‘Boston
Strong’: Marching in Lockstep with the Police State
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By John W. Whitehead
April 22, 2013
April 22, 2013
“Of all the tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised
for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”—C.S. Lewis
Caught
up in the televised drama of a military-style manhunt for the suspects in the
Boston Marathon explosion, most Americans fail to realize that the world around
them has been suddenly and jarringly shifted off its axis, that axis being the
U.S. Constitution.
For
those like myself who have studied emerging police states, the sight of a city
placed under martial law—its citizens under house arrest (officials used the
Orwellian phrase “shelter in place” to describe the mandatory lockdown),
military-style helicopters equipped with thermal imaging devices buzzing the
skies, tanks and armored vehicles on the streets, and snipers perched on
rooftops, while thousands of black-garbed police swarmed the streets and SWAT
teams carried out house-to-house searches in search of two young and seemingly
unlikely bombing suspects—leaves us in a growing state of unease.
Mind
you, these are no longer warning signs of a steadily encroaching police state.
The police state has arrived.
Equally
unnerving is the ease with which Americans welcomed the city-wide lockdown, the
routine invasion of their privacy, and the dismantling of every constitutional
right intended to serve as a bulwark against government abuses. Watching it
unfold, I couldn’t help but think of Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering’s remarks
during the Nuremberg trials. As Goering noted:
It is always a simple matter to drag people along
whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a
communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to
the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and
exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.
As
the events in Boston have made clear, it does indeed work the same in every
country. The same propaganda and police state tactics that worked for Adolf
Hitler 80 years ago continue to be employed with great success in a post-9/11
America.
Whatever
the threat to so-called security—whether it’s rumored weapons of mass
destruction, school shootings, or alleged acts of terrorism—it doesn’t take
much for the American people to march in lockstep with the government’s
dictates, even if it means submitting to martial law, having their homes searched,
and being stripped of one’s constitutional rights at a moment’s notice.
As
journalist Andrew O’Hehir observes in Salon:
In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil,
or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing. We agreed to give up most of
our enumerated rights and civil liberties (except for the sacrosanct Second
Amendment, of course) in exchange for a lot of hyper-patriotic tough talk, the
promise of “security” and the freedom to go on sitting on our asses and
consuming whatever the hell we wanted to. Don’t look the other way and tell me
that you signed a petition or voted for John Kerry or whatever. The fact is
that whatever dignified private opinions you and I may hold, we did not do
enough to stop it, and our constitutional rights are now deemed to be partial
or provisional rather than absolute, do not necessarily apply to everyone, and
can be revoked by the government at any time.
Particularly
disheartening is the fact that Americans, consumed with the need for vengeance,
seem even less concerned about protecting the rights of others, especially if
those “others” happen to be of a different skin color or nationality. The
public response to the manhunt, capture and subsequent treatment of brothers
Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is merely the latest example of America’s
xenophobic mindset, which was also a driving force behind the roundup and
detention of hundreds of Arab, South Asian and Muslim men following 9/11,
internment camps that housed more than 18,000 people of Japanese ancestry during
World War II, and the arrest and deportation of thousands of “radical”
noncitizens during America’s first Red Scare.
Moreover,
there has been little outcry over the Obama administration’s decision to deny
19-year-old U.S. citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his due process rights and treat him
as an enemy combatant, first off by interrogating him without reading him his
Miranda rights (“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and
will be used against you in a court of law...”).
Presently,
under the public safety exception to the Miranda rule, if law enforcement
agents believe a suspect has information that might reduce a substantial
threat, they can wait to give the Miranda warning. For years now, however, the
Obama administration has been lobbying to see this exception extended to all
cases involving so-called terror suspects, including American citizens.
Tsarnaev’s case may prove to be the game-changer. Yet as journalist Emily
Bazelon points out for Slate: “Why
should I care that no one’s reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev his Miranda rights? When
the law gets bent out of shape for him, it’s easier to bend out of shape for
the rest of us.”
The
U.S. Supreme Court rightly recognized in its 1966 ruling in Miranda v. Arizona that police officers
must advise a suspect of his/her civil rights once the suspect has been taken
into custody, because the police can and often do take advantage of the fact
that most Americans don’t know their rights. There have been few exceptions to
the Miranda rule over the last 40 years or so, and with good reason. However,
if the Obama administration is allowed to scale back the Miranda rule,
especially as it applies to U.S. citizens, it would be yet another dangerous
expansion of government power at the expense of citizens’ civil rights.
This
continual undermining of the rules that protect civil liberties, not to mention
the incessant rush to judgment by politicians, members of the media and the
public, will inevitably have far-reaching consequences on a populace that not
only remains ignorant about their rights but is inclined to sacrifice their
liberties for phantom promises of safety.
Moments
after taking Tsarnaev into custody, the Boston Police Dept. tweeted
“CAPTURED!!! The hunt is over. The search is done. The terror is over. And
justice has won.” Yet with Tsarnaev and his brother having been charged, tried
and convicted by the government, the media and the police—all without ever
having stepped foot inside a courtroom—it remains to be seen whether justice
has indeed won.
The
lesson for the rest of us is this: once a free people allows the government to
make inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining
chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.
And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the
helm, because the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to
embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government. Increasingly, those on
the left who once hailed Barack Obama as the antidote for restoring the
numerous civil liberties that were lost or undermined as a result of Bush-era
policies are finding themselves forced to acknowledge that threats to civil
liberties are worse under Obama.
Clearly,
the outlook for civil liberties under Obama grows bleaker by the day, from his
embrace of indefinite detention for U.S. citizens and drone kill lists to
warrantless surveillance of phone, email and internet communications, and
prosecutions of government whistleblowers. Most recently, capitalizing on the
nation’s heightened emotions, confusion and fear, government officials used the
Boston Marathon tragedy as a means of extending the reach of the police state,
starting with the House of Representatives’ overwhelming passage of the
controversial Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which
opens the door to greater internet surveillance by the government.
These
troubling developments are the outward manifestations of an inner,
philosophical shift underway in how the government views not only the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but “we the people,” as well. What this
reflects is a move away from a government bound by the rule of law to one that
seeks total control through the imposition of its own self-serving laws on the
populace.
All
the while, the American people remain largely oblivious to the looming threats
to their freedoms, eager to be persuaded that the government can solve the
problems that plague us—whether it be terrorism, an economic depression, an
environmental disaster or even a flu epidemic. Yet having bought into the false
notion that the government can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and
will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to
nursing homes, we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned
into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms
or our happiness.
WC:
1476
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