there are several threads about Sen. Graham's comments about 'fifth columns' and the duty to surveil them. Taken alone, this comment would naturally give rise to the concerns about traditional American "traitor under the bed" witchhunting. Rightly so. What with detention camps for 'new programs' being constructed and what have you...
And yet, we find in
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020700731.html that that is not all Sen Graham said. Immediately following the statement in question, the exchange with Gonzales continued:
GRAHAM: But here's my challenge to you, Mr. Attorney General. There will come a point in time where the information leads to us believe that citizen A may be involved in a fifth column movement. At that point in time where we will need to know more about citizen A's activity on an ongoing basis, here is where I part.
I think that's where the courts really come in. I would like you and the next attorney general and next president, if you have that serious information that you need to monitor this American's citizen's conduct in the future, that they may be part of a fifth column movement to collaborate with the enemy, I want a check and a balance.
Here's why: Emotions run high in war. And we've put a lot of people in prison who just looked like the enemy and never did anything wrong, just as loyal American as you or I.
But it would be very easy in this war for an American citizen to be called up by the enemy and labeled as something they are not. It would be very easy, in my opinion, if you're a business person dealing in the Mideast who happens to be an American citizen, the business deal goes bad, that bad things could happen to you.
And I would just like the administration to entertain the idea of sitting down with Senator DeWine and others to see if we can find a way at some point in the process of monitoring fifth column movements to have a check and balance system that not only would strengthen the commander in chief's role, it will give guidance to the people fighting the war. You'll have Congress on board. You'll be stronger in courts. And the enemy will be weaker.
Now, I probably have a larger collection of metal foil garments than many who post here, I've heard that Mike DeWine is a fool, and Sen. Graham has an illustrious reputation of trying to spindle the administration's bagel at every opportunity. And yet, in the above, he mouths words which indicate that he is addressing precisely the concern we feel here about the notion of surveilling putative "fifth columns" and telling the USAG that checks and balances are needed on the power to surveil such groups in order to prevent such fascist depredations from taking place. He may not be a firebrand, and he may be mealymouthed in an old boy way, wantin' to have a conversation and then maybe go shoot some quail with the Pres'dent, but nevertheless, he is not in fact a Cheney, or a Gonzales, who simply says "you have to watch what you say, there's a war on".
It would seem that more background is needed. While the protofascist excesses of this administration are disgraceful, and the public's willingness to sacrifice a lot of liberty for precious little security is disgusting, we on the other hand in the rational opposition cannot practice absolutist demagoguery (?sp) if it is out of touch with reality. Thumping our shoes on the table and proclaiming loudly a simplistic mantra that there shall be no, repeat no, domestic surveillance in a time when it is clear that our country _has_ been infiltrated to a significant extent by groupings interesting in committing acts of violence here is simply stupid. It earns us the title 'moonbat' and paints us as just more of the idiotic and potentially truly disloyal fringe.
The challenge of our time is to respond to both potentially invasive technological capabilities, and a diffuse collection of real threats to security, with solutions that have sufficient complexity to both safeguard our inherent civil rights, and address those threats. This is what we accuse the GOP and cohorts of failing to do, and they have; we on the other hand cannot respond to their simplistic dogma with ours. The largely self-indulgent simpletons who accused soldiers returning from Vietnam (their generational and class compatriots, or maybe not, since most were poorer than those who stayed home) of being murderers, rather than making the effort to join those forces who were (legally) taking the battle to the true sources of the problem, civilian policymakers and their lackeys in the military command hierarchy, disgust me as much as the worst GOP fascist enabler. In fact they facilitate the power of said fascist enablers by making it easy to dismiss themselves as stupid.
Let's not make the same mistakes as the left has always been accused of making, often rightly (I recall yet again the imbecile at a 1983 El Salvador demonstration in NYC accusing another Trotskyite sect of being class traitors while his was not). We will not beat the conservatives and the shit they dispense by dispensing an equal weight of diametrically opposed complementary shit. That just makes two opposites that are both shit. We will win by doing what they fail to do: using human intellect that normal people are not conditioned out of using to assess the situation our nation is in objectively and rationally, identifying its complexities correctly, and synthesizing rational, pragmatic courses of action which we then take and by so doing convince the public of their superior viability.
So, the short point WRT Sen. Graham: tell the whole story and work from that. Don't cut out the parts that we can use to sell low-quality diatribes which only serve to confirm stereotypes about us which make us easy to dismiss. Defending absolutes is not accomplished by being an absolutist. And painting the conservatives as being fascists by lying instead of using the abundance of real evidence is maybe what they would do, but the temptation for turnabout is seductive - if your enemy is an asshole but you're not, then acting like one puts you in danger of becoming one and negating your inherent advantage. Let's not be assholes, we have the GOP doing an excellent job taking care of that - "mission accomplished". Many times over. They are providing their own rope... We don't need to manufacture more of poor quality by lying.
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