Another glop of text
Onto other civil liberties:
1. End the war on drugs. It is a useless exercise that only serves to prop up Columbian drug lords and the right wing military junta there. Education and treatment should come first. Abandoning treatment and reasonable legal systems is what got us into the crack mess in the first place. Deal with the root causes of addiction and excessive escapism.
Oh yeah and while we are on the subject, unless Marijuana secretly holds pod people seeds that infiltrate peoples brains and convert them into alien mind controlled zombies than we should decriminalize it almost completely. Establish laws allowing people to use it in their own homes and in special designated bars. Treat smoking the stuff in public in a similar manner as you would any other form of public intoxication. Fine ‘em.
2. End the mother fucking war on terror. You cannot declare a war on a tactic. As David Cross said it is a stupid proposition, like a war on jealousy. Or as the George Carlin asked (paraphrased) “Don’t we have any other metaphor for getting shit done? A war on poverty, a war on drugs, and a war on whatever the fuck we don’t like”
The fact of the matter is that terrorism has no reasonable definition. Is it the targeting of non-combatants in war? Because I am having an awful difficult time separating this from strategic bombing of production or civilian areas to ‘break the enemies resolve’. Deprived of the ‘War on Terror’ brand name our extra-national adventurism begins to look absurd, vicious, and imperialistic. (And it will look worse When we attack Iran)
There will always be terrorist acts and assaults on non-combatants by thugs, bully’s, and militants. Declaring an unending war against them will not reduce them one iota. And actually may increase or conflate their power, attention, and recruiting capacities beyond what they would ordinarily be.
And the damage to our own liberties, well speaking of that…
3. Sunlight the whole damned patriot act. Honestly, this shit does nothing but prove that we can burn our own freedoms faster than the terrorists. I mean if you believe that old tired bullshit about them ‘hating us for our freedoms’ then they have to start loving us soon since we are all too willing to shred them the moment things make us scared.
We look pathetic; we are still driving ourselves into a panic over just a couple of attacks on a few buildings. Honestly, I am not saying “Get over it” or “stop whining about trying to find the truth. But what I am saying is that this is the kind of shit that happens in most other countries at one point in time or another. We have got to get over ourselves and this idea that the one super-televised moment of pain is somehow more important than anything that has ever happened in the entire world since the fall of the Berlin wall.
Oh and let us do away with the Military commissions act and restore the age old tradition of Habeas Corpus. There really is no excuse for this bullshit. However information is gathered it is only right to present the information or at least the accusation.
We should also immediately close the prison aspect of Gitmo, and every overseas torture parlor that we are using in this semi-secret policy of extraordinary rendition. It makes us look like Nazis with no concern for human rights, sovereignty, or international law.
And of course we should stop the debates to mangle Fisa and let off those that abused our liberties without punishment. The Fisa court circa post Church commission has all the exceptions needed to allow the feds to listen for free for three days before going to the Fisa court for a warrant. And historically speaking over 18,000 requests were put in until 2004 with only five being rejected. And Fisa only applies to domestic message traffic and communications. International communications are purely the purview of our various intelligence apparatus and do not require a pass through the courts to listen in.
4. Iraq. End the occupation and internationalize the effort as soon as humanly possible. As long as we are there it is a symbol of every reason why we are hated internationally. It is a massive sink in lives, morale, equipment, money, and reputation. There is no answer to this problem. This was a war of choice, adventurism, and profit. The motives were wrong and the whole damned thing is pointless now.
The idea of Iraq becoming like West Germany or Japan ignores history, culture, religion, identity, and the fact that we did not enter as liberators, nor even as an opposing army defeating an aggressor. We were the aggressors AND the conquerors AND we are the occupiers.
The argument of preventing genocide is the one floated by the very people that advocating bombing the ever loving crap out of the Iraqi infrastructure and then hiring the most corrupt and incompetent contractors to rebuild it all. There will be sectarian violence when we leave. There will be sectarian violence if we stay and nothing we can do will stop it. The only reason our leaders can claim to have turned yet another corner on violence in Iraq is because most of the various media have turned their collective attention to American Idol or the dueling personalities in our upcoming presidential election.