Who is Responsible for Giffords?

By Philip Giraldi • January 9, 2011, 9:07 AM

The terrorist attack on Congresswoman Giffords and her entourage raises some interesting questions of culpability since the laws governing terrorism have been made so elastic that almost anyone can be charged for almost anything. Ali Hamza Ahmad Suliman al Bahlul, a citizen of Yemen currently held in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camps, was convicted in November 2008 of performing media relations (making videos) for Osama bin Laden and sentenced to life imprisonment after a commission of 9 military officers deliberated for less than an hour. One also recalls that bin Laden;’s driver was also imprisoned at Guantanamo. Both men were charged with providing material support to a terrorist.

Based on that precedent, it is clear that Sarah Palin and the others that advocated terroristic acts in the guise of exercising their 2nd Amendment rights and who have used gun metaphors in their campaigning have likewise provided Material Support for Terrorism. Sarahpac website features a map of the United States with enemies listed and shown geographically, with a seen-through-a-gunsite symbol highlighting their location on the US map. Giffords is one of the targets. Palin or her handlers appear to be aware of the problem they have created as she is reported to be erasing all references to guns, gunsights, targeting, and shooting from her website as well as expressions like “no retreat-reload.”

Will Mrs. Palin be charged under the Military Commissions Act or is it restricted only to brown people originating somewhere east of Suez?

Posted in Foreign policy.

42 Responses to Who is Responsible for Giffords?

KV says:

January 9, 2011 at 9:31 am

Short Answer: Restricted to brown people originating somewhere east of the Suez.

The mantra after the Fort Hood shootings was this was not an isolated incident. This was an the act of a man (nidal hassan) who represented the worldwide threat of muslim extremism, better yet, a violent religion that needs to be destroyed (see the rantings of now-elected Rep. Allen West; Atlas Shrugged, Jihad Watch, et al)

A quick glance at FOX News this morning indicates that the right wing will not surprisingly take the opposite view with the AZ shooter, that he represents no movement nor ideology, but is a schizophrenic madman, isolated from reality. Recently-elected Sen. Rand Paul said it himself. No one seemed to want to recognize the anger against government has risen to dangerous levels all around. Yesterday certainly wasn’t the first or last example. It was just probably the worst, yet.

Rhetoric does count for something and Palin can scrub all she wants but there is plenty of evidence of this anger and if you seek you shall find it — in short order.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/37870_What_Violent_Right_Wing_Rhetoric
Mike MacLeod says:

January 9, 2011 at 9:37 am

Uh, the guy who shot her?
SM says:

January 9, 2011 at 10:56 am

Ignorant. Completely ignorant. YOU are the problem. YOU are the reason why something so harmless, you know it is, can’t be said. YOU should be put in jail. This boy was troubled. YOU are politicizing this.
Pingback: Tweets that mention The American Conservative » Who is Responsible for Giffords? -- Topsy.com
Tony J says:

January 9, 2011 at 11:33 am

“Will Mrs. Palin be charged under the Military Commissions Act or is it restricted only to brown people originating somewhere east of Suez?”

Of course she won’t.

The MSM are already pushing their coverage in the direction of “Both Sides Do It – Everyone’s To Blame.” So the vile hate-speech and eliminationist rhetoric coming from the Right – can’t – be blamed for this, not when Matt Bai can do a google-search and find a single commentator on Daily Kos saying Giffords was “Dead to me” for her stance on immigration. Clearly they’re just as bad as each other, and that’s the meme the MSM are running with for all they’re worth.

Not surprising. What are they going to do? Run stories about how crazy people can be influenced by crazy political rhetoric? They’d have to explain why they spent the last two years ignoring the rhetoric coming out of the GOP and its Tea Party franchises, and that might be.. difficult to pull off.
Mya says:

January 9, 2011 at 1:20 pm

Remember the anti-government tone of early 1995? The NRA warning about jack booted thugs and so on? They paid the price when the building blew up in Oklahoma. Clinton, who was badly wounded, was back politically. I suspect the same might happen here.Joyce Kaufman was talking about resorting to bullets if ballots did not work and Allen West wanted to make her his chief of staff. The tea party movement reached its high water mark yesterday–and it will be sharp decline from here on out. Are the likes of Palin or even Kaufman to blame for what happened? No. But the narrative has changed drastically based on what happened yesterday and you better believe the president and his allies will work to keep it changed. So will Conservative Inc. in the beltway. Look for the Republican establishment to make the tea party walk the plank.
Thomas O. Meehan says:

January 9, 2011 at 2:51 pm

“Terrorist attack?” I hope you are being ironic here. American political discourse has been intemperate and inflamatory since at least 1965.

