Another Straw in the Wind

NYC Expands Surveillance Net to Fight Crime As Well As Terror…

As we continue our morph into a militarized police state, increasingly the state will treat all lawbreaking of any kind as an act of war against the State and not merely as crime. So we are already instructed that “the battlefield in the War on Terror is everywhere” and citizens are now subject to the same kind of spying, jailing and killing as the rest of the world’s population. At present, only custom and societal pressure keeps the state from transitioning from killing people with swarthy skin and funny Arabic names to killing people claimed to be, say, child rapists or murderers or drug barons.  Soon it will occur to the State to define “terror” as any action that upsets the civil order. Soon after, the argument will be made, “What?  You want to waste money defending that creep who (we are pretty sure) wasted that cop/raped that kid/sold meth to high schoolers?  If you ask me that drone strike was money well spent!” That’s the wonderfully elastic thing about Terror[TM] and our Holy War on it and it will, for a long time, be used to shout down protest about any act of state lawlessness as unpatriotic and as “siding with the Terrorists[TM].”  And a supine media, fretting about not getting invited to the White House Press Corps Dinner, will acquiesce, even when the state is spying on and interfering with its normal operations and totally not-suspicious-or-anything stuff like the death of Michael Hastings happens.  The imperative of state-run media will be continue to be profits and perks, not to report news.

Eventually, it will occur to the police state that in the struggle to keep us safe from The Terrorists[TM]), not just infinite jail time, and murder, but torture will be permissible against domestic criminal suspects and not merely against swarthy foreigners with Arabic names.  After all, domestic criminals can do heinous things too (or *may* have done them).  They can build ticking time bombs.  So if we are going to torture foreigners on the off chance one of them knows something, why not use the same techniques in the War on Terror (meaning, by then, “civil disorder”) right here at home?

And since it’s not *really* torture but just “enhanced interrogation” and our noble goal is not vengeance or oppression or anything like that, but simply the swift and efficient harvesting of information, why not do what is most efficient and subject the loved ones of suspects to these harmless techniques since that is usually the best way to persuade suspects to talk?  Or do you want The Terrorists[TM] to win and innocent people to suffer and perhaps die?  What kind of self-righteous Ivory Tower pantywaist are you?

I wonder how long it will take before the prolife movement and Christians who labored to defend torture get targeted and numbered among The Terrorists[TM]?

Or, alternatively, we could repent, believe the good news, and become disciples of Jesus Christ.  That’s always on the table too.