insecution

Lets do a little time travel, lets go back to the morning of 10/9/2001, the moment you woke up. Look out of your window, see whats around.

Now, travel a little forward, wake up and look out of your window on the morning of the 12/9/2001. Whats different?

For anyone living in New York, the answer is obvious, for anyone else the answer is nothing. Unless you look beneath the view and see the underpinnings of your society being dismantled, not by the terrorists, but by the very people who proclaimed that any change in our behaviour is a victory for the terror. Chalk one (no, two) up for Osama.

Since then we have:

scrapped, or are in the process of scrapping, the double jepardy rule.
allowed the rules of evidence to be lowered.
allowed hearsay obtained under tortured in as evidence.
re-assigned/re-aligned innocence as the right of every accused.
facing your accuser is now on a case by case basis, with national security trumping your rights.
justified torture as a means to an end, and allowed it to become apart of our legal system.
permitted internment without trial.
allowed thoughts, not actions, to be the basis for criminal sanctions.
equated dissension with treason.
allowed our governments to create a class of people to whom no law applies, yet allow the testimony of those people to be brought before the courts as evidence.
created those legal black holes.
forced accused to plead guilty by threatening them with expulsion to these legal black holes.
threatened and jailed lawyers for defending "terrorists".
rolled back and trampled civil rights.
given the powers that be more powers than they know what to do with.
created a new class of crimes.
made it an offence to tell anyone that you are under suspicion or have been charged with terrorism offences.
made it an offence to "unknowingly" (or even innocently) contribute to any group or person who may be involved with terrorism.
made the geneva convention a quaint idea that may or may not be adherred to in the prosecution of a war, depending on the ever shifting circumstances and justifications of those in power.
corrupted the notion of soveriegn nations by allowing secret rendition, secret prisons and disapearances to become a normal part of our societies.
allowed the rule of law to be subverted by the rule of neccessity (as defined by those who deem whatever they do necesary).
redefined the word torture to allow torture.
redefined how our governments relate to their populations though secrecy provisions in legislation.
allowed our governments to seek unlimited powers with no oversight.
diminished/undermined/redefined our values.
redefined law enforcement to the point where it no longer proscecutes crimes, it can now proscecute and jail for "aspiring"to commit crimes (as opposed to those under previous laws who had to be actually planning crimes, a huge difference that is becoming very apparent in a large number of australian cases and convictions).
made paranoia of the nixon variety into the states mantra.
redefined terrorism as a purely Islamic action.
made justice seem as quaint a concept as the geneva convention.
made the war on terror a global fight for freedom while rolling back the very freedoms we are meant to be fighting for.
invaded a country which had nothing to do with the attacks on 9/11 on the pretext that the country had something to do with 9/11.
criminalised being a refugee.
convinced ourselves that unless we subvert our societies underpinnings that a couple of thousand armed extremists living a long way from our shores will subvert the underpinnings of our society.
promoted fear ahead of sense and allowed it to be used for purely political whims and gains.
declared war on a word.


not bad for a guy in a cave, I would even go so far as to say that Osama has already won the War on Terror by default.