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| February 7, 2013 Tomgram: Todd Miller, Locking Down the Borders
In the always-good-news category, a Monday front-page New York Times piece by David Sanger and Thom Shanker, filled with obvious administration leaks, lays out another step in the White House’smarch out of American legality. As it has codified its drone assassination strikes, so it has been codifying and “legalizing” another new right of the Executive Branch -- the right to launch preemptive cyberattacks “if the United States detects credible evidence of a major digital attack looming from abroad... even if there is no declared war.” Of course, the White House has already launched such a set of attacks -- against Iran’s nuclear program -- without even the excuse of a threatened “major digital attack.” In other words, in total secrecy it initiated the planet’s first state-run cyberwar without notice to or consultation with anyone. And keep in mind that someday, given the potential devastation cyber attacks could wreak on our highly electronic way of life, cyberweapons will surely be reclassified as weapons of mass destruction.
In the meantime, with the Pentagon quickly expanding its new Cyber Command, the White House has taken another major form of potential aggression and given itself the right to use it without the say-so of anyone else. It is essentially codifying and declaring legal a cyber version of George W. Bush’s post-9/11 doctrine ofpreemptive war and, for all we know, heading for Dick Cheney’s infamous one percent doctrine. (Even a one percent chance of an attack on the United States, went Cheney's thinking, especially involving weapons of mass destruction, must be dealt with as if it were a certainty.) And yet here’s the strange thing: even when such news hits the front page of the newspaper of record, it somehow doesn’t make much of an impression on us. As various forms of perpetual war are made “legal” by the White House, remarkably few find this worth the bother to discuss or debate, no less protest. Nonetheless, this week TomDispatch remains focused on the issue of legality (or rather illegality) and our National Security Complex, as well as on the lockdown of this country, since the two are so intertwined. On Sunday, Noam Chomsky explored why “the United States has the right to use violence at will,” and why, when it does, it’s “legal.” On Tuesday, I chimed in with a piece on how, for the National Security Complex and the White House, the rule of law has become a thing of the past, and how, in the service of their fantasies and fears, this country has been locked down. Today, Todd Miller, who has previously written for this site on themilitarization of the Mexican border, focuses on a part of that American lockdown which I’ve seldom seen discussed anywhere: the way our northern border, once possibly the most open on the planet, is being transformed into a “Constitution-free zone.” It’s a story that, like many TomDispatch tries to pursue, is not normally a focus of our world, but should be. Tom Living in a Constitution-Free Zone |
