Today is the day we commemorate the 13th anniversary of when we as Americans mistook a horrific criminal action as an existential threat, and started giving up freedoms wholesale that had been bought and paid for with the blood of our ancestors. When we cried for a police state to save us from the scary ragtag terrorists, and in so doing gave Al Qaeda exactly what they wanted. We elevated them in our minds and policies into a threat equal to the lone superpower of the world. We willingly curtailed our own freedoms in order to grasp at some false sense of security. And as we have since found out, we abandoned the moral high ground and became every bit as barbaric as the terrorists we were fighting in Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and black sites around the world. 9/11 was the date we lost our damn minds. 9/11 is the day that a handful of terrorists successfully dragged the USA down into the muck. If, as President Bush said, “they hate us for our freedoms,” then we responded by willingly giving up those freedoms. They have won, and now another terrorist organization, ISIS, is attempting to do the same thing. Today, we should stand up and remember that we are Americans. That we were the first revolutionaries to cast off the yoke of monarchy to coexist as free men. That every democracy in the world today looks to that former image of us as inspiration for a government by and for the people. We are not the cowards that we have become. So let us use this day and all the days beyond to start to claw back the guaranteed freedoms that we allowed to be taken from us. 1a) The freedom of the press should be reinstated, and government whistleblowing decriminalized. We the people have a right to know what the government is doing in our name. 1b) We collectively should respect the freedom of religion, and realize that terrorism isn’t a “Muslim thing.” The world is filled with literally billions of adherents of Islam that do NOT want to kill us. Stop tarring them with the same brush as the few radical extremists that do. 1c) The right to peacefully assemble has been sharply curtailed in our new police state. Time and again peaceful protests have been met with police violence. 4) We have lost any right to be secure in our persons against unreasonable search and seizure. The NSA has made a mockery of the very concept of a warrant, Homeland Security and the police state routinely manufactures the flimsiest excuses to warrant probable cause. The domestic spying apparatus must be dismantled, full stop. 5) We must immediately end the practice of indefinite detention without criminal prosecution. Novel legal theories post-911 gave birth to the ability for the government to seize literally anyone, citizen or not, that they suspect of terrorist sympathies (itself an undefined and vague term), and “disappear” them in extrajudicial limbo indefinitely. The do-no-fly list was created that limits citizen’s liberty to travel without any due process or possibility to contest or amend this extrajudicial curtailment of rights. 6) In the cases where indefinite detention eventually results in a trial, those trials should follow the form of civilian jury trials, with the accused informed of charges, having the right to confront witnesses and evidence against them, the right to compel witnesses to appear in court, and the right to assistance of counsel without spying on the defense attorneys by the prosecution (or even the jailing of defense attorneys, as has happened in some cases). Too often trials are shrouded in government secrecy, and defendants are judged based on secret evidence they have no access to or ability to rebut, under conditions that in another nation we would call a kangaroo court or a star chamber. 8) Torture has no place in civilized society. We should renounce this practice formally, allow inspections by human rights organizations to verify that torture is not occurring, and prosecute those who ordered torture. These are fundamental rights, parts of the bill of rights that mark the first ten amendments to the constitution, and we have shredded them out of fear of a few criminals that used tactics of terror to successfully make the USA forget that which made America great. So this 9/11, let us start the long journey back to a free America. It would be the most profound strike back against the terrorists we can aspire to.
Posted on: Thu, 11 Sep 2014 13:48:15 +0000
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