The shooter is a madman in the classic clinical sense. Why put a political context on his acting out? Psychotics respond to the voices in their heads a lot more than voices on the radio or FOX news.

CNN, MSNBC and all the usual suspects are using this outrage to supress the right. I see no point in helping them.
Philip Giraldi says:

January 9, 2011 at 3:15 pm

Tom and other friends, pace! I was referring to the hypocrisy of the whole thing and was not demanding action. My point here is that this shooting was no less a terrorist attack than many other incidents over the past years that have been so labeled. If we are going to arrest someone who makes a video or drives a car we should also be arresting someone who openly criticizes and targets a politician who then gets shot. I believe that all the “support of terrorism” laws are wrong, are a violation of the first amendment, and should be stricken from the books. As several of you have noted the debate over all of this is poisonous, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be criminalizing it.
HateHacks says:

January 9, 2011 at 3:26 pm

Mr. Giraldi, I normally am a fan of your columns, but I must strongly disagree with this one. No good will come of all these scripted assertions in the last 24 hours about “vitriolic right wing rhetoric” as some sort of “incitement” to violence, much less linking political expression, however idiosyncratic, to the utterly pernicious and concocted legal doctrine of “material aid to terrorism.” You should recognize this litany for what it is: not simply an attack on the “right wing,” but a direct attack on constitutional free speech guarantees. I don’t have to like or support an idiot like Sarah Palin to despise efforts to intimidate her and others into silencing their political views, and I am surprised that you would suggest support for such tactics, even tongue in cheek.
Thomas O. Meehan says:

January 9, 2011 at 3:46 pm

I didn’t think you were for arresting Sarah Palin, Phil. Your point on the support of terrorism laws is a good debating point. Surely laws on the books concerning aiding and abetting, conspiracy etc. are enough when dealing with an organized entity like a terrorist cell.

I would make this point however. There is nothing more traditionally American than to threaten to horsewhip you congressman or burn down city hall. We all know this. But beginning with the anarchists and communists and progressing to the Jihadists, whe seem to have no settled way of addressing genuinely allien threats. I’m not sure what the answer is.

At some point words and deeds should have consequences. I remember the flag burning controversy. At the time conservatives fought the idea that burning a flag in a public place was a form of speech. My approach would have been to pass a law stipulating that burning a flag under those circumstances was to be construed as a formal renunciation of citizenship. You would be free to to it, but there would be consequences.
Mitch says:

January 9, 2011 at 5:03 pm

I’m surprised that so many commenters completely missed the point of your clever reductio-ad-absurdum of ‘terror support’ laws. I can’t see how such laws can pass constitutional muster when dealing with the making of videos, and I’m not convinced that bin Ladin’s driver represents much of a terror threat.
Having said that, I hope the Right will tone down the “guns/violent revolution/2nd amendment remedies” rhetoric, which is unseemly and not conducive to reasoned argument.
By the way, thanks for the LGF link, KV. Perfect illustration of what I mean by ‘unseemly’.
Savrola says:

January 9, 2011 at 6:18 pm

ramifications of hypocrisy being an non-issue, one must acknowledge that violence has always been a viable political option.
DirtyHarriet says:

January 9, 2011 at 6:29 pm

My fear is that this latest incident, tragedy that it is, is going to be used to (further) silence critics of Capitol Hill.

In other words, intense criticism of Congresspersons may be seen as criminal (incitement).

Methinks that may be the point Phil is trying to make.
sal magundi says:

January 9, 2011 at 6:37 pm

“CNN, MSNBC and all the usual suspects are using this outrage to supress the right.”

“supress”? how can they “suppress”? are you looking for a dramatic and victimological way of saying “attack politically”?
btw, after the VT shootings, limbaugh blamed it on liberalism. was he using that outrage to “suppress” the left?
Adam Rurik says:

January 9, 2011 at 6:52 pm

Excellent piece, Mr Giraldi, as usual.

