The War on Terror is a New Kind of War II

So busy, ...

But essentially, it's argued that the "war on terror" is so new, that we have to give police all sorts of new powers to help them combat it. We have to get rid of the idea of individual privacy, habeas corpus, ... and well, getting rid of those two things seems sufficient for conveying the amount we're told we must sacrifice in order to defeat this new enemy.

But what, at the bottom of it, is this new enemy? It seems to consist of transnational organizations, organized in a cellular fashion (with some cells having merely assumed the brand name of the organization and acting in isolation) conspiring to commit violent acts against the general public to advance a political agenda.

[We can agre to disagree about just what this political agenda is: The reality-based community says that their goal is to force the United States to change its foreign policy in the Middle East, the right-wing says that they want to reconquer Spain and/or subject the entire Western World to the "Islamofascist" authority of a new "Caliphate" by blowing up a building or a subway train every now and again.]

Okay, anyway, ... what's so new about post 9-11 terrorism from the terrorism of the past? The law enforcement agencies of the West have kept terrorist lists for decades now. They've learned to cooperate to control and capture targetted terrorist groups in the past. What's changed?

When these cells are active in a specific country, they amount to criminal conspiracies. They'll do stuff like having all their members sign up for flying lessons (with the stupider among them telling the instructors that they won't be needing any taking-off or landing lessons!), they'll be trying to amass quantities of explosives and place them somewhere, they'll be planning on robbing banks, receiving criminally obtained monies from overseas, they'll be planning on capturing buildings and taking hostages.

The point is that criminal conspiracies aren't new. What 9-11 showed us was that a spectacular failure of various agencies to connect the dots allowed a group of terrorists to pull-off a major action that killed a relatively large number of people. But these were failures to efficiently utilize existing police powers and methods. The Madrid and London subway bombings were similarly major acts of violence, but they were also isolated events.

Does it justify the permanent removal of habeas corpus and freedom from the oversight of our states into our private lives, to fight this problem?

Two links I'll try to get to tomorrow:

http://www.counterpunch.org/bowden03012007.html

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200409/cullison