Civil Liberties Are Being Trampled by Exploiting "Insurrection" Fears. Congress's 1/6 Committee May Be the Worst Abuse Yet. - by Glenn Greenwald - Glenn Greenwald- Following the 9/11 script, objections to government overreach in the name of 1/6 are demonized as sympathy for terrorists. But government abuses pose the greater threat.
"When a population is placed in
a state of sufficiently grave fear and anger regarding a perceived threat, concerns about the constitutionality, legality and morality of measures adopted in the name of punishing the enemy typically disappear.
- The first priority, indeed the sole priority, is to crush the threat.
- Questions about the legality of actions ostensibly undertaken against the guilty parties are brushed aside as trivial annoyances at best, or, worse, castigated as efforts to sympathize with and protect those responsible for the danger.
- When a population is subsumed with pulsating fear and rage, there is little patience for seemingly abstract quibbles about legality or ethics.
- The craving for punishment, for vengeance, for protection, is visceral and thus easily drowns out cerebral or rational impediments to satiating those primal impulses.
...For many liberals and Democrats in the U.S., 1/6 is the equivalent of 9/11.
One need not speculate about that.
Many have said this explicitly.
Some prominent Democrats in politics and media have even insisted that 1/6 was worse than 9/11.
...Mainstream political and media sectors instantly consecrated the narrative, fully endorsed by the U.S. security state, that the United States was attacked on 1/6 by domestic terrorists bent on insurrection and a coup.
They also claimed in unison that th
e ideology driving those right-wing domestic terrorists now poses the single most dangerous threat to the American homeland, a claim which the intelligence community was making even before 1/6 to
argue for a new War on Terror ...With those extremist and alarming premises fully implanted, there has been
little tolerance for questions about whether proposed responses for dealing with the 1/6 “domestic terrorists" and their incomparably dangerous ideology are excessive, illegal, unethical, or unconstitutional.
...Even without enactment of a new law,
there is no doubt that a second War on Terror, this one domestic, has begun and is growing, all in the name of the 1/6 "Insurrection" and with little dissent or even public debate...
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The full recording was posted on Twitter by BuzzFeed reporter Zoe Tillman this morning.
