Category Archives: TERRORISM

GIVING THANKS, KINDA…

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By

Zachary Klein

zachFor decades, Sue, our kids, and I have spent Thanksgiving with the same group of friends at Bill and Bonnie’s home. Over the course of those decades, our numbers have grown as kids matured into adults and started their own families. And this year is special because our older son, Matt, Alyssa, and their one-year-old twins (Mari and Vivian) will be joining us for the first time since the kids were born.

It’s always been passing strange that the single holiday I actually enjoy began, according to some historians, as a commemoration of the Pequot Massacre between 1634 and 1638. After colonists found a murdered White man in his boat, armed settlers burned a Pequot village and their crops, then demanded that the Natives turn in the murderers. The Natives refused and a massacre followed.

Shortly afterwards, William Bradford, Governor of Plymouth, declared, “A day of Thanksgiving, thanking God they had eliminated over 700 men, women, and children.” It was signed into law that “This day forth shall be a day of celebration and thanksgiving for subduing the Pequots.” (In support of a proposed national holiday, Sarah Josepha Hale, novelist and author of Mary Had A Little Lamb, wrote letters to five Presidents of the United States: Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan, but the letter she wrote to Lincoln convinced him to support legislation establishing a national holiday of Thanksgiving in 1863.)

In a proclamation Lincoln implored that all Americans ask god to “commend to his tender care all those who had become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife,” and to “heal the wounds of a nation.” And while Lincoln connected the holiday to the Civil War, “festivities” actually dated back to the Puritan massacre.

So yeah, although the holiday’s origin is in direct contradiction to everything I’ve believed in throughout my adult life, it’s still the one I’ve enjoy the most. Go figger.

But this year, despite the joy of being with my entire family and a large number of friends and their families, my face is planted hard into that contradiction. As I write this, there really is no escape from the national debate about shelter for Syrian refugees that’s erupted since the Paris tragedy. It’s as if the majority of my fellow citizens are projecting our genocidal history with Native Americans onto people who are seeking safety from the inhumanity and mass destruction which hangs over their heads. An obscene inhumanity brought about in no small measure because of our intransigent wars in the Mideast. Go figger.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve slammed our door in the face of specific peoples. We did it to the Chinese with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, we turned away Jews trying to escape Nazism, and we rounded up Japanese people and sent them to internment camps during the Second World War. (And these are just quick-fire examples.) So there’s really nothing new in our rabid response to Syrian refugees. Fear, rational or not, does that.

I understand the anxiety caused by the Paris tragedy. I vividly remember my frantic calls to New York on 9/11, looking for my son and my cousin who worked downtown. I live in Boston so the Marathon Bombing still rings fresh. Look, every society wants to self-protect. I get it. But to imagine that Syrian refugees will just waltz through the door and into Mosques to plot terror attacks is, at best, ignorance, and, more likely, as usual, sheer racism. As it was against the Chinese, Jews, Japanese, and other nationalities who’ve been given the back of our hand.

While politicians play politics with our fears, every once in a while it’s useful to look at some facts. Here’s a very abbreviated list of refugee security screening:

Refugees are subject to the highest level of security checks of any category of traveler to the United States, including the involvement of the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of State, and the Department of Defense.

All refugees, including Syrians, are admitted only after successful completion of this stringent security screening regime, which includes all available biographic and biometric information vetted against a broad array of law enforcement and intelligence community databases to confirm identity and ensure safety.

This screening process has been enhanced over the last few years to ensure we are effectively utilizing the full scope of our intelligence community to review each applicant.

Mindful of the particular conditions of the Syria crisis, Syrian refugees go through additional forms of security screening. We continue to examine options for further enhancements for screening Syrian refugees, the details of which are classified

Clearly, it’s not impossible for a potential terrorist from any country to sneak through and blow something up. But the vast majority of what has occurred in this country that’s been termed “terrorism” has come from home-growns. Born and bred White Americans. To use Syrian refugees to pander to our people’s basic fears is almost as cold and callous as the bombs we’ve dropped on their region. But given the history of Western Civilization, the history of our species, it comes as no surprise

The opening scene in Werner Herzog’s, Aguirre, the Wrath of God, starts with a distant aerial shot of clouds atop a mountain. As we slowly travel through we begin to see movement on the mountain. Drawing closer it’s possible to make out caterpillar lines of motion. As we get even nearer, those caterpillars become people. Really close, we see Conquistadors marching while whipping slaves to pull their carriages and equipment. What was at first beautiful becomes horrifying.

