I've told you my perspective as an Expat living abroad. A couple of comments below made me realize that maybe I'd buried the lead. Here's why I'm doing this, and why this is of such concern to me: I can't write my congressperson. I don't have one.
U.S. Electoral Law allows you to vote as a citizen from anywhere in the world. But if you don't reside in the district, you are only allowed to vote for President, not for any of the other offices. (I know that the laws vary from state to state, but the spirit of this is mostly true in other states.) In other words, when it comes to alerting (or shaming) your legislators into exercising their Constitutional authority against a President overstepping the bounds of his power, I have no voice.
The way the law works is that you vote from the last place you resided in the USA. For me, that's Florida. I know. I'm a Florida voter. I've voted absentee in every election since 1988, the first one I was eligible to vote in. I don't know if my vote was counted in 2000. I have doubts that it was counted in 2004. My parents, who have moved back, did vote and said that they had to wait in line for an hour -- but heard that in "other" [read: black] precincts, the wait was much, much longer.
So though this is very important to me, there's no one I can write to it about. And every American living abroad is in exactly the same position.
One of the traumatic things that's happened since 9/11 is Americans have become aware of just how much the world doesn't like them. But that's not the whole story. Everywhere you go there are people like my friend AfricanDen, who I met while I was in South Africa last year. Now here's another perspective, from someone else who once believed in the "City on the Hill."
Here's what he writes:
"I despair, mainly, because while presidents come and go, the people of America have in the past always been steadfast and honest and reasonable… but now, now they’ve lost the plot so badly, it’s like America’s jumped the shark. The rabid conservatism and apologistic neo-fascism that’s chewing up the US constitution terrifies me and I wonder if the greatest country will ever again truly be the land of the free and brave."
While I was in South Africa, they celebrated their tenth anniversary of independence. To anyone who grew up in North America, it was a profound eye-opener to be there. Here's a place who rightly scratched their heads at the hagiography of Reagan when he died (he did, after all, support apartheid.) It's a nation with huge challenges and problems, and also a huge amount of hope -- because they know how close they came to the brink.
Being there made me think a lot more about the roots of my own country. Mainly because, you know, it was so weird to see stories in the paper about one of the founding fathers of their country still walking about, alive. They don't call Mandela Mandela there -- it's Madiba.
I think every American needs to see the world. And maybe realize that however polarized things are right now, however hopeless or dangerous things seem, it's nothing compared to what other nations face. (And I include Iraq in that equation. No one roots for a free and independent Iraq more than I do.)
But the whole exercise becomes irrelevant if you don't hold fast to the principles. A time of war is no time to jettison them. I don't buy that argument for a second. As a man on BBC World said yesterday, "When the 1978 law was enacted, the threat was the Soviet Union and the Cold War going hot. And that was a real threat. Bush needs to make the case of how things are so much more dangerous now than when we faced nuclear annihilation."
Bush can't make that case, because there is simply no case to be made. Same as the case for torture. It doesn't float on the law, it doesn't float on the facts, and it sure don't float on the ideals on which the Republic was founded.
So please write and call your Representative for those of us who can't. I mean it -- you Republicans too - in this case, it's not a partisan issue. If the President of your stripe has absolute power now, then eventually one of ours will too. Think on that a bit.
You need an out. Take it. Write.
6 comments:
Spying on the American public didn't begin with Bush!
The year before 9/11 I was working as a computational linguist in Silicon Valley. I was working on natural language processing engines that can read emails and determine topics in the email. This technology is used commercially by large companies to pre-process and route emails for their customer service agents. It can also be used by a government to process large amounts of emails sent around by citizens.
In 1995, while I was in graduate school, the CIA recruited me. I told them I didn't want to keep secrets. In 2001, the NSA recruited me. I told them I didn't want to work on spy software, that I want to make movies. They moved on quickly.
