image by Ralph Gibson
i'm trying to understand how the Patriot Act is going to help make the world a safer place because i had naively assumed that we were already doing these things as outlined in the Patriot Act and so had this false sense of security. Admittedly, i don't know as much about it as perhaps i should, but i do know enough to know that under the terms of this act, librarians and even bookstores will have to turn over any books i check out or by if asked by the federal government. That, in fact, the government will serve like a sixth grade teacher, mulling over the odd list of books that i check out or buy. This is just one part of the act and perhaps to some, the most aggregious part, though i admit i'm on the line about this one. Yes, of course i want to prevent terrorism, but i'm still assessing how much of a violation this is for those of us who are simply living our lives. How the books we read prove anything is a tough one for me to accept. After all, as a journalist, i read all variety of books; it's even my job to check out terrorist profiles and the like so that i know whereof i speak, but this doesn't make me a terrorist or sympathizer. It is my job to know, as surely many here can relate. Yet according to this act, the very fact of our research could land many of us neck-deep in shit that reeks of guilt.
There are ways in which this possibly makes sense: after all, if you suddenly see cluster of people who are all friends and are checking out The Anarchist's Cook Book and flight manuals and books like, "i hate america" then it's possible that you can get a head's up. Possible, but not likely. I would wager that those who are sly enough and sneaky enough to do what the terrorists on 9/11 did are not going to be purchasing books from local bookstores or in batches. I also doubt that they are dumb enough to all buy the same books at the same time so that they can attend a little book club and discuss how to put what they read into action.
I found a little government web site alled "Preserving Life & Liberty 
." The headline tells us that to preserve life and liberty, we can use these words from the Declaration of Independence as some kind of support for the Patriot Act, though i'm not completely clear on the relevance. It says: "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are Life, LIberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted..." This, of course, from the Declaration of Independence. How this relates to book monitoring and media monitoring i dont' know, but it does somehow... that through the Patriot Act, innocent lives will be protected and we can all pursue our happiness. That much does make sense to me; you can't pursue anything if you are dead. What they are saying, and i quite agree, is that anyone who interferes with the right of the majority to pursue these things will be brought down.
What this means is that the government may now use the tools that they have used in many other instances such as wiretapping drug dealers, mafia, etc etc. can now be used for the prevention of terrorism. This last confuses me a bit. Why hadn't we been wiretapping terrorism suspects before now? i've been living, i guess, the happy delusion that we already had been doing that. That of course we were monitoring, even wiretapping terrorists because that is just about the only thing that makes sense. It's the only way to prevent crime; shit, if you can wire tap the mafia, why the hell couldn't you wire tap possible a possible terrorists. Yes, it's more complicated than that. You can't just wiretap a person because you have a hunch. There needs to be some more convincing evidence in order to get the judicial approval that one needs to put any person under such surveillance. How an individual is identified as a potential terrorist, how we determine who is tricky, but then, i suppose we have set guidelines in place that would speak to this since we have long put suspects of other activities under surveillance.
Heck, i remember years ago, must be almost fifteen years by now, when i was living in the Italian District of Boston in a loft that looked right into the kitchen of the Andjulo brothers - those big mafia thugs who seemed to sit in the kitchen all day, frying up peppered Italian sausage with garlicky red sauce. They just looked like a bunch of older Italian guys who liked to cook. I remember if i had the windows to the loft open, you could even smell their garlic sauce and the sausage as at sizzled in the pan. The only thing that seemed a little off was that they seemed to always have the radio on and loudly, tuned to, from what i could tell, mostly static. They certainly didn't look like they were up to anyting suspicious (though looks are often deceiving, yes, i know), but i remember the day it all came down for the andjulo brothers and the FBI lead a bunch of middle-aged Italian guys in Members Only jackets down the narrow staircase and onto the street facing Pizzeria Regina. I was stunned. These were the guys i had known for all these years; the same guys who offered me free donuts on Sunday mornings and shouted "Hey Saadiii" to my window.
That night, i found out about how they butchered people to death, some right there in the apartment. That hits were ordered, deals were made, and fates sealed right there as the sausage sizzled and the wine breathed. It seemed so arbitrary to me. That depending on their mood and gastric upset or not, they could order a hit on just about anybody.
