.S. is tantamount to suicide if we accept our government's reasons for the bombing of Afghanistan. And when "the land of the free and home of the brave" is declared a battlefield as Senator Lindsey Graham has stated and Miranda rights and due process should be waived, is America truly the priceless repository of freedoms and safety enjoyed nowhere else in the world? Which brings us to the simple point of where and who are these legions of nigh-invincible evil warriors who keep on threatening America's freedom? Those who would destroy our way of life just because? Where exactly is the threat of Muslim extremists hiding amongst us, waiting, biding their time? The enemies of freedom to the critical eye and ear fail the test of common sense more so as the U.S. also faces "domestic terrorists," who, like the foreign ones, fall under what could only be characterized as insultingly generic guidelines. At the time of this writing, over four-hundred local, county sheriff and state legislature resolutions have been passed in opposition to the Patriot Act. More Americans are turning from the mainstream to the alternative media for news to find another perspective to the stories we so often accept from the television and cable news as "written in stone.” In response to this trend, there has been a viral explosion of internet activist sites covering information on civil liberties and their losses in addition to a seemingly spontaneous succession of survival videos and articles ranging from radioactive fallout to how to store and grown one's own food. Yet despite the burgeoning truth movement on the web, we recently faced the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA), which under the guise of protecting copyrighted material, threatened to limit accessibility of websites providing vital news and other information; another freedom precipitously ready to be lost, put on hold by Washington for the interim. People naturally gravitate towards security in lieu of privacy, although ironically there is no security in the absence of privacy for those who proudly trumpet "I have nothing to hide" or "I'm willing to give up a little freedom to feel safer" may have overlooked the simple fact that the very legislation enacted to "protect us" has birthed a society in which freedoms have undeniably become scarcer while the powers of the federal government have grown exponentially into a big brother surveillance state once the stuff of fiction. "They are jealous of our freedoms" has long since passed the limits of reasonable credulity and logic as no one person or group would be envious of a nation bereft of the multitude of freedoms America's leaders and mainstream media so proudly celebrate, or put another way, how can one covet that which the object of your desire does not possess? Edited by Madison Ruppert