I posted this in the comments at Dan Gillmor's eJournal yesterday (Jan.18).
The post to which it was appended has disappeared. It was about an airline/security flap in North Carolina.
Considering how much space and time Gillmor devotes to accountability and ethics, I would have expected him to post something as to why it's not there.
My comment was a slightly rewritten version of an earlier one, at a different online journal. The original is at Body and Soul.
This is self-plagiarized from another comments page, where the subject was Mohamed Arar and his mass� flight path to Syria:
There's this refusal to draw the obvious conclusion. People want to believe it's not so bad. Bad but not too bad.
That the dark side of American politics would be capable of Central American atrocities and assassinations, South American atrocities and assassinations, Asian atrocities and assassinations, the Middle East, Africa; you see what happens, it doesn't stop exactly, it begins to shift into marginal colors and then it fades into the shadows of conspiracy and paranoia.
Better to pretend it's all pretty much OK.
But it isn't and it wasn't.
That these men would do those things to protect their business interests in foreign countries would seem a clear indication they would do those things and worse to protect themselves at home, where not just their business interests but their families are threatened.
Yet the idea is still shocking to too many of us.
There's a sense of outrage that the owned media don't present the crimes of their masters to the public.
It's so much easier to believe there's a fixable problem. That these men would steal a presidential election, then four years later, after repeatedly defecating on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, participate dutifully in the next one, win or lose.
That they would encourage and participate in the killing of Salvador Allende but not Martin Luther King. That they would encourage and participate in the assassination of a generation of Argentinian "leftists" but not an American one.
But they would; they would and they did.
They used covert techniques that are as immoral as any traditional evil, on people who were not evil themselves, but merely in the way of the capitalist power train.
I hesitate to use a word like "capitalist" though, because it makes it all sound like a difference of economic opinion.
It isn't just Arar. At some point, long past, it became a question not of any specific thing this country had done, but of what this country is.
America is supposed to be a democracy, it shows that face to the world still.
But democracy is government by the people, and the American people are being told what to think, what to believe, and what to do, or else, by their government.
Government by the government.
That's the opposite of democracy.
That's tyranny.