I guess the point is that i'm not sure that if we had access to any books that they checked out, if there were any, i doubt it would have told us very much. In the end, it was wire taps that and bugs that brought the brothers down, so it worked. But how one identifies a terrorist suspect seems a lot harder. With the Andjulo brothers, you could find people somewhere you were already dead. Hits had been ordered, drugs had been trafficked; it was an ongoing process.
Terrorists, by contrast, seem to build up to one pretty big event and from what i've seen so far, up until the deadly, grisly day, they are squeaky clean so as not to raise any red flats. Should we have questioned a bunch of middle eastern guys taking flight lessons in Vero Beach? Perhaps. But then you face the difficulty of saying that if you fall into X. demographic, and read Y. book or take Z. lessons, then you are immediately suspect. I should know; from what i understand, even I fit a profile: i have a somewhat radical past and involvement in some groups that the FBI anyway, considers "fringe" - though frankly, i think i attribute that to youth and if they actually knew me, they would see i'm really more of a conservative. I also look like a drug mule, one customs officer told me because i am blonde and fair and have grey-green eyes and i smile when i go through customs and security and god, that smile is the death of me because nobody in their right mind smiles for the priveledge of queing up, so this makes me suspect. Add to the mix that i have epilepsy and that when i get nervous, i begin to tremble and perhaps even have a grand mal or complex partial seizure, then i really look like i'm up to no good. That shaking is my biggest problem these days. To date, every time i have had to go through security at an airport, INS, or even corporate security, i have been pulled out of line and questioned and even searched by a female officer.
I can't help but think what a profound waste this is. First, there were no female terrorists on 9/11 - not one on any plane that we know of. Second, most terrorists seem to be men for whatever reason. There are, of course, a few females, but the for the record, they look nothing like me and they all seem to be dark in hair and eye and certainly not European looking. Why then, is the government still profiling blonde software developers and analysts like myself? Isn't it time we got with the times, Mo.
Here is a list of the books next to my bed at the moment. Maybe they reveal something about me and maybe if you work hard enough you can fit these into a profile. I'd be most curious to know what this adds up to. Here's the list
20 Lines a Day by Harry Mathews
A French | English dictionary
In the Shadow of the Dreamchild by Caroline Leach
Don't Make Me Think: Web Usability by Steve Krugg
NetWords: Creating Effective Content by Nick Usborne
Rough Magic: a Biography of Sylvia Plath
Birthday Poems: Ted Hughes
Ada or Ardour by Vladimir Nabokov
Woman by Natalie Anger
Longer Poems by Haydn Carruth
Best American Poetry 1994 - anthology
There are also several notebooks with story ideas and selected poetry fragments as well as a printed manuscript of journal fragments that i might use for a novel. I also have a book called Entre Nous by someone i can't remember and many French lesson workbooks, CDs, dictionarys, a dictionary of French slang (which i highly recommend for anyone who wants to fake it and know how to get out of a conversation by saying they've just had enough, Tant Pis, au revoir salope. as well as tapes and a walkman and a blank book for practicing French and writing French poems. Overall, i look like someone who could possiblly be planning to cause some major damage in the telecommunications industry, where i had been working on the Home page for the nation's largest telecom firm and certainly could have sabotaged if that had been my desire (it wasn't); i am foreign and from an area of London that has a high Pakistani and middle-eastern population; i work in software; i am a journalist, among other things; not a U.S. citizen, yet i live here ; was and am a member of the Socialist Alliance, which i joined as a teenager and never actually quit, so technically, though i have changed, that hasn't, mostly out of apathy. Overall, if one wanted to, one could make a case for monitoring me. I wager they'd be pretty bored, but heck. To compound matters, i am leaving for Europe and will be traveling on September 10th and arriving in London on September 11th and then off to Paris, a fact which i am not happy about, but those are the dates we got. I am not at all pleased to be travelling on a day that has such bad associations.
Truth to tell, i am e nervous than i normally have been since September 11th (and i was never a nervous flyer, even though i had been in a plane crash as a child, i still felt safe flying; my mother was and is a flight attendant, and had always told that i was far safer in thy sky than in my car, commuting to work. She's right of course, but the awful drama and horrific graphics that come with terrorism, a plane crash seems less frightening in a way - maybe more likely, that i can agree, but somehow less gruesome. Terrorism succeeds, i am sorry to say, in terrorizing. It is so visual, so gruesome. Who an forget Lockerbie; the plane seats that had fallen and landed in trees, passengers still strapped in, hanging from the large Oaks over Lockerbie, Scotland. A flight that my grandfather was supposed to be on, but changed at the last minute to the next day - hardly a fact which did anything to dispel his awful fear of flying.