More earth

 

 

 

 

SyrianBombing

So it’s tough to give thanks these days. But come Thursday, surrounded by love and joy from friends and family, I’ll no doubt kick back, eat, drink, and set aside the pain and suffering that surrounds damn near most of our world. After all, despite vicious politician fear-mongering, I know, comfortable in my White privilege, that no bombs will turn me and mine into homeless refugees. Luck of birth, eh?

 later that night

I held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole

world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

 It answered

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.

~ Warsan Shire

Jackboots In The Post Office

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by Kent Ballard

The Christmas season was never a time to go to the Post Office. It’s an annoyance at best and a dreadful, thankless chore at worst. But this season my visit became something much darker.

Friday was one of those days that hit us all once in a while. I was busy and pinched for time. I had to hit the hardware store, Post Office, and then rush back home to meet a friend who was coming to visit. They were widening a public sidewalk corner in the tiny little town near my home. With the forethought and planning of any small town the minor construction they were undergoing managed to not only tie up a major state highway but also a federal highway that often takes the spillover traffic from the nearby Interstate. I don’t think I could have done a better job of disrupting traffic if I’d been hired to do it by the governor. At least I’m sure they’ll build a sidewalk that will last for the ages, a sidewalk that will someday be measured as one of man’s enduring efforts like the Great Pyramids or Mount Rushmore. It’s certainly been taking them that long.

After plodding through the traffic backup I made the hardware store and was in and out in a flash. Then I had to negotiate the barricades and yellow flashing lights again, along with their amazing town construction workers, all expertly trained to sleep while leaning on shovels without falling over. I pulled into the parking lot of the Post Office and went in. I didn’t have a stamp for my letter. My wife had taken off with our stamps safely in her purse and all I had to do was tell the nice Post Office person I wanted to mail this envelope (a common letter), pay them, tip my hat, and come home.

The USPS has been going broke for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why they just don’t charge more and become solvent. I’ve read where postage in other countries is considerably higher, and often when visitors come to the States they remark about our low postage costs. An even better idea would be for the USPS to triple or quadruple the cost of third class mail. We’d then either get a lot less junk mail or they’d be rolling in money, probably both. Anyway, after waiting my turn in line I got to the sole woman behind the USPS counter who was waiting on the public. The counter was set up for two workers, but I’m sure you’ve encountered similar “conveniences” yourself, either at your Post Office or your bank, where they spend fifty million dollars to tell you how much they value your business while cutting workers and lengthening your time in line. Few people will change banks and where ya gonna go for another Post Office?

When it was my turn I stepped forward and put the letter on the counter in front of the woman. While digging in my pocket for change I said, “Hi. I just need to mail this. My wife has the stamps and I want to get this out today.”

The woman did not share my sense of urgency. Fair enough. She didn’t need to. All I wanted her to do was her job.

“You don’t have a return address on this. You need a return address.”

Did you ever feel like a bumblebee that just flew into a brick wall? The woman gestured to the counter along the wall, indicating I could go over there and temporarily be out of her hair for a moment while I wrote my return address on the envelope. She was only working at one speed (glacial) and processing customers as if they were all putting her to extreme difficulty. If I’d taken my letter and done as she said it’d be another ten or fifteen minutes before I worked my way back to her. I’m not normally rushed, but those minutes were more important to me than the normal creaking flow of her day. I did not have a pen on me, nor did she offer me one.

“Is that a law? Can’t you mail this without a return address?”

“Hmm. I could mail it. But you need a return address.”

“Well, if you can mail it without one, go ahead and do that, please.”

“You don’t understand. I could mail this, but you really need to put a return address on it.”

“Is it a federal law now that every letter has to have a return address?” And then I caught her expression. For no understandable reason this civil servant was now glaring at me with something akin to suspicion. What was this woman’s problem? Something changed in the air. I was not sure what. Was she just overwhelmed by her own bureaucratic importance of having the only USPS public window in twenty-five miles? Had she finally exhausted her ability to wield such astonishing power?

I didn’t know. It finally dawned on me that I didn’t care either.

“If there’s no federal law requiring a return address, I’m going to mail this as is without one. I don’t have the time to…”

BAM! She slapped a meaty fist on the counter, snatched up my letter, spun around with surprising speed for someone of her size, and marched back into an office behind her.

Behind me, a housewife waiting in line softly said, “Well, what’s wrong with her…?”

I kind of shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s just a letter.” Then I looked back in line and offered, “Sorry to cause a hold-up. I don’t know what her problem is. I just need to mail one letter.”

Presently the squat woman came out of the office followed by a man. She pointed an accusing finger at me and said triumphantly, “He’s the one!”

The one WHAT? I wondered. What had I done? Nothing. Nothing at all.

