Mark Ash: Post bin Laden America

[Hissyspit]

http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/6068-post-bin-laden-america

Post bin Laden America
By Marc Ash, Reader Supported News
27 May 11

Reader Supported News | Perspective

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America after bin Laden is sadly an America more in line with bin Laden's own ideological perspective. We are a more intolerant, more repressive and socially restrictive society than we ever had been before bin Laden. Many of the most draconian new social measures have come at the hands of those who postured themselves as bin Laden's most ardent foes, and "freedom's" staunchest defenders. If the object was to, "defeat bin Laden, not become him," clearly from a standpoint of social justice in America, we have failed.

The issues are stark and substantive. Political surveillance and repression in the US are at levels not seen since the darkest days of Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunts and J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO.

We are now an America that rationalizes and debates the merits of torture. From the talk shows to the floor of congress - that, which for one hundred and fifty years has been unspeakable conduct for an American government, now has openly shameless defenders. Among them, a prominent law professor from Berkeley, and a sitting judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Both apparently enjoying unassailable careers. Both legal advisors to George W. Bush who crafted legal opinions justifying - if renaming - what the world calls torture.

Perhaps bin Laden was rendered lifeless by SEAL Team 6, but he is very much alive in the way we live our lives today in this land that's known as freedom. The government is now allowed to tap your phone without a warrant. Repeat: The government is now allowed to tap your phone without a warrant. In fact, Congress said so twice. First in a knee-jerk piece of legislation that bin Laden must have had a good laugh over called the USA PATRIOT Act, and then, in case you didn't hear it the first time, in the FISA Amendments Act, which expressly validated warrantless wiretapping, and retroactively indemnified the telecommunications companies from lawsuits for having done it at the behest of the Bush administration.

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