All of this is to say that for as much as i want, by god, to make sure that these things never happen again, that we catch these fucking terrorists who could cause us and the world great harm; would use unbelievablly awful and painful biological weapons that would cause us all, them included, a grisly and certain death for which our hospitals and emergency services are not prepared - a fact you know all too well if you've ever been to the ER on any given night with a simple wound. It's a five hour wait at best. Imagine a warhead loaded with racine landing near you. How would you get to the ER, first of all, and what could they do for you even if you could get through. The wait itself would waste hours that are vital in such a case, and i'm sorry to report that by and large, the ER has been useless for me. As a cancer patient and epileptic, i've been there far more than i would choose on my own and for the most part, i am treated like i am a pest, a burden on these over-burdened and embittered nurses who are taken advantage of by drug-seekers who use the ER as thei rpersonal dealer and so look askance at anybody who shows up with legitimate pain. I can't blame them - but i can't blame me either. What i am saying is that i think we are unprepared. If someone can prove me otherwise, by god, please do. I'd be thrilled and i'd feel a great deal better.
]t the end of the day, even if i know what someone is reading, what books they check out, even if the book is entitled "How to Terrorize and Murder Thousands of US Citizens by Flying a Plane into a National Landmark" - How does this help me? Will it really stop that thing from happening? Didn't the FBI, we've established, have some warning before 9/11 that they disregarded? Hadn't we helped train Osama bin Laden when we thought we were on the same side? Isn't he as good (or bad, however you wish to say it) at his "job" because we helped him to be "all that he can be."
Well, i've gone on long enough. I'm not against the Patriot Act, but i'm not clear on why we weren't already doing these things; i guess that's the thing that surprises me most. I don't want my own privacy to be invaded, there are certainly issues there. But i had mistakenly assumed that the government was already wire tapping and investigating those who they had just cause to believe posed a danger to the US. Talk abou naive, but i thought they were doing their job. Here is some of the tex from lifeandliberty.gov. To read the text in full, scroll down and follow the link at the end of this article:
- Allows law enforcement to use surveillance against more crimes of terror. Before the Patriot Act, courts could permit law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance to investigate many ordinary, non-terrorism crimes, such as drug crimes, mail fraud, and passport fraud. Agents also could obtain wiretaps to investigate some, but not all, of the crimes that terrorists often commit. The Act enabled investigators to gather information when looking into the full range of terrorism-related crimes, including: chemical-weapons offenses, the use of weapons of mass destruction, killing Americans abroad, and terrorism financing.
- Allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trained to evade detection. For years, law enforcement has been able to use "roving wiretaps" to investigate ordinary crimes, including drug offenses and racketeering. A roving wiretap can be authorized by a federal judge to apply to a particular suspect, rather than a particular phone or communications device. Because international terrorists are sophisticated and trained to thwart surveillance by rapidly changing locations and communication devices such as cell phones, the Act authorized agents to seek court permission to use the same techniques in national security investigations to track terrorists.
- Allows law enforcement to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists. In some cases if criminals are tipped off too early to an investigation, they might flee, destroy evidence, intimidate or kill witnesses, cut off contact with associates, or take other action to evade arrest. Therefore, federal courts in narrow circumstances long have allowed law enforcement to delay for a limited time when the subject is told that a judicially-approved search warrant has been executed. Notice is always provided, but the reasonable delay gives law enforcement time to identify the criminal's associates, eliminate immediate threats to our communities, and coordinate the arrests of multiple individuals without tipping them off beforehand. These delayed notification search warrants have been used for decades, have proven crucial in drug and organized crime cases, and have been upheld by courts as fully constitutional.
to read more, click here .
Yes, anything we can do to prevent terrorism; but silly me, i thought we were well beyond this point, and how what i read or what you read is going to help i just don't see. In truth, i doubt that anybody capable of such secrecy and commitment to their cause is dumb enough to sign out or buy a bunch of books on the topic and send up a crimson flare shouting 'Me! me! me!" Of course, I could be wrong. As to the rest of it, what can i say... i had enough faith that i believed we were well beyond this point. How frightening that i had such faith in the government and they have such little faith in me, in you.
sadi ranson-polizzotti
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