PLUS: Maryland politicians fundraising on 9/11
UPDATE: The ACLU of Maryland warns that tomorrow Congress is scheduled to vote on an extension of police powers allowing the government to wiretap American's communications without a search warrant. Use the ACLU's online action tool to send an email to your members of Congress today.
ANOTHER DAY OF 9/11 REMEMBRANCE: Today marks another anniversary of the tragic 9/11/01 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Indeed, I nearly forgot about this new American milestone, until I woke up and started reading the news coverage and alerts streaming through my email inbox. Of course, most news outlets are running the ordinary tributes and commentary on the event itself, and the victims deserve their moment of remembrance. It is, after all, tough to forget the jarring emotional period in American civic life that many of us lived through. It is harder still to forget the tragic imagery from that day and how it continues to impact the American policy mindset (both positively and negatively)....
MARYLAND POLITICIANS HOLD FUNDRAISING EVENTS TODAY: Some Maryland politicians, however, are celebrating 9/11 with fundraisers for their campaigns. Bryan Sears of the Pikesville Patch notes that Delegate Jon Cardin is holding a fundraiser today for his 2014 Attorney General run. Meanwhile, Delegate Eric Bromwell is hosting a "Jamaican-Me-Crazy" fundraiser in Baltimore today. See an excerpt from the Patch article below:
PIKESVILLE PATCH: A state delegate says his fundraiser on the anniversary of 9/11 is just one of the "patriotic things that we do." Del. Jon Cardin, a Democrat who represents Owings Mills, Pikesville and part of Timonium, will hold a fundraiser at the Baltimore home of David Thaler, president of DS Thaler and Associates.
Also holding an event today is Del. Eric Bromwell, a Perry Hall Democrat, who hosts his annual "Jamaican-Me-Crazy" party at the Bay Cafe in Baltimore at $125 per person.... Bromwell, according to his Facebook page, plans to ask attendees to write notes to members of the military serving overseas.
ANOTHER REMINDER OF THE SHODDY STATE OF CIVIL LIBERTIES IN AMERICA: I suppose attending a political fundraiser could be seen as patriotic to some, but I prefer 9/11 to be a time where Americans take an honest look at our government and continue the dialogue that we never finished during the Bush years. This many years after the 9/11 attacks, Maryland Juice does not think there is much disagreement in America about our disgust at what happened. Meanwhile, we've swept the more uncomfortable conversations under the rug -- to the point that most have forgotten about the vigorous debate over civil liberties in the post 9/11 world.
Instead, as Democratic and Republican administrations have changed hands, we've seemingly slid down the slippery slope of accepting a perpetual surveillance state and a massive expansion of the Pentagon budget and police powers. And if you believe that law enforcement is monitoring the legality of its own actions or that Congress is providing adequate oversight, I've got an ICC to sell you for $1.
TWO 9/11 COMMENTARIES WORTH READING: Below are a couple worthwhile essays from today's news roundup. One comes from Wired Magazine and discusses the post-9/11 mindset with the headline, "This 9/11 Commemorates the Zombie War on Terror." The other article is from the Political Fiber website and focuses on the mindset of youths who came of age during 9/11. We provide excerpts from both articles below, but we encourage you to check out the full commentary of the authors.
WIRED MAGAZINE: "This 9/11 Commemorates the Zombie War on Terror" - ...It’s been over a year since the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden.... And yet the giant wartime apparatus the government built to confront the emergency of al-Qaida remains firmly in place.
In a rational world, as the emergency receded, so too would the institutional mechanisms of response. In the world we actually live in, the war on terrorism is more like a zombie, lurching forward thoughtlessly on instinct and stimulus-response....
Money is perhaps the most direct way to understand how the war on terrorism lurches forward. The Defense Department hasn’t had its budget for the next year approved yet, but the version that’s making its way through the Senate is $604.5 billion: $516 billion for the Pentagon’s typical operations, purchases, personnel and so forth; and $88.5 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq....
Treasure is one thing. Blood is another.
There have been 246 U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan in 2012 to date.... The pace of further U.S. drawdowns remains to be determined....
President Obama has proven unable to shutter the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, owing to bipartisan congressional opposition....
