I have not had time yet, but if you want to listen to Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean, the 9/11 Commission Chairmen, address a Homeland Security meeting then click on the above link.
During testimony, they pointed out that the Obama Administration has allowed a Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board recommended by the commission to become “dormant” since no one has been appointed to fill its five seats..
Like I said, I have not heard it yet, but there it is if you want to.
I found this the other day browsing around but unfortunately I cannot open or download the file. I am hoping someone out there has an account with this group Palgrave Connect. All the chapter contents seem to be very interesting. I somehow get the feeling the issue will say basically that the means will justify the end. See comments below.
The Impact of 9-11: The New Legal Landscape is the third volume of the six-volume series The Day that Changed Everything? edited by Matthew J. Morgan. The series brings together from a broad spectrum of disciplines the leading thinkers of our time to reflect on one of the most significant events of our time. With a foreword by the former Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Senator Bob Graham, the volume’s contributors include Alan Dershowitz, Aziz Huq, William Weaver, and other leading scholars.
List of Contents:
Acknowledgments * About the Contributors * Foreword – Bob Graham * Introduction – Matthew J. Morgan * The Preventative State: Uncharted Waters after 9/11 – Alan M. Dershowitz * Section I: The Impact on American Civil Liberties * The Logic of Suspending Civil Liberties – Dewi Williams * The Use of “Speech Zones” to Control Public Discourse in 21st Century America - Paul Haridakis and Amber Ferris * Challenges to Academic Freedom since 9/11 - Peter N. Kirstein * The Right to Bear Arms and Gun Control after 9/11 - David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen * National Security Letters and Diminishing Privacy Rights – Christopher P. Banks *
Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the primary U.S counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations.
The proposed protections were cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Dashing the hopes of liberals, the Senate Wednesday night instead passed — by voice vote without debate — a one-year extension of key parts of the USA Patriot Act that would have expired on Sunday.
Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government’s authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.
More than 300 individuals and groups have sued the government to get records in the year since President Obama pledged that his administration would be the most open in history.
In case after case, the plaintiffs say little has changed since the Bush administration years, when most began their quests for records. Agencies still often fight requests for disclosure, contending that national security and internal decision-making need to be protected.
The lawsuits cover a wide range of issues. A retired Marine wants to review soldier autopsies to learn whether the Pentagon has issued defective body armor. A Texas law professor questions whether the location of the U.S.-Mexico border fence unfairly harmed minority landowners. Closer to home, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation continues its battle to learn whether agencies are properly punishing those who destroy wetlands.
Radio talk show host Alex Jones is calling for petitions, boycotts and lawsuits en mass in an effort to block the nationwide implementation of full body scanners that represent a total violation of privacy, a health risk, and the next wave of tyranny being metered out against the American people and the people of the world under the phony pretext of fighting terrorism.
“Our long journey into domestication and dependency on the scientific dictatorship is accelerating, our entire society is being turned into a massive surveillance grid, it has been designed to persecute the people,” Jones warned on his show yesterday, adding that the scanners were the latest manifestation of the prison planet being constructed around humanity.
Allied with the contrived global warming movement, terrorism is the other prong of the pincer being used to crush freedom and advance totalitarianism in the developed world as Homeland Security follows the plan it was created to carry out – the gradual implementation of martial law in America characterized by the kind of stifling security we now see in airports being introduced into our daily lives in shopping malls, public schools, and many other buildings.
Forget that the government’s spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here).
Forget that the draconian Patriot Act was written before 9/11.
Forget that the Bush administration used its heightened powers granted under the state of emergency declared in 2001 (and continuing to the present day) to harass those who disagreed with its policies. See this, this and this.
Posted by Brian 