The internet was started by DARPA and has always been one of the play things of the US Government. The spying didn't start with Bush, though our intelligence efforts declined under Clinton and arguably set the stage for 9/11.
A few months before 9/11, the UK division of a large internet company approached the company I was working for and asked us if we could set up our software on their network quickly. Some of their IT people had evidence that terrorist activity was being planned using their chat system. Unfortunately, we didn't get it set up fast enough.
The downside of not monitoring communication is that the bad guys will go unchecked too and things like 9/11 will happen. How would you propose getting around that?
Also, I think it's worth noting that the United States is not the only country to see a rise in a sort of fascist state. In the last decade, France, Austria and even the Netherlands have had fascists movements gain momentum among their citizens.
I'm not a Bush supporter. I just believe in pulling back and looking at the bigger picture. Bush is a symptom of a much larger problem.
In a documentary, Noam Chomsky pointed out that much of the truth is out in the public domain for the public to discover if they would just look. The problem is, most Americans don't want to come home from work and do a research paper. It's much easier to sit back and zone out in front of entertainment. 80% of the American population is asleep, and I think it's going to take an actual war being fought on their own soil to wake them up.
Hopefully, I'm too cynical.
I'm not naive - I know that spying exists.
Neither was Congress. That's why in the 1978 law that Bush broke, there were provisions for alerting the court body. They could even do it retroactively.
The point isn't that Bush's hands were tied, the point is that he ignored the process that's been in place to deal with just such contingencies, because he wanted to avoid political accountability. What he did was completely unnecessary -- except if your objective was to never be accountable.
We wouldn't have known about this if not for the NYTimes.
We wouldn't have known about Abu Ghirab if not for the New Yorker.
The entire point of this administration has been to subvert the processes in place, in order to set up extra-legal groups, like the Pentagon group that runs a separate security apparatus from CIA and NSA.
This President's default position is to exert Executive Privilege on everything. He brokes no opposition within or without.
Yes, this is part of a trend. But in times like this, you don't abandon your principles -- you stand up for them, or you take what comes next.
And if we don't have the principles we claim to have, then what exactly are we fighting for, anyway?
I already said it: Americans are asleep. If pressed to fight, they'll fight for their right to own big screen TVs.
The point of the scandal is not that Bush spied on Americans. He is allowed to under FISA provisions.
The point is that he broke the law in bypassing those provisions, and then when caught, claimed that the President has the Constitutional right to override laws if it is in the interest of "national security".
If that statement goes unchallenged, or is accepted by Congress, it sets a dangerous precedent, since it *effectively* give the POTUS dictator powers.
Yeah, "whatshesaid" reminds me when working for a corp in T.O. we were asked by an exec to examine code from one of our sites we supported in an American city.
These poor working saps there thought their conversation using company equipment was private and untraceable. Unfortunately for them we extracted the convo from the logs. They had using insulting allusions to their boss (the exec) and he was able to fire one caz he discovered he had lied about being sick and taken days off.
So like what's that? Contracting domestic spying to a foreign country i.e. Canada? :)
It's no crime, all corporate info and equipment used on site belongs to the corp. The info centers know more about folks than they do themselves.... and large CIS staffs all got acccess to that info.
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By some new-age personnel idea a small group of us lower echelon had coffee clutch with the director of CIS of this major financial company...during which he sneered at privacy concerns of the public ... quote: "People want privacy?... they can move to the Arctic".
That was how the'90's started.
..
It's so easy to tap anything now, a conversation is just a click away, who can resist that? Especially the zap-me-now generation.
Sow the tech and reap the technowind.
I can't for the life of me understand WHY some people think that's it's OK for Shrub abd his posse of yes men to curcumvent the law and ignore our constituional rigths. Oh, wait, it's not the Constitution of the United States of America, it's just a "god-damn piece of paper!"
If we keep allowing these heinous violations, we WILL have "just" a "god-damn piece of paper".
Tragically, it seems as if most of the nation doesn't care if that's what at the end of this particular journey.
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