war on terror: August 2004 Archives

Some interesting comments regarding the "War On Terror" by linguistics Professor George Lakoff as well as the language used by progressives against conservatives in politics...worth a read....

You've said that progressives should never use the phrase "war on terror" — why?

There are two reasons for that. Let's start with "terror." Terror is a general state, and it's internal to a person. Terror is not the person we're fighting, the "terrorist." The word terror activates your fear, and fear activates the strict father model, which is what conservatives want. The "war on terror" is not about stopping you from being afraid, it's about making you afraid.

Next, "war." How many terrorists are there — hundreds? Sure. Thousands? Maybe. Tens of thousands? Probably not. The point is, terrorists are actual people, and relatively small numbers of individuals, considering the size of our country and other countries. It's not a nation-state problem. War is a nation-state problem.

What about the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty"?

Those are metaphorical. Real wars are wars against countries, and in the "war on terror," we are attacking countries. But those countries are not the same as the terrorists. We're acting at the wrong level. Meanwhile, by using this frame, we get a commander in chief, as the Republicans keep referring to Bush — a "war president" with "war powers," which imply that ordinary protections don't have to be observed. A "war president" has extraordinary powers. And the "war on terror," of course, never ends. There's no peace treaty with terror. It's a prescription for keeping conservatives in power indefinitely. In three words — "war on terror" — they've enacted vast political changes.

Read the rest of the article

As most people know if you live outside the US you now have to (basically) apply for a visa and get your photo and fingerprints taken, in the name of fighting the "war on terror" (I'm gonna refuse to use caps on that from now on!). What a lot of people probably don't know (especially if your not from/in the States) is that there is a court case currently going on that is challenging the idea that presenting identification papers has any effect on terrorists carrying weapons. I picked this press release off the EFF, which says that

the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the plaintiff, arguing that compulsory ID checks at airports violate the Fourth Amendment.

So it appears that the US Government isn't just paranoid about "aliens" but also their own citizens, and that there is someone who has a problem with that.

Once again the paranoia that everyone thinks that the Bush administration suffers from is shown to be true, according to this article on El Reg.

Apparently the Bush administration have connected building plans to Al Quaeda, and decided that these plans must be targets, and that all of this is connected to ongoing plans to sabotage the election in November (easy way to do that...vote for Bush again!)

Fortunately our protector of personal privacy and civil liberties stepped in to berate the Americans shitstirring:

The information on which the Bushies decided to raise the terror alert level is "of dubious worth," Blunkett said, adding that such information should be published "only if it would prove useful in preventing injury and loss of life," which he obviously believes the Bush hysteria would not do.

"There has been column inch after column inch devoted to the fact that in the United States there is often high-profile commentary, followed - as in the most current case - by detailed scrutiny with the potential risk of inviting ridicule,"

yep, i'm talking about David "I've got a prize (and not a good one) named after me" Blunkett.

Piracy is now also a threat to National Security, in addition to funding terrorism.

Our economy is so based on intellectual property ideas
that, unless we can protect them, we're really looking at a situation
where it's going to hurt our ability to survive as a country
-David Israelite, Chairman of Anti-Intellectual Property TaskForce, US
Dept Of Justice