A different cornerstone of the 9/11 security state was the vastly expanded powers of surveillance Congress and President George W. Bush expanded. The Patriot Act gave the FBI the power to collect the library, business, and in some cases financial records of Americans — ostensibly connected to terrorism investigations — without judicial warrants....
Now for what we don’t know....
Changes in 2008 to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the principal legal authority governing the National Security Agency, made it much easier for an agency that’s supposed to focus on overseas communication to intercept calls, e-mails and metadata of people inside the United States. And the National Security Agency will not say how many Americans have gotten caught in its web....
The Political Fiber website looked at all of these changes in the American mindset from the perspective of the millennial generation. They named five ways 9/11 continues to have an enduring impact on the psyche of young people in America. Below we highlight some of their discussion about military service and immigration (excerpt below):
POLITICAL FIBER: The U.S. went through enormous change following the September 11 attacks. Eleven years later, college students continue to experience a country altered by the tragedy. As the Millennial generation ages and enters a post-9/11 world, we examine the ways it has shaped their country and their worldview....
Military Service post-9/11
When David Conway signed up for the army in 2005, he was 18 years old and determined to fulfill his patriotic duty. The Lawrence native was in junior high when the twin towers were attacked....
“It wasn’t until I got there that I started to question the motives of the government and whether it was worth our time and effort,” he said....
“It’s hard for veterans to come out and say that the war is wrong,” he states, “It’s essentially saying that the two years were a waste.”
Conway said the motivations behind enlisting for young people are changing and the strong sense of civic duty may be replaced by economic necessity....
Increased focus on Immigration Policy
Before 9/11, President Bush began immigration negotiations with Mexico, citing its economic contributions to the U.S. economy. However, after the terrorist attacks the negotiations collapsed....
Debbi Klopman, a New York immigration lawyer of more than 25 years, said within the past 10 years, the United States’ strict visa and immigration policies have grown more restrictive.
“If you came in the country in the last 10 years and you overstay your visa or come across the border without a visa and you want to legalize your status there’s no way,” she said....
CONTINUING BI-PARTISAN SUPPORT FOR THE MINDLESS STATUS QUO: No matter how much rhetoric both Democrats and Republicans spew about the bloated defense budget, the corruption of defense contracts and Pentagon waste, and the unfunded domestic spending priorities -- politicians are still unwilling to actually reduce defense spending. In Montgomery County this year, some Democrats even tried passing an advisory resolution suggesting that Congress re-prioritize its spending, but the advisory effort was killed by defense lobbyists -- in one of the nation's most liberal jurisdictions.
And when it comes to civil liberties, there is an almost complete bi-partisan disregard for checks on the government's surveillance powers. It used to be that Democrats fought back against John Ashcroft and Dick Cheney's Patriot Act, but now that Bush is out of office, the Party seems to ignore the most challenging civil liberties issues.
Esquire Magazine's politics blogger Charles Pierce used a recent opinion poll about Bin Laden as a springboard to scorch both parties for their 9/11 posturing. Apparently 15% of Ohio Republicans think Mitt Romney deserves more credit for finding Osama Bin Laden than President Obama:
ESQUIRE: Happy 9/11, America! If we needed any more evidence that the atrocities perpetrated by Osama bin Laden 11 years ago have been transformed into simply another mudball in our national political mudfight, that poll pretty much seals the deal for you. It's more than ignorance. It's more than being misinformed..... This is simple reflexive tribalism — Democrat bad, Republican, good....
The fact is that we never have found a way to integrate the mass murder of nearly 3,000 Americans into our politics in a way that satisfies all of us and does honor to the victims of that day. And the responsibility for that does lie with a Republican — namely, George W. Bush, whose negligence, as Kurt Eichenwald in The New York Times reminds us today, prior to the attack remains inexcusable, and who later used the horror of those events, and the ensuing spasm of national mourning and unity, to embark on a whole raft of policies, including an illegal war in Iraq. The Democratic leadership in the Congress, by and large, went along with these policies until everything went sour in Baghdad, and then they spent an election-cycle-and-a-half trying to climb out of the mess in which they were utterly complicit....
Maryland Juice has a terrible feeling that on September 11, 2013, I'll still be complaining about the Patriot Act/FISA, unwarranted surveillance, and an out-of-control Pentagon budget. Sigh.
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