Never ones to let a terror incident go to waste, the Republicans are using the recent attacks in Paris as an excuse to block changes in the "Patriot Act" meant to rein in the NSA's indiscriminate spying on Americans. And it appears they will succeed, because apparently no individual freedoms or Constitutional rights are as important as protecting the "Homeland," and the Republicans are the unsurpassed experts at exploiting Americans' irrational fears.
Some officials, such as Senator Marco Rubio and former NSA director Michael Hayden, have already argued that the attack should slow reform. As Hayden snarked on MSNBC after the attack: “That metadata doesn’t look all that scary this morning.”
It appears that the former zeal for reform of these practices has all but evaporated in light of the Paris attacks:
The revelations about NSA bulk surveillance raised hopes that an alliance of civil liberties progressives and libertarian conservatives concerned about national security overreach could come together to force reform. But plainly momentum has flagged. House GOP leaders — with the complicity of some Democrats who oppose reform — may simply move for a vote to reauthorize the program. It’s also an open question how hard Obama will push Congress to pursue changes to it. And with some lawmakers seizing on the France attack to kill all hopes of reform, it remains to be seen whether that left-right coalition can make anything happen.
Meanwhile the country that was actually targeted in the attacks, by all signs, is
not about to trade its citizens' rights away for the illusion of security. Unlike us skittish cowards in the United States, France apparently understands that in the grand scheme of a country's history some things are more important than overreacting to a terror attack, no matter how brutal. While some in France have called for tightening surveillance laws, the response has been swift and telling--rather than regarding it as a "model," France views the American reaction to 9/11 as an example of
what not to do:
That the Patriot Act has become shorthand for limiting freedom underscores France’s strong criticism of American surveillance. A Pew Global Attitudes poll last year found that 82 percent of French respondents said it was unacceptable for the United States to monitor its own citizens, a figure nearly as high as the opposition to American surveillance of foreigners. Among European countries, only Greece was more fervent in its objection.
A string of arrests in France this week under a new anti-terror law reminiscent of the U.S. government's' frenzied reaction in the aftermath of 9/11 has prompted what never occurred in this country--an actual, vocal debate on the issue of how to balance security and civil liberties. The French revulsion at what Americans allowed to be done to them in the name of "security" is not limited to those on the left:
Dominique de Villepin, the former French prime minister, warned against the urge for “exceptional” measures. “The spiral of suspicion created in the United States by the Patriot Act and the enduring legitimization of torture or illegal detention has today caused that country to lose its moral compass,” he wrote in Le Monde, the French newspaper.
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Even the center-right in France understands that by changing society we let the terrorists win:
François Fillon, the former prime minister under Mr. Sarkozy and now a rival for the center-right, said he opposed a Patriot Act for France. “No freedom should be abandoned,” he said. “I do not support fundamental legislative change.” Otherwise, he said, “we give justification to those coming to fight on our land.”
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“In the United States, restricting the field of liberty has not produced conclusive results,” said Razzy Hammadi, a Socialist legislator from Seine-Saint-Denis, a Paris suburb. “No legislation could ever overcome the madness of a single actor of this kind of barbarism.”
This is how mature societies react. What the French are doing is what we should have done after 9/ll and very possibly what we would have done if we weren't led by incompetent demagaogues and a cowed Congress. Instead, all debate was stifled, dissenters were labelled as anti-American, we started a pointless, destructive and expensive war and tore up the Constitution in the process.
In that regard, the very existence of a debate in Europe is in contrast to the response across the United States in 2001, when Congress hurriedly passed the Patriot Act before many members had time to read it.
The details of any new French law are unclear, but discussion has focused on increased Internet surveillance and new authority to remove content. Adrienne Charmet-Alix, the coordinator of La Quadrature du Net, a group that advocates Internet freedom, urged caution. Everyone, she said, “must keep a cool head.”
“When freedom of expression is under attack through Charlie Hebdo, when Jewish people are murdered because of their religion, when 4 million people take to the streets, shouting ‘freedom, freedom,’ and the government’s first reflex is to create a framework to reduce this freedom, we must warn citizens,” she said.
Possibly the single most intelligent statement about the "War on Terror" was authored by William Greider and published in
The Nation on June 21, 2004:
My advice for Americans is also an urgent warning: Get a grip, before it is too late. Take a hard look at your own fears, reconsider the probabilities of danger in the larger context of life's many risks and obstacles. The trauma of 9/11 stimulated infinite possibilities for worry--some quite plausible, but most inspired by remote what-if fantasies. A society bingeing on fear makes itself vulnerable to far more profound forms of destruction than terror attacks. The "terrorism war," like a nostalgic echo of the cold war, is using these popular fears to advance a different agenda--the re-engineering of American life through permanent mobilization. The transformation is well under way. The consequences, if left unchallenged, will be very difficult to reverse.
The French apparently understand this. Americans didn't. And now it's probably too late.