I’d love to see a Scarlet Letter solution applied to Half-Gov Palin: She’d have to make her next dozen public appearances with a Target symbol painted on her forehead. I mean, gun IMAGERY doesn’t equal gun VIOLENCE, right, Sarah? And, since you so love the free-market system, I should think you would be downright THRILLED to be sporting the logo of one of America’s largest retail chains.
CM says:

January 9, 2011 at 7:19 pm

My thanks to Mr. Giraldi for asking this all-too-obvious question.
Mitch says:

January 9, 2011 at 8:09 pm

“one must acknowledge that violence has always been a viable political option.”
How true – in say, Nicaragua, or Sudan.
MattSwartz says:

January 9, 2011 at 8:26 pm

Whenever anyone is really energetic in assigning blame to specific political actors for the actions of lone nuts, I can’t shake the suspicion that perhaps the blamer is secretly pleased about the tragedy. Sure, some innocent people are dead, but the important thing is that one’s enemies will be impeded in their future attempts to spread their messages.

What a trade-off! In what sort of poisoned mind is such a maneuver possible? In what sort of a debased climate is it fashionable?

I find Palin dreadful, and I get Mr. Giraldi’s point about her inconclusive link to this killing and how it mirrors the insufficient linkages she champions in the “counterterrorism” arena, but if she’s done in by this, it will be a new low in political discourse, and a new record for MSM mau-mauing.
ian says:

January 9, 2011 at 10:24 pm

I’m a fairly good shot.. can I just reload and take aim at someone I’ve never met because I watch too much Fox? This was a natural consequence of Tea party type retoric. Sounded great all the big talk but now a little girl is dead. Thanks Tea party. At least have the balls to admit your’responsibilty. Your gutlessness makes me sick…reaches for glock…
Hugh T. Guillaume says:

January 9, 2011 at 10:44 pm

Read the second last paragraph of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage in the context of the Arizona shootings. He says “It’s not a matter of putting him out of his mIsery, it’s a matter of putting him out of our misery.” And later in the same paragraph he says,”we had better get rid of the whole crew before they take us off the cliff.” More grist for the mill, you might say.
TomB says:

January 10, 2011 at 7:40 am

Hugh Guillaume wrote:

“More grist for the mill, you might say.”

Oh come on, Hugh, it’s all just tiresome predictable hackery. If the guy had demonstrated some previous liberal/lefty attraction in the main the hacks on the Right would be saying it was the consequence of liberalism/Leftism but now that the shoe seems mainly on the other foot the liberal/Lefty hacks are going at it and blah blah blah.

We never can seem to get beyond it, we never can seem to rise above it, this is the apogee of and thus apparently permanent background state of our modern politics. Hackery, aimed at the boobs.
eep says:

January 10, 2011 at 9:24 am

If Sarah Palin were arrested and charged under the Military Commissions Act then it would give her supporters something to think about as they watch propaganda on Fox News.

The shooter sounds like he is schizophrenic from what I’ve read. If it is true that he was a 9/11 truther then I think his actions are blow back from US foreign policy that contributed to 9/11, our foreign policy after 9/11, and the resulting domestic policy. Also the community he was raised in probably deserves some of the blame in my opinion.
Hugh T. Guillaume says:

January 10, 2011 at 10:37 am

I am not sure what point TomB is making. My point was and is that anyone and everyone who considers himself or herself conservative, or even libertarian, is very likely to find himself or herself under even more scrutiny with regard to what is being spoken, written and even read. Defining extremism is like poking an amoeba or a bowl of jello. Leftists, rightists and centrists all know that and will continue to redefine the term to best suit their interests at the time. The most extreme rightists and the most extreme leftists are actually not very far apart in terms of political philosophy – they have all taken statism to the limit. I vividly recall talking about this at a fascinating seminar conducted by the late Robert LeFevre.
Vincent Granowicz says:

January 10, 2011 at 11:36 am

Why does any group or ideology deserve blame? What ever happened to personal accountability in this country? The entire issue of who’s to blame smacks of MORE political correctness!
Jbraunstein says:

January 10, 2011 at 11:36 am

All evidence points to the shooter being a textbook “lone nut” who acted upon delusions of his own unique design (have you seen his youtube videos) rather than on any particular influence of Tea Party / Republican rhetoric. This guy was no Mcveigh.

Giraldi’s point was that our anti-terrorism laws are so absurdly broad that Palin could ‘hypothetically’ be charged with material support of this guy under the current law–which is itself a ridiculous notion highlighting the ridiculousness and danger of over-broad anti-terrorism laws.

