Hiding something

May 7, 2004

When someone brings up the scary bits of the Patriot Act or TIA, how often have you heard “if you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?” That kind of wide-eyed innocence would be almost touching if it weren’t so bone-head stupid.

Again, I think we can look at Police State Iraq to see what Police State America would be like.

“A unit goes out on a raid and they have a target and the target is not available; they just grab anybody because that was their job,” Mr Nelson said, referring to counter-insurgency operations in Iraq. “The troops are under a lot of stress and they don’t know one guy from the next. They’re not cultural experts. All they want is to count down the days and hopefully go home.
“I’ve read reports from capturing units where the capturing unit wrote, ‘the target was not at home. The neighbour came out to see what was going on and we grabbed him’,” he said. [ Cooks and drivers were working as interrogators ]

Oh, but of course the issue was rectified when the interrogators got ahold of the prisoners and realized what happened, right?

Interrogators “weren’t interested in going through the less glamorous work of sifting through the chaff to get to the kernels of truth from the willing detainees; they were interested in ‘breaking’ tough targets”, he said.

See, the problem with having near absolute authority over a populace that has practically no authority is that you have no real need to make sure you get it right. Because hey, what can they do to you?

Posted in Terrorism, War