This was interesting. Had I broken some obscure federal law? Could I expect an FBI SWAT team to launch grenades through the door and club me into submission? Whadda hell was going on here? The man looked at me as if I was a Nazi paratrooper just dropped in to conquer his portion of America. This made no sense at all. And whatever their dog and pony show was really about, they were hindering every postal customer there. Including me. I didn’t know what raised their hackles, but it was now evident that whether I liked it or not I was in the middle of some kind of Twilight Zone game. Did you ever surprise yourself and decide you’d had enough?

“You need a return address on this.”

Wrong thing to say, Homer. “You need to train your help. I just asked her if that was a law. She said it wasn’t.”

He laid the letter back down on the counter. Trying a different tact, he said more pleasantly, “No, it doesn’t have to have one. But if it doesn’t have a return address it could get lost in the mail and we wouldn’t know who to return it to.”

“I’ve got faith in you.” This was becoming a pissing contest.

“It’s for your own protection,” he deadpanned.

“I’ll take my chances.” I was on the verge of becoming…postal.

“It could get lost.”

“I’ll write another.”

I found myself engaged in an silly exchange over…what? Why were these two government time clock punchers behaving this way? Why were they very strongly trying to get me to comply when there was no law to comply with? Were they vaguely threatening me? It sure seemed like it. But why?

Nope. I wasn’t playing their game, whatever it was. I had a dollar bill crumpled in my hand. I tossed it onto the counter and stared back at the Postmaster.

He said, “It’s really for your protection…”

I didn’t say a word. Just stared at him.

He bent down and literally whispered something to the office penguin. Whispered, mind you, as if saying some loathsome, despicable thing. She looked back at him. He nodded. She stepped ahead and picked up my dollar and–as if nothing unusual had transpired–she rang me up and handed me my change.

I muttered thanks and turned for the door. Once past it I looked back and they were still staring at me. What in the world? It seemed as if they were doing their barnyard best to memorize my looks, height, weight, my every feature.

When I came home I was still mystified, still wondering what had taken place in such an otherwise obscure place like the local post office. My guest arrived and I told him, “Dave, the weirdest thing happened just a while ago…”

I told him about the little mystery I’d encountered while in town. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, leave it to you…”

That only turned my fires up. “Leave WHAT to me? I ASKED them if it was legal, or if a return address was required by law! Hell, by their own admission I wasn’t breaking any law! Why all the guff over something as unimportant as that?”

Dave made a mocking frown at me. “You disappoint me, Kent. I thought you kept up with all the news about our heroic war on terrorism.”

“Huh?”

He sighed. “You ever hear of the Patriot Act? Do you remember when that wacko sent powdered ricin in the mail to a few congressmen? You won’t get a cell phone because you don’t want spy agencies pinging you every five minutes,” he laughed, “but you didn’t know about some of the other ways they track you?”

Terrorists? Ricin? Congress? I stood there blinking.

The U.S. Post Office is nearing the capability to photograph every piece of mail it handles. They say they only photograph some of them now. But they have conveyor belts they can place mail on and it shoots them through a camera very rapidly. They have software that can read and store names and addresses. That way, if the FBI, the Department of Homeland Insecurity, or even a local cop gets interested in someone they can call the USPS and ask them, “Where is this person’s mail going and who mails them?” And you will never know anything about it. The NSA didn’t ask your permission to read your emails and search engine queries. They didn’t ask how you felt about them listening to your phone conversations. The USPS didn’t ask you about this, either.

They can track everything you send and everything you get in the mail. They can tap the same information from FedEx and UPS too. Law enforcement requests for USPS information are skyrocketing (see below). It costs them nothing. You pay for it. And that’s why the people in one post office wanted me to put a return address on my letter so very damned badly and why it looked suspicious when I refused. At least to them. I suppose they saved every minute I was there on videotape and flagged that, too. I should have combed my hair.

This business has gone on long enough. I’m tired of every government mouthpiece constantly screaming TERRORISM! TERRORISM! at me when I’m in far greater danger from bee stings or tripping over my own big feet. I’m tired of secret judges on secret courts handing out surveillance warrants like Life Savers on Halloween. I’m tired of my own government using the weak straw man of TERRORISM! to shred my Bill of Rights more every day.