Tea Partiers should be breathing a sigh of RELIEF that this guy seems to be a sui generis mentalcase, and not a radicalized political operative. Not to be crass, but they certainly “dodged a bullet”–given their endorsement and encouragement of violent rhetoric, all it would take is for some zealous, grandeur-seeking individual to draw his own “Dead Zone” like conclusions and take matters of protecting America from “domestic threats” to the Constitution into his own hands and the Tea Party would instantly become politically radioactive.

Accusations of facilitation, encouragement and abetting the kind of discourse that logically concludes in violence would become a firestorm of blame games and witch hunts not entirely unjustified. The practical effect would be the speedy marginalization of any political figure who engaged in violent rhetoric, the discrediting of the Tea Party in general (after several rounds of connect-the-dots) and a major recalibration of the GOP.

The Tea Partiers have to realize that they’re playing with fire.
Jamie Lowe says:

January 10, 2011 at 11:38 am

So when this guy threatened Giffords in 2007 was that Sarah Palin’s fault?
David Perfect says:

January 10, 2011 at 11:52 am

Jeez I am going to have to be more careful. The more I read your website the more I am impressed by the intellectual level of the
articles I get to read.
Mike Lebert says:

January 10, 2011 at 12:38 pm

For months now I have listened to IDIOTS like Beck, Limbaugh, Levine and Palin inciting violent opposition to Liberals. I work in the mental health field and I can attest to the connection of such retoric to action such as we saw this past weekend. Gun owners , and I am one, fail to see the connection of the the right to bear arms to people like Sarah Palin who use the peoples desire to practice this freedom to elevate themselves to the political forefront. Palin could not care less about freedoms. Her goal is to become rich even if she sells out all this country was built upon. I am afraid that this recent event is only the beginning. So go ahead you conservative fools, destroy the foundation of this great country just remember that as it crumbles you will fall into the darkness with the liberals.
Downsize DC says:

January 10, 2011 at 1:47 pm

Mr. Giraldi should be careful. What is a reductio ad absurdum today will become a legal argument tomorrow.
Ed Marimba says:

January 10, 2011 at 4:19 pm

Philip, that was a pretty cagey provocative piece. The obvious differences between the Arabs you highlighted and Palin are that the Arabs are foreign enemies, whereas Palin is a U.S. citizen exercising her 1st Amendment rights. Military tribunals are the proper forum to try the foreign terrorists. Palin has the right to be a nincompoop, and is not subject to military law.

Schizophrenics have no capacity to interpret events logically, so it wouldn’t matter if the killer had listened to Palin, Harry Reid, or Donald Duck.
DirtyHarriet says:

January 10, 2011 at 4:41 pm

I’m not a big fan of Palin’s politics or the extreme rhetoric between right and left, but I don’t see how Palin can take any blame for this.

The only person to blame is the guy that pulled the trigger.

How can someone be responsible for the criminal actions of another who could be set off by the slightest perceived provocation?
Michael says:

January 10, 2011 at 5:32 pm

All these people are referred to as insane, I don’t think so , these people are the creation of a desire to destroy. So is Mr. and Ms. fill in the blank.
KDZ says:

January 10, 2011 at 5:35 pm

There’s a lot of denial around here (by which I don’t mean Mr. Giraldi). Saying innocuous things like “X should be lined up and shot” or “should be burned in effigy” and the like will not incite an unstable person to violence, but speaking in trigger-happy ways, as Sarah Palin and many others do, and saying “X should be beheaded,” etc., is all too likley to incite the lunatics. The conservative/Tea Party movement has a big, big problem with influential loudmouthed bullies who affect the pose of a warrior. These noisy fraudulent jackanapes should not be listened to.
KDZ says:

January 10, 2011 at 5:56 pm

The loon had been stalking the congresswoman since 2007. Does that prove that SP and the talk-radio people had nothing to do with incitement? Just the opposite. A loon stalks a politician for three whole years, but doesn’t engage in actual violence until after an unusually toxic election season in which the martial metaphors belong entirely to America’s blighted facsimile of a right wing political party.

This might be a good time to reread Walker Percy’s increasingly apt “Love in the Ruins.”
Neil says:

January 10, 2011 at 6:57 pm

The poster SM is clearly politicizing this article… the author never mentioned any party political affiliation for the unfortunate Sarah Palin.

SM suggests the author of the article is politicizing this horrible attack… Actually it was the terrorist who politicized it. He deliberately sought out a political figure to attack. He made it political.

