Thursday, July 07, 2005

This is going to seem callous, but the jailing of Judith Miller for not revealing her sources made me angrier than the London bombings.

The bombings left me angry, but cold. I hate those guys. They hate us. We're in a war with them. They murdered at least 37 people today. I'm not sure modern society will ever be free of lunatics who mistake Islam/Christianity/Judaism/Hinduism/Buddhism for an excuse to murder people. There are just too many people, and modern explosives are so devastating.

But Judith Miller... when a reporter from the Times is jailed, that strikes at the heart of a free society in a way that angry Islamists could never do. Jefferson once wrote that he'd rather have newspapers without a government than a government without newspapers. He was exaggerating to make his point, but a society in which everyone's scared to blow the whistle when their bosses commit crimes -- and the Republicans who outed Valerie Plame were committing treason -- is a scary society on its way towards despotism. Without Deep Throat, Nixon would never have paid the price for the Watergate break-ins. Would Mark Felt have gone to the Washington Post if Woodward and Bernstein could have been compelled by a court to reveal his identity?

Meanwhile, our leaders raise the terror level, and put cops on the platforms, as if that's going to protect anyone. The next attack will not come by plane. It won't come necessarily by train. The likely target everyone's been talking about is cargo containers. But our fearless leaders have done almost nothing to stop terrorists from packing a standard shipping container with something horrible and shipping it into New York harbor.

I can think of some much more effective ways to terrorize North America, but I'm not going to blog them. They're just too damn easy, and terrifying.

I'm not scared of the terrorists. The IRA killed lots of people but never fundamentally changed British society, or even got the Brits out of Northern Ireland. But I am really scared about the political climate in the US. We are losing our freedoms, and slightly more than half the country thinks it's part of the war on terror.

When our leaders use the terrorists as an excuse to grab more power, terrorism wins.

3:33 PM

6 Comments:

For the first time in my life, I'm actually scared of my government. I don't want to turn into one of those people who see black helicopters everywhere, but I've never seen a power grap so obvious and yet so un-commented upon by the press at large.

By  Unknown, at 4:15 PM  

I am actually just tired at this point. The extremists just make me sad. They have gone so far into the dark and away from real people that they are just cartoons. It is the politicians who make me angry. They fought hard for the jobs that they grandstand with and yet they do not seem to understand. Yet we are just as bad- when our legislatures do the slow and boring work of real legislation with thought and care and a chance of meeting the standards of our constitutions then we vote them out of office. We need the free press to be less afraid of their marketing departments and get back to the work of telling us what is really going on and when they do, we must support them for doing it.

By  Hawise, at 7:25 PM  

Just google "Buddhist riots" or "Hindu riots," Bryan. There was violent anti-Muslim rioting during the Partition of India. The Buddhists riot in Burma, among other things. Why should they be exempt? Just because their religion is peace-loving? So is Christianity.

By  Alex Epstein, at 7:53 PM  

Why don't we simply throw Robert Novak in jail to find out who HIS "anonymous goverment source" was? After all, if we can do this to Judith Miller, why not Novak? Oh, that's right, he amd Karl Rove are good buddies. After all, Rove got FIRED from Bush Sr's campaign in 1992 for "allegedly" leaking info to Novak.

By  writergurl, at 7:57 PM  

BTW, according to the Times editorial, there are state laws protecting journalists' rights in 49 states. There is just no federal law protecting them.

By  Alex Epstein, at 10:00 PM  

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopNews&article=UPI-1-20050706-12264700-bc-india-templeshooting.xml

The key sentence: "Hindu activists blamed Pakistani-supported Islamic militants for Tuesday's attack on the temple where Hindus in 1992 tore down the Babri mosque, which sparked Hindu-Muslim riots that killed 2,000."

Not 1915. 1992. (Partition was 1947.)

By  Alex Epstein, at 12:38 AM  

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