The following article from The Guardian certainly seems to show that it is
threatening the very freedoms it claims to be defending. The application
of advanced technology for surveillance in the form utilised in Afghanistan
has frightening implications. Where do the boundaries lie between clamping
down on terrorism and legitimate dissent as a hard fought human right?
As the case of Katie Sierra seems to show it can be a very fine line indeed
when fervent patriotism is interpreted as defending anarchy and the basic
human right of free speech is denied in the name of national security.
What is originally claimed to be a war on terrorism is extended to put a
clamp on all dissent. On the other hand, constant vigilance is essential as
was proved when a flight was diverted to Boston to prevent disaster. A
passenger was nabbed before he had time to set off a shoe filled with
explosive. What does that incident prove? Does it show that airport
security, in spite of all the measures surrounding the hysteria to identify
people as 'security risks', is still not foolproof? The pace of events
today show that the consequences and implications of advanced surveillance
technology are awesome and there is no quarantee that they can be protected
from thr wrong hands.
As Michel Foucault foresaw when he was writing in the 1960s and 70s, are
we are being engineered towards a conformity of belief and action - a new
fundamentalism - since anything more radical might be interpreted as
'defending terrorism'? It is disturbing to contemplate that we may be
entering a new era of political control, unchecked by dissent, where the
very freedoms that it is claimed to so vigorously defend, constitute the
biggest threat to those very same freedoms.
The Guardian December 18, 2001
The Taliban of the West
This war is threatening the very freedoms it claims to be defending
by George Monbiot
The pre-Enlightenment has just been beaten by the post-Enlightenment. As the
last fundamentalist fighters are hunted through the mountains of eastern
Afghanistan, the world's most comprehensive attempt to defy modernity has
been atomized. But this is not, as almost everyone claims, a triumph for
civilization; for the Taliban has been destroyed by a regime which is
turning its back on the values it claims to defend.
In West Virginia, a 15-year-old girl is fighting the state's supreme court.
Six weeks ago, Katie Sierra was suspended from Sissonville high school in
Charleston. She had committed two horrible crimes. The first was to apply to
found an anarchy club, the second was to come to classes in a T-shirt on
which she had written "Against Bush, Against Bin Laden" and "When I saw the
dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of
national security. God bless America." The headmaster claimed that Katie's
actions were disrupting other pupils' education. "To my students," he
explained, "the concept of anarchy is something that is evil and bad." The
county court upheld her suspension, and at the end of November the state's
supreme court refused to hear the case she had lodged in defense of free
speech.
Katie is just one of many young dissenters fighting for the most basic
political freedoms. A few days before Katie was suspended, AJ Brown, a
19-year-old woman studying at Durham Tech, North Carolina, answered the door
to three security agents. They had been informed, they told her, that she
was in possession of "anti-American material". Someone had seen a poster on
her wall, campaigning against George Bush's use of the death penalty. They
asked her whether she also possessed pro-Taliban propaganda.
On October 10, 22-year-old Neil Godfrey was banned from boarding a plane
traveling from Philadelphia to Phoenix because he was carrying a novel by
the anarchist writer Edward Abbey. At the beginning of November, Nancy Oden,
an anti-war activist on her way to a conference, was surrounded at Bangor
airport in Maine by soldiers with automatic weapons and forbidden to fly on
the grounds that she was a "security risk". These incidents and others like
them become significant in the light of two distinct developments.
The first is the formal suspension of certain civil liberties by governments
backing the war in Afghanistan. The new anti-terror acts approved in Britain
and the US have, like the reinstatement of the CIA's license to kill, been
widely reported. The measures introduced by some other allied governments
are less well known. In the Czech Republic, for example, a new law permits
the prosecution of people expressing sympathy for the attacks on New York,
or even of those sympathizing with the sympathizers. Already one Czech
journalist, Tomas Pecina, a reporter for the Prague-based investigative
journal Britske Listy, has been arrested and charged for criticizing the use
of the law, on the grounds that this makes him, too, a supporter of
terrorism.
The second is the remarkably rapid development of surveillance technology,
of the kind which has been deployed to such devastating effect in
Afghanistan. Unmanned spy planes which could follow the Taliban's cars and
detect the presence of humans behind 100 feet of rock are both awesome and
terrifying. Technologies like this, combined with CCTV, face-recognition
software, email and phone surveillance, microbugs, forensic science, the
monitoring of financial transactions and the pooling of government
databases, ensure that governments now have the means, if they choose to
deploy them, of following almost every move we make, every word we utter.
I made this point to a Labour MP a couple of days ago. He explained that it
was "just ridiculous" to suggest that better technologies could lead to mass
surveillance in Britain. Our defense against abuses by government was
guaranteed not only by parliament, but also by the entire social framework
in which it operated. Civil society would ensure there was no danger of
these technologies falling into the "wrong hands".
But what we are witnessing in the US is a rapid reversal of the civic
response which might once have defended the rights and liberties of its
citizens. Katie Sierra's suspension was proposed by her school and upheld by
the courts. The agents preventing activists from boarding planes were
assisted by the airlines. The student accused of poster crime may well have
been shopped by one of her neighbors. The state is scorching the
constitution, and much of civil society is reaching for the bellows.
This, I fear, may be just the beginning. The new surveillance technology
deployed in Afghanistan is merely one component of the US doctrine of
"full-spectrum dominance". The term covered, at first, only military
matters: the armed forces sought to achieve complete mastery of land, sea,
air, airwaves and space. But perhaps because this has been achieved too
easily, the words have already begun to be used more widely, as commercial,
fiscal and monetary policy, the composition of foreign governments and the
activities of dissidents are redefined as matters of security. Another term
for "full-spectrum dominance" is absolute power.
There are, of course, profound differences between the US and Britain. The
US sees itself as a wounded nation; many of its people feel desperately
vulnerable and insecure. But while our cowardly MPs seek only to dissociate
themselves from the victims being persecuted by Torquemada Blair's
inquisitors, the lord chancellor's medieval department is preparing to
dispense with most jury trials, which are arguably now the foremost
institutional restraint on the excesses of government.
The paradox of the Enlightenment is that the universalist project is
brokered by individualism. The universality of human rights, in other words,
can be defended only by the diversity of opinion. Most of the liberties
which permit us to demand the equitable treatment of the human community -
privacy, the freedom of speech, belief and movement - imply a dissociation
from coherent community.
While those who seek to deny our liberties claim to defend individualism, in
truth they gently engineer a conformity of belief and action, which is
drifting towards a new fundamentalism. This is an inevitable product of the
fusion of state and corporate power. Capital, as Adam Smith shows us,
strives towards monopoly. The states which defend it permit the planning
laws, tax breaks, externalization and blanket advertising which ensure that
most of us shop in the same shops, eat in the same restaurants, wear the
same clothes. The World Trade Organization, World Bank and IMF apply the
same economic and commercial prescription worldwide, enabling the biggest
corporations to trade under the same conditions everywhere.
Some of those who, in defiance of this dispensation, write their own logos
on their T-shirts are now being persecuted by the state. The pettiness of
its attentions, combined with its ability to scrutinize every detail of our
lives, suggest that we could be about to encounter a new form of political
control, swollen with success, unchecked by dissent. Nothing has threatened
the survival of "western values" as much as the triumph of the west.
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