Pointing out there are cranks in the media who incite this is merely pointing out the obvious.
Edmond says:

January 10, 2011 at 7:08 pm

This was an excellent article Phil and makes a couple excellent points about 21st Century Conservatism, i.e., Palin and other neoconservatives. For years now they have demanded a “military’ solution to every problem on earth, even as it bankrupts us and shifts strategic and econonomic advantages to the likes of China and Iran (so much for the strategic “genius” of neoconservatives). For more than nine years we have enculturated and socially conditioned, with our militarism (see 1930′s Japan and Germany, as well as 1980′s USSR; how’d it work for them?), a generation of Americans, perhaps such as the 22 year old shooter. The American Right, forgetting that they were supposed to be American conservatives, conserving our political traditions, morphed into the likes of Prussian, Soviet, or Japanese Militarist Conservatives; appropriating their belief systems, but wrapping it up with American symbols. So although Ron Paul’s symbolism of the “Tea Party” resisting an unresponsive political class by political democratic means (remember, the Boston “revolutionary’s complaint wasn’t that there was taxation, it was that there was taxation without representation of colonists in Parliament, whereas we just had an election) was within the American political tradition, the American political symbolism was quickly stolen away by political opportunists representing a 1930′s European political tradition from countries such as Germany, where Communist’s and Nazi’s political tactics were mainly political violence and threats. This last election with the implied and explicit threats made by the neoconservative right was not in the American tradition, it was in the tradition of folks such as Ernst Rohm.
Phil, your pointing out that the use of this type of rhetoric constitutes material support for terrorism is simply using the logic of the last administration; that material support for terrorism is anything done by someone that the government finds to be inconvenient, whether it is left-wing antiwar activists in the midwest (who are currently under a Grand Jury subpoena in Chicago) or, perhaps, in the near future, Tea Partiers. But yet the American Right has been the most vociferous in demanding that freedom of expression should only apply to themselves, forgetting the wisdom of the founders that political power is shifting. If “conservatives” have any brains, which has been called into question these last 10 years, and why I no longer call myself one, they would realize that the police state they have been so zealous in creating is the sort that turns on its “children. Instead of stealing the Communist’s torture tactics and militarism, and reading neoconservatives paraphrasing of Trotsky’s works on how the state should use terrorism (a police state) to protect itself, as neoconservatives are so in favor of, conservatives, if they represent American Conservatism and not that of the European authoritarian states of the 1930′s and 40′s, must begin reading Orwell, Koestler, and other anti-totalitarians, instead of creating an American-style totalitarian state. Or maybe the likes of Palin represents such a threat to the state with her terrorist-modeled rhetoric that some “conservative” should start calling for a missile strike on her, just like they do for Assange.
BSuden says:

January 10, 2011 at 8:04 pm

“since the laws governing terrorism have been made so elastic that almost anyone can be charged for almost anything.”

Excellent point, Phil and sadly many of the faux conservatives don’t seem to be able to get it. That’s because of the SP Personality Cult. You know like the Geo. W. Obama Personality Cult. Preceded by the Real Geo. W. Bush Personality Cult. Any appeal to rationality or ability to follow a principled argument self destructs if a certain anybody is remotely criticized.

IOW carry on, please and disregard the respective Dimocrat/Repuglican barking. If this country can’t get beyond the internecine food fight between Tweedledum and Tweedledee – the Ying and Yang of the Big Govt. Party – we’ll finally get to 1984/Fahrenheit 451 in this country and then we will all have something to twitter about regarding the new reality show in town. It promises to be fun.
BSuden says:

January 10, 2011 at 8:11 pm

I might add – I almost wonder if it makes any difference – both the left and the right use extreme rhetoric, so this can’t be laid at the feet of the Right by the Left.

But if the shooter had been Mexican or Muslim where would we be now?

Never mind, Toto. I want to go back to Kansas. Now.
ian says:

January 10, 2011 at 8:50 pm

This bothways thing is laughable… this happened in Arizona where the Rightwing hatespeech went way over the top and and this is what happened.Fox news has killed more Americans than.. Iran!

Let Sarah be responsible for her part in this divisive atmosphere. I agree completely with KDZ.
DirtyHarriet says:

January 11, 2011 at 7:32 am

Whaddya think, is the shooter going to be allowed that defense – the toxic atmosphere whipped up by the right wing?

