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All About Perspective
R. Alex Whitlock
Last week in the New York Times, Joseph J. Ellis calls for a little perspective. 9/11, he says, was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. And to an extent I honestly don't entirely disagree. It wasn't what 9/11 was that changed everything, but it was what it represented. It was what it could have been. It was what it will be in the future if we continued the course we were taking. In the greater scheme of things, Pearl Harbor wasn't a big deal. But it justifiably changed everything.
But that' s neither here nor there.
What I found
interesting is that Mr. Perspective had this to say:
My list of precedents for the Patriot Act and government wiretapping of American citizens would include the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, which allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport foreigners during the "quasi-war" with France; the denial of habeas corpus during the Civil War, which permitted the pre-emptive arrest of suspected Southern sympathizers; the Red Scare of 1919, which emboldened the attorney general to round up leftist critics in the wake of the Russian Revolution; the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, which was justified on the grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national security; the McCarthy scare of the early 1950's, which used cold war anxieties to pursue a witch hunt against putative Communists in government, universities and the film industry.
On one hand we have wiretapping domestic/international calls to or from prospective terrorists, and on the other we have the rounding up of Japanese Americans and throwing them in to prisons. On one hand we are allowing the government to conduct investigations (involving subpoenas, searches, and warrants) without the suspects knowledge, and on the other we're allowing the government to shut down any and every newspaper that disagrees with our government's policy.
Whatever your views on the wiretapping (I've no problem with it) and the USA PATRIOT Act (I'm leaning more and more against its continuation), that's an questionable perspective on perspective.
Observations
Wiretapping is one thing, but domestic wiretapping without warrants is illegal (under FISA and the Const.). There is no "zone of twilight" here, as Congress (the law making body of the federal government) has explicitly legislated on the matter (via FISA) and a previous president signed off on FISA. This is a nation ruled by law, not an administration. Thus, we currently have a problem with a President who thinks he can chose which laws to follow and which to ignore.
By "Whatever your views on..." I meant to say that I am not debating the particulars (I put my view in parenthesis as a disclosure), but to say that even if you do believe it to be illegal or unconstitutional, putting it in the same category as Japanese internment and the Alien and Sedition Acts indicates an... interesting... sort of perspective (or, more likely, a lack of one).
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