Note to Bush, et al: shut up about “tools needed to fight terrorism”

The bombshells are starting to drop in terms of the “domestic surveillance” debacle, it seems. First up we have Verizon admitting that they’ve turned over thousands upon thousands of phone records without either a court order or a warrant. Now as a Verizon customer, this worries the hell outta me.

Meanwhile in the blue corner, we have the president threatening to veto a wiretap bill coming from Congress because it’s too restrictive.

One of the points of contention we find between the President and Congress is that he wants retroactive immunity to be given to the telecommunication companies to protect them from any lawsuits concerning their previous involvement with this activity. That it is implicitly admitting guilt to request retroactive immunity for anything seems to be lost on the administration.

Anyway, the point is that their argument stems from the premise that they “need” these powers in order to protect us from terrorism. To them I say: shut your damn mouths.

Listen, no one supports terrorism. It would be idiotic to suggest that anyone doesn’t want to stop terrorists from flying over here and killing us. It’s not like I forget looking out the window on September 11th, 2001, wondering if those three were just the beginning of some grand-scale Armageddon. I live near Shanksville, so it felt like they were banging on my door. I don’t even want to know the horror felt by those who lived in New York City.

Unfortunately, what no one wants to admit, is that there is no damn terrorism. Period. I’ve written about this before, which is probably one of a few pieces of essential reading I should link to on the sidebar. The point is that your danger of dying in a terrorist attack is nearly zero. Mine is the same. For all of us in the United States, the danger of dying at the hands of foreign jihadists is lower than the danger of being hit by lightning.

If you doubt that, think about where you’ve been over the past few months. Hell, expand it to where you’ve been since 9/11/01. Think about every restaurant you’ve eaten in, every time you took public transportation, every movie you’ve seen, and every time you’ve gone to church/temple/mosque/whatever. How many of those times were you sitting there, wondering if someone was going to run in wearing a bomb vest and blow up the building?

My point exactly.

We aren’t living in Israel or India, people. We don’t get on a bus and look at all the passengers to make sure none of them are wearing an overly bulky coat in July. We don’t sit down to eat at a restaurant and look around for anyone who’s got an incredibly expensive meal but doesn’t seem likely to have much in his bank account.

Oh sure, people look over their shoulders for Arabs at the airport, but that’s about it. When was the last time you checked to see what the terror alert level was?

Don’t give me that “it’s because of the war” bullshit either. Bush supporters keep flogging the pseudo-statistic that since there have been no terrorist attacks since 2001 it vindicates the war. First off, that doesn’t vindicate Iraq, at best it justifies our going into Afghanistan which almost no one argued with anyway. Secondly, since we’re obviously only considering attacks on American soil (there sure as hell have been terrorist attacks abroad since then), the rah-rah-war crowd is totally forgetting something.

There weren’t any terrorist attacks on American soil between the 1993 WTC bombing and 9/11.

The point is that we in the United States live pretty terror-free lives. Admit it, outside of the pointless paranoia you feel at the airport when a brown guy with a beard walks past, your day is not derailed at all by concerns of your own death at the hands of Al Qaeda. You don’t check your local paper to see if anyone you know got killed in a suicide bombing. You don’t guide your child to school yourself because you’re afraid the bus may get blown up.

All this chatter about the tools needed to fight terror is just that. Chatter. When you watch the debate on TV or read about it, you aren’t screaming at the screen or page to hurry up and pass the bill before they strike again. There’s no one mourning loved ones who died in a suicide bombing while Congress was arguing with the president over wiretapping.

This is a battle over a threat that doesn’t exist. Yes, there are terrorists in the world and quite a few of them probably want to attack us. Fortunately, it’s incredibly difficult for them to do so and despite the aberration of 9/11, the danger is no greater in 2007 than it was in 1997, if you don’t count the greater vulnerability the Iraq invasion has caused.

The next time anyone tells you that wiretapping or some other measure is needed to fight terrorists, ask them why we haven’t been attacked despite not having these tools before. The only dodge to that is for Bush to admit that he’s been illegally using them. Granted, he’s doing just that by requesting retroactive immunity, so maybe there’s something to his argument after all.