COMMENTARY
Rod Watson: Never happen here? Guess what -- it has
Updated: 08/07/08 11:59 AM
As one of its many shifting rationales for starting a war, the Bush administration constantly reminded Americans about the freedoms we take for granted.
That argument will be much less compelling next time for one simple reason: We won’t have nearly as many freedoms left once this bunch leaves office.
The outrageous new policy of seizing electronic devices at the Peace Bridge and other crossings purely on the whim of a border agent is just the latest example of our government doing to us what we’d fight to the death to prevent a foreign power from doing.
Think about it: No warrant. No probable cause. No judge.
Just a vague suspicion — real or fabricated — is pretext enough to seize your laptop, cell phone or iPod and all of the personal or business-related information in it. A local entrepreneur’s trade secrets, a journalist’s confidential information from a whistle-blower, your private medical records — all fair game for any snooping government agent.
No appeal. No ability to challenge it. And no idea when, or if, you’ll ever get it back.
If you walked into a room in the midst of a discussion of this abuse, the reaction would be, “Wow, I’m sure glad I live in America, where nothing like that could happen.” It’s the kind of story that, when it occurs in other countries, prompts U.S. leaders to wag their fingers.
In the last few years, slowly, silently, we’ve become those other countries.
While there have been protests as the administration’s oil buddies rob consumers to rake in record profits, we’ve been robbed of something much more precious with hardly a whimper.
The local office of the New York Civil Liberties Union hasn’t gotten any complaints about the seizure policy, even though Buffalo Niagara has four border bridges and stands to be one of the areas most affected.
“As more and more people travel, that’s something we’re going to hear more and more about,” predicted John A. Curr III, regional director.
I fear he’s being optimistic when it comes to the protests.
Curr recalls Ben Franklin’s warning that a nation willing to sacrifice liberty for security deserves neither. In fact, this nation’s credo used to be “give me liberty or give me death.”
Today, it’s “give me the remote control and leave me alone.” Most of us don’t vote, don’t follow the news and hold Buffalo Bills more accountable than public officials. That apathy has let this administration obliterate the critical balance between privacy and security.
The list of its outrages — some curbed by the courts, some not — is chilling:
The warrantless surveillance program to listen in on your phone conversations. Spying at the library to see what books you check out. Watchtowers along the Niagara River, succeeded by even more invasive radar cameras. The effort to recruit boaters as unpaid spies to snitch on one another.
And now they may take your computer at the bridge.
It’s the extension of a mind-set that rationalizes holding people indefinitely without legal recourse at Guantanamo Bay. What we’re experiencing now, bit by bit, is the Gitmo-ization of America. We’re slowly losing liberties even as we wave Ol’ Glory and sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
And you want to know the really scary part? If this is what they’re willing to tell us they’re doing, imagine what they’re not telling us.
If you had predicted such abuses a few years ago, the response would have been, “That could never happen in America.” Most of us would have agreed.
This isn’t that America anymore.
