If the original PATRIOT Act was ill-advisedly passed in a state of panic, its reauthorization, should it occur, will be the result of bureaucratic inertia, the corruption of media discourse on matters relating to “national security,” and, above all moral cowardice masquerading as political “realism,” Julian Sanchez observes in a must-read piece titled “War on Terror II” in The Nation.

Reviewing current “debate” and deliberation around the PATRIOT Act, Sanchez warns:

We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We’ve watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of “state secrets.” We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.

Tags: PATRIOT Act, surveillance, war on terror

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 3:11 pm and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.