Ryan Singel, over at the Wired Blog Network, posted a thought-provoking piece today. He makes some good points which deserve a wider audience.
Singel's main point is that the language used to speak to the public by the current administration is designed to justify acts that Americans would not stand for if they were couched in normal speech. Instead, we have been instructed to trust our security to a nebulous, multi-faceted, Department of Homeland Security which spends years researching the terrorist problems facing us and only comes up with insightful comments such as
We assess that al-Qa’ida’s Homeland plotting is likely to continue to focus on prominent political, economic, and infrastructure targets with the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear among the US population.
Isn't the emphasized section above merely a definition of any terrorist activity?
Singel states that those who frame the argument around these patterns are trapped in a "rigid, nationalistic world view" which is obviously at odds with the way the real world works today. Except he does it much better:
In fact, by using the vocabulary of Fascism, the Intelligence Community itself feeds the animals.
I am an American. I do not have a Homeland. My home, our home, is the United States of America and our leaders should damn sure remember that before they continue to debase and degrade the freedoms that have made it great.