[lbo-talk] Your Info Is On File ( Was Re: Hill refines her posish on war)

Yoshie Furuhashi critical.montages at gmail.com
Sat Mar 17 15:36:17 PDT 2007


On 3/17/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Actually among the scariest aspects of all this is
> that these sweeps are likely to be highly inaccurate,
> both as to content and storage, since they are done
> undiscriminatingly by machines, and as to hypotheical
> future use if someone is "targeted." The prospects are
> gruesomely indicated in Terry Guillam's Brazil, where,
> in a Total Information Awareness society, thye chain
> of events is set in motion when a glitch in processing
> leads to the security forces' apprehension, torture,
> and execution of a random victim. I have little faith
> in the successful operation of ditigal technology even
> when closely supervised, so in many ways I think the
> threat is less a matter of the authority's ability to
> quickly locate, collate, and deploy this data that is
> somewhere in their hard drives against a person chosen
> to be a target -- hell, if it comes to a Brazil or
> 1984 state, why think they will bother with nicety's
> like "building a case" against you? -- than in the
> terror of random arrests and disappearances which such
> technology could faciliate.

Torture* and probably also execution of innocents are already happening. But they aren't and won't be random. The system is program to single out Arabs, Muslims, immigrants, lawyers who defend terrorism suspects, and so forth. If you do not fit into any of the suspect categories, you are unlikely to live in terror or rebel against it.

* <http://www.maherarar.ca/> Maher Arar is a 34-year-old wireless technology consultant. He was born in Syria and came to Canada with his family at the age of 17. He became a Canadian citizen in 1991. On Sept. 26, 2002, while in transit in New York's JFK airport when returning home from a vacation, Arar was detained by US officials and interrogated about alleged links to al-Qaeda. Twelve days later, he was chained, shackled and flown to Syria, where he was held in a tiny "grave-like" cell for ten months and ten days before he was moved to a better cell in a different prison. In Syria, he was beaten, tortured and forced to make a false confession.

During his imprisonment, Arar's wife, Monia Mazigh, campaigned relentlessly on his behalf until he was returned to Canada in October 2003. On Jan. 28, 2004, under pressure from Canadian human rights organizations and a growing number of citizens, the Government of Canada announced a Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar.

On September 18, 2006, the Commissioner of the Inquiry, Justice Dennis O'Connor, cleared Arar of all terrorism allegations, stating he was "able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada." To read the Commissioner's report, including his findings on the actions of Canadian officials, please visit the Arar Commission's website or click here. -- Yoshie



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