Killer Politics by Ed Schultz Read Free Book Online

from coal should be part of that transition as well. Until these emerging fuels can stand on their own in the marketplace, government subsidies almost certainly will be necessary. When the cost of these subsidies is debated, it will be important to remember that Big Oil is already being subsidized in dollars and in American blood.
    THE PATRIOT ACT VS. THE CONSTITUTION
    After 9/11, the Bush administration pulled the Patriot Act out of some neocon’s drawer somewhere and shoved it down our throats. If you voted against it, the implication was you were soft on terrorism. With little debate and without many people even having read the law that granted sweeping new police powers and steamrolled right over the Constitution, the Patriot Act was approved.
    The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause….” The Patriot Act violated the Fourth Amendment; it opened the door to warrantless wiretaps. In 2007, a federal judge struck down the part of the Patriot Act allowing the FBI to obtain e-mail and telephone data from private companies for counterterrorism investigations.
    Still, because of this act, we may now have to redefine what an illegal search is and what the inevitable ramifications are of being searched. Do we want to live in a world in which every e-mail and every statement is analyzed to decide if we are an enemy of the state? Do we want our credit card purchases and library records examined by the government? Do we want them tracking us by our cell phones? What about facial-recognition software? It can be used to spot known terrorists in airports. But it could also to be used to track your every move. Your cell phone tells Big Brother every move you make.
    â€œThe Patriot Act’s key provisions focus primarily on data collection. The underlying assumption is that the real problem here is a lack of information,” said James Walsh, former executive director, Project on Managing the Atom/Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle . “The history of intelligence failures suggests, however, that often the problem is not a lack of data, but rather making sense of the data you already have. Sometimes it’s the case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand has. After the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the FBI discovered that it already had copies of maps and detailed plans of the attack before it happened.”
    After dissecting all the missed opportunities to thwart the plot to destroy the Twin Towers in 2001, it became obvious that turf battles between the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies were part of the problem. Even where there were no turf battles, there was no information shared. Had information been shared and proper procedures followed, most of the hijackers would never have been allowed to board. Once they were aboard, the communication between the FAA and the military was so slow, an effective defense—which would have meant shooting down passenger jets—could not be mounted. Communication between President Bush and the White House could not be established for some time during the crisis. In short, the intelligence part of our defense system failed.
    Before 9/11, the Bush administration had many pieces of the terror plot puzzle sitting right in front of them, but they were unable to put them together in time. British Intelligence had warned two years earlier that planes might be used to attack American targets. The Bush administration knew this. By the summer of 2001, elements of the government knew a terrorist attempt by al-Qaeda was about to happen. The president even received a memo while on vacation in Texas about bin Laden’s determination to attack within the United States. But no