Please.
rick says:

January 11, 2011 at 11:26 pm

Georgetown law professor David Cole makes a sound argument that
former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and former National Security Adviser Frances Townsend, all committed a federal crime last month in Paris — because their speech supporting the Mujahedeen Khalq (an Iranian opposition group)
constituted “material support” for an outfit the U.S. State Dept.
has designated a “foreign terrorist organization”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/opinion/03cole.html?_r=1

I’d now like to extend Phil Giraldi’s “Modest Proposal”
from the legal realm, to that of undercover operations:

Current FBI practice of cultivating/self-selecting homegrown
Islamic terrorists in sting/honeynet operations has been quite
successful in producing a series of ideologically-deluded
(and often mentally-deficient) young male defendants.

Indeed, when you fertilize certain weeds, they grow more prominent,
and they can then be more easily chopped down. Such programs are popular, because they justify ever-increasing budgets for bureaucratic fertilizer.

And who is to say that “Security Theater” is not a deterrent?
(Our grand Social-Engineering experiment has no scientific “Control Group”,
to allow comparisons. Did we *create* terrorist weeds from those who
might otherwise have become productive citizens? We’ll never know.)

Hence, I modestly propose the FBI target a wide range of mentally-ill
and mentally-deficient individuals, via websites, social media,
bugging psychologists’ offices, etc.

To safeguard the democratic process, we must prevent future
assassination attempts. And to do that, we must fertilize
mental deficiency and deviance — cultivating it until it
sprouts into overt acts of violence (under uniform covert
Rules of Engagement, and controlled legal conditions).

As a “non-Brown” person, I demand my Constitutional right to
Equal Protection of the law: I demand my fair share of
terrorist-inducing fertilizer!

At the core of the problem, I fear, is the Heisenberg-esque
notion that one cannot “measure” the “enemy combatant potential”
of an individual without perturbing both the System — and the
individual object — one hopes to “measure”.

So far, our Surveillance State has decided it’s ok to
irreversibly perturb the lives of targeted individuals.
But that ignores the dangerously-widening divergence
it causes between the Government System and the Constitution.

(The divergence between our fundamental moral principles
and our actual behavior is not a problem — since, as usual,
we can handle it via denial, self-deception, and moral amnesia.)
rick says:

January 12, 2011 at 8:26 pm

Georgetown law professor David Cole makes a sound argument that
former Attorney General Michael Mukasey, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, and former National Security Adviser Frances Townsend, all committed a federal crime last month in Paris — because their speech supporting the Mujahedeen Khalq (an Iranian opposition group)
constituted “material support” for an outfit the U.S. State Dept.
has designated a “foreign terrorist organization”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/opinion/03cole.html?_r=1

I’d now like to extend Phil Giraldi’s “Modest Proposal”
from the legal realm, to that of undercover operations:

Current FBI practice of cultivating/self-selecting homegrown
Islamic terrorists in sting/honeynet operations has been quite
successful in producing a series of ideologically-deranged
(and often mentally-deficient) young male defendants.

Indeed, when you fertilize certain weeds, they grow more prominent,
and they can then be more easily chopped down. Such programs are popular, because they justify ever-increasing budgets for bureaucratic fertilizer.

And who is to say that “Security Theater” is not a deterrent?
(Our grand Social-Engineering experiment has no scientific “Control Group”,
to allow comparisons. Did we *create* terrorist weeds from those who
might otherwise have become productive citizens? We’ll never know.)

Hence, I modestly propose the FBI target a wide range of mentally-ill
and mentally-deficient individuals, via websites, social media,
bugging psychologists’ offices, etc.

To safeguard the democratic process, we must prevent future
assassination attempts. And to do that, we must fertilize
mental deficiency and deviance — cultivating it until it
sprouts into overt acts of violence (under uniform covert
Rules of Engagement, and controlled legal conditions).

As a “non-Brown” person, I demand my Constitutional right to
Equal Protection of the law: I demand my fair share of
terrorist-inducing fertilizer!

At the core of the problem, I fear, is the Heisenberg-esque
notion that one cannot “measure” the “enemy combatant potential”
of an individual without perturbing both the System — and the
individual object — one hopes to “measure”.

So far, our Surveillance State has decided it’s ok to
irreversibly perturb the lives of targeted individuals.
But that ignores the dangerously-widening divergence
it causes between the Government System and the Constitution.

(The divergence between our fundamental moral principles
and our actual behavior is not a problem — since, as usual,
we can handle it via denial, self-deception, and moral amnesia.)