BackHas Osama won after all?
9/11 has changed the way US views its own citizens, feeling the need to spy and take note of all that is happening
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The US marks its 237th Independence Day on 4 July. It is apparent that the American way of life, which at its heart stands for a society free from government intrusion and overzealous prosecution, has taken a beating since 9/11. Aaron Swartz, Edward Snowden and the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are three issues that highlight this.
In the name of protecting its citizens from the possibility of another 9/11 attack, the US has started looking more and more like China. Pointing fingers at China for surveillance, intrusion and intelligence theft had recently gained a righteous and mighty tenor when Edward Snowden’s timely revelations of the extent of US spying on its citizens and the world at large has placed the US in an embarrassing light.
The “everyone is doing it" explanation provided by President Barack Obama is, well, perfectly true. India is the latest to unveil and enforce a see all, know all surveillance program known as the Central Monitoring System (CMS). If you got an intelligence agency, well that is what they do, naturally. So everyone is doing it. Except, nobody expected the US to do it to its own citizens on such a grand scale if all that Snowden has revealed is true.
Making matters worse, actively lobbying nations against granting Snowden asylum is a clear violation of Snowden’s human rights. But this is a brave new America battling it out for the safety of its people.
Earlier this year, many felt that 26-year-old Aaron Swartz’s suicide was a direct result of an overzealous State wanting to make an example of any would be hacker/leaker type on the lines of Julian Assange. Swartz hacked into and downloaded a few million articles from JSTOR, a subscription database. He did not distribute or make any of these articles public. The alleged victim JSTOR (the US-based online system for archiving academic journals) did not want to pursue charges against Swartz. Prosecutors went overboard by all standards by charging Swartz to the fullest possible extent and by refusing to offer him a reasonable plea that matched his actions. Instead they demanded a penalty of 35 years in prison and a million dollar fine. It appears that the State fears Americans like Swartz in this new world of information infiltration.
Post 9/11, Guantanamo looms large as an example of American hypocrisy. Detaining inmates ad infinitum without charging them is a gross violation of human rights, something the US has accused the Chinese of doing frequently in the past. As many as 166 humans are still locked up in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. One hundred and six of them are on a hunger strike protesting their indefinite detention but are being force fed in a manner that appears to fit the definition of torture. Moreover, as the Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan, approaches next week, these detainees have filed a suit arguing that they will be denied the right to practice their religion if they are force fed to keep them alive.
In the light of this, it is a bit odd to see President Obama at Nelson Mandela’s old prison cell.
9/11 has changed the way America views its own citizens, feeling the need to spy and take note of all that is happening within its borders. So who will take its place as defender of the free world now? Is there another promised land? Ecuador? Should France be making a new Statue of Liberty for the next in line?
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