I’m not the first to write about this. You’ll find the links below quite interesting. I’d hoped that maybe, somehow, I’d blown this out of proportion in my mind, that a bored clerk in a post office merely wanted to do something to break her monotony, or perhaps even that I was rushed and came to an incorrectly harsh judgment. I hoped that right up until I read these.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7084135/usps-mail-cover-surveillance-wider-than-thought-49000-pieces

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/snail-mail-snooping-safeguards-not-followed-108056.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring-mail-of-thousands.html?rref=us&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=U.S.&action=click&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article&_r=1

LATE TO AN UGLY PARTY

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By Zachary Klein

Since the 1960s (and probably before) it’s been no secret that our government spies on its own citizens. We knew that S.D.S. meetings, demonstrations, activists, and people the government distrusted have always been under systematic surveillance. Books have been written about it; friends had it proven to themselves by requesting their own dossiers after the Freedom Of Information Act was passed.

Like I said, it was no secret, but I never cared. If the government wanted to play garbologist with my life, so be it. It was their hands that got dirty. And when the Internet blossomed and people had the opportunity to chat with others far and wide, let alone visit websites that discussed everything from politics to porn, I just assumed they were being monitored. And I still didn’t care. If they wanted to watch me look at naked ladies, go for it. I’d lost any belief of the “right of privacy” a long, long time ago. I had other fish to fry and barely considered the implications of my own facile attitude.

But a week ago I saw a movie called Citizenfour, a documentary by Academy Award winner Laura Poitras. Shot in real time Poitras follows Edward Snowden leaking thousands of classified documents, primarily to Glen Greenwald, at that time a reporter and columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian. Then she followed the aftermath of the published leaks.

These leaks detailed the wholesale data interception by the N.S.A. We’re not just talking about spying upon known or suspected terrorists and their connections and associates. We’re talking about damn near everybody including prime ministers of other countries. (One example was Germany’s Andrea Merkel). And when I say everybody I mean pretty much that. Telephone companies, cable companies, Internet search engines, and any institution who gathered personal information were essentially ordered to turn everything over that they had on all of their customers or clients.

When the story first broke publicly in early June, 2013 I met it with a shrug, continuing to believe we were talking about rummaging around in people’s underwear. But at one point in the movie (and I’m going to paraphrase) someone commented that while we were calling this massive collection of information the loss of privacy, it really went much, much deeper. The enormity of this invasion of peoples’ lives actually represented the loss of freedom and liberty. A situation where the quantitative morphs into qualitative.

Well, that notion spun my head. If our own government quietly watches every person, with access to all our conversations, we are living in what ought to be described as a benign police state. A police state usually conjures images of barbed wire and machine guns and, in many countries throughout the world, that’s exactly what it is. But let’s remember what has always been true: information is power. Having virtually all information about every one of us residing in the hands of the government is more power than I’m willing to cede.

I’ve listened to the other side of the argument. “We need to be safe and secure.” “Everything changed after 9/11 and that tragedy demands heightened security—even at the loss of some liberty.” “We don’t know how many attacks have been thwarted because of the N.S.A.’s eyes and ears.” Which is true. We don’t know. But that lack of knowledge is due to our government’s ongoing refusal to provide any hard, real information.

Then there’s also the demand to show how this overwhelming amount of spying has affected anyone’s rights. Where is that slippery slope that will lead to the loss of liberty? Which organizations have been affected by the government’s knowledge about everything they do or say?

I can’t answer those questions. But the government can. And won’t—though some small glimmer occasionally shines through. Does anyone really believe that every major news organization decided on their own not to show the body-bags of our dead soldiers returning home? And that due process has been denied for every single person who has been sent to Guantanamo on the basis of information the government refuses to make public? Do we really have to wait until neighbors, relatives, or friends are arrested and detained because they had a conversation with someone who knew someone who knew someone else that attended the same church as someone who might have known a person who had possible ties to a radical organization? From where I now sit that’s way too late. That’s stick a fork in it time.

I’m sure there are people who believe that all undercover espionage on our citizenry should be eliminated. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and the possibility does exist that dangers might be greater than some reasonable surveillance.

But the key word is reasonable and that is not what’s happening. What’s really happening is blatantly unreasonable. For our government to secretly spy on its entire population because they can and not be held accountable in any way (and please don’t throw the secret F.I.S.A. court in my face because apparently they have no accountability to anyone but themselves) is shameful for any country that calls itself an open democracy.

Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glen Greenwald, and those who drew back the curtains on the N.S.A.’s illegal activities should be honored for their attempt to expose our government’s spitting in the face of liberty and freedom. Dictionary.com defines a police state as a nation in which the police, especially a secret police, summarily suppresses any social, economic, or political act that conflicts with governmental policy.

We aren’t there or that. Yet. But most of the Patriot Act and especially the N.S.A’s extraordinary hidden reach, brings us a giant step closer.

“The best people possess the…, courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.” – Ernest Hemingway