by TChris

It took little time after 9/11 for neocons to start repeating the mantra, "Everything changed after 9/11," a phrase that the traditional media uncritically reported. But many things didn't change: the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the American values of privacy and liberty, and the need for a governmental system of checks and balances. The LA Times reports on the things that did change:

[Law enforcement and intelligence-gathering authorities] increased the tapping of Americans' phone calls and voice mails. They watched Internet traffic and e-mails as never before. They tailed greater numbers of people and into places previously deemed off-limits, such as mosques.

They clandestinely accessed bank and credit card transactions and school records. They monitored travel. And they entered homes without notice, looking for signs of terrorist activity and copying the contents of entire file cabinets and computer hard drives. ...

In the five years since the attacks, the scope of domestic surveillance has steadily increased, according to interviews with dozens of current and former U.S. officials and privacy experts.

by TChris

In the days following 9/11, much of the rest of the world viewed the United States with sympathy and support. Five years later, thanks to the Bush administration, world opinion of the U.S. has flip-flopped.

Critics say Americans have squandered the goodwill that prompted France's Le Monde newspaper to proclaim ''We are all Americans'' that somber day after the attacks, and that the Iraq war and other U.S. policies have made the world less safe in the five years since. ...

Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel -- an advocate of closer ties with Washington -- had veiled criticism of the United States, saying: ''The ends cannot justify the means.''

''In the fight against international terror ... respect for human rights, tolerance and respect for other cultures must be the maxim of our actions, along with decisiveness and international cooperation,'' she said.

She'll get no argument here.

by TChris

An editorial in today's NY Times calls attention to the true purpose of felon disenfranchisement laws in southern states: "felony disenfranchisement is an enormous obstacle to voting for black people in the Deep South."

In Alabama, an archaic law strips the right to vote from people convicted of crimes involving "moral turpitude,'' without explaining what that is or what crimes are covered. A man who was convicted of a felony for driving under the influence of alcohol, for example, was stripped of his right to vote. When he reapplied for the vote, different agencies gave him contradictory answers, and he was initially prohibited from registering.

People who work and pay taxes deserve to participate in the political process. Erecting barriers to voting that disproportionately disenfranchise black voters is antithetical to democracy. The solution is clear:

The only honorable solution is to automatically restore voting rights to Alabamians who have completed their sentences. That's the only way to take this issue out of the hands of bureaucrats and make amends for one of the most shameful voting rights records in American history.

I'm headed to the airport and won't be back to a computer until tonight. Here's a place for you to discuss whatever is on your mind.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Five years ago today, Al Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, perpetrated the most heinous attack against the United States on our territory since Pearl Harbor. As the CIA warned President Bush and his administration in its August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing, bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States using hijacked airplanes. As President Bush noted at the time, the CIA had "covered [its] ass." In December 2001, President Bush chose to let bin Laden, the person behind the murder of nearly 3,000 souls, go:

Well past midnight one morning in early December 2001, according to American intelligence officials, Osama bin Laden sat with a group of top aides - including members of his elite international 055 Brigade - in the mountainous redoubt of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan. Outside, it was blustery and bitterly cold; many of the passes of the White Mountains, of which Tora Bora forms a part, were already blocked by snow. . . .

. . . Now, as the last major battle of the war in Afghanistan began, hidden from view inside the caves were an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-trained, well-armed men. A mile below, at the base of the caves, some three dozen U.S. Special Forces troops fanned out. They were the only ground forces that senior American military leaders had committed to the Tora Bora campaign.

Meet Majid Khan, one of the 14 alleged terrorists held by the CIA in overseas secret prisons and recently transferred to Guantanamo.

Majid and his family came to the Baltimore area in 1996. He went to high school in Owings Mills, Md. where he was considered a serious student. From his English teacher:

This week's allegations stunned Sanford, who said the young man she taught in her English-as-a-second-language class could not, as alleged, have plotted to blow up gas stations or poison drinking water in U.S. reservoirs. "It doesn't make any sense to me," said Sanford, who taught many of the school's foreign students. "I can't imagine it.

In the remembrance of those killed on 9/11, Wonkette reminds us:

The number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan has already surpassed the death toll of 9/11.

Steve Gilliard of the News Blog writes at Firedoglake about his recollection of being in New York on 9/11. And the media aftermath:

The people rebroadcasting their 9/11 broadcasts are no better than vermin. Matt Lauer should be placed on a glue trap in the sun.

This doesn't belong to America. It isn't some grand national cause. It is a tragedy some get to live with forever. You can remember the dead, but because you became scared of brown people or of someone blowing up your mall or of airplanes, you can share in it. You cannot and if you were smart, you wouldn't want to. No one should want to carry the burdens of another because they feel they should.

As to our government officials, particularly Bush and Giuliani:

Following it's fictionalized version of The Path to 9/11, ABC's Nightline has a ten minute special on the Hunt for bin Laden, says it has new evidence on the hunt.

It reports that two months before the Africa Embassy bombings, there was a plan to arrest bin Laden, anesthetize him and take him to the U.S. George Tenet, according to ABC, pulled the plug on the operation. Richard Clarke says the plan wouldn't work.

I watched a half hour. I found it bathetic. The acting is miserable. It's disjointed and hard to follow. It's a GOP commercial for more wiretapping, racial profiling and xenophobia.

I'm changing the channel now. Did anyone else watch it?

Update: I tuned back in for the last half hour. They replayed the disclaimer that this is not a documentary and that it is based on several published reports in addition to the 9/11 Commission report, and some scenes are fictionalized. They also shamelessly played President Clinton's statement that he did not have sexual relations with "that woman" and showed a picture of Monica Lewinsky. Then they played scenes with Sandy Berger, basically alleging he made a decision not to kill bin Laden when he could have, which in turn resulted in the Embassy bombings.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Powerline's John Hinderaker says:

Just A Thought

First the Senate Democrats browbeat a television network into changing a program so it won't reflect badly on a Democratic administration. Then a Senate committee puts out a report that airbrushes history, leaving out the most important evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, for the sole purpose of making a Republican administration look bad. I think it's really important to work hard to get a Republican majority in the Senate, so the Dems won't be able to pull stunts like these!

Geez, did ABC not run "Path to Truthiness" when I wasn't looking? And Bill Frist and Pat Roberts, the Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman, are Democrats now? No kidding. What, if anything, is Hinderaker up to? Some possibilities in extended.

(Guest Post by Big Tent Democrat)

Taking IOKIYAR (It's OK If You Are a Republican) to new heights, while simultaneously engaged in a full bore defense of ABC's "dramatized" smear of the Clinton Administration the extreme Republican web site Red State also has time to attack Dana Priest's bombshell article that features the fact that George Bush Let bin Laden Go:

Intelligence officials think that bin Laden is hiding in the northern reaches of the autonomous tribal region along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. This calculation is based largely on a lack of activity elsewhere and on other intelligence, including a videotape, obtained exclusively by the CIA and not previously reported, that shows bin Laden walking on a trail toward Pakistan at the end of the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, when U.S. forces came close but failed to capture him.