The 9/11 attacks killed thousands, horrified a nation, weakened an economy, and provoked a response from the Bush administration that threatened every American's civil liberties. After 9/11, the Bush administration responded with a strategy that included two elective wars, illegal surveillance, indefinite detention without trial of both citizens and non-citizens, torture, secret prisons, and ethnic and religious profiling. (Head)
According to Stewart Nusbaumer
(2003), “The Bush Administration hawks are lumping together all kinds of
reasons and excuses under the rubric of terrorism and exploiting the horror of
9/11 for political and corporate gain – the war against terrorism has become,
in fact, a war for empire.” This is clearly unethical but some may say that the end justifies the means. We must ask ourselves if the end we got is really the one that we wanted. I have to wonder if the American public would have supported the war on terror had they been able to foresee the boomerang effect of technologies and practices designed for the war on terror coming back and being employed domestically on civilians, all while big business and the government profits from it. They originally gained support from the American public through an extensive media campaign (see Effects of the Media). "Some media outlets have readily available phony Islamic experts or officially subsidized gatekeepers of approved truth to allege that Islam teaches radicalism and the issue of "youth extremism" (Khawaja, 2006). Anyone who is familiar with Islamic teachings can tell you that this is not true. "Islam is a religion of peace and it shares all its values and belief, as do other branches of the Abrahamic monotheistic faiths such as Christianity and Judaisim (Khawaja, 2006).
On September 12th, 2001, it was easy to believe that we would suffer dozens of major attacks on U.S. soil over the next six years, and almost impossible to imagine we would suffer none. Instead of being the opening blitz of a "long, global war," 9/11 was a freak event that may never be replicated (Chapman, 2007). While this was written before the bombings in Boston, the point is still valid because the Boston bombings were not reported to have been carried out by the same terrorist organizations involved with 9/11. In essence, the media has projected the sense of a prolonged war to keep certain policies active, the main one being the Patriot Act.
The Patriot Act
The Patriot Act significantly expanded the power of U.S. law enforcement by giving them unprecedented authority to track and follow terrorists.
The Patriot Act basically extends the government's foreign intelligence surveillance powers over potential "domestic" terrorists, including American citizens. Several of its more controversial provisions include:
• Federal agents may conduct surveillance and searches against U.S. citizens without "probable cause" to suspect criminal activity. The targeted person is not notified and cannot challenge the action.
• Agents can conduct "sneak-and-peek" searches without prior notice in common domestic crime investigations. Before the Patriot Act, courts required law enforcement to "knock and announce" themselves before conducting searches.
• Government agents now have access to any person's business or personal records. These include library records, book-buying habits, medical, marital counseling or psychiatric files, business records, Internet habits, and credit reports.
(Montaldo)
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA (1978), amendment connected to the Patriot Act in 2002 wherein the usual requirements for a police search—probable cause to believe a criminal act had occurred could be suspended in certain circumstances-allowed “warrantless wiretapping” of American citizens from 2002-2007 and was amended in 2008. It also made it practically impossible to sue the government for doing this. "You can't sue unless you can prove you've been wiretapped, but you can't prove it because the wiretappers won't tell you. The government abuses its power secretly in the name of national security, and the secrecy protects it from having to end the abuse." (Chapman, 2007)