Independence Day STILL means freedom

I’ve posted my feelings here before about the war on terrorism even though I’m not a counter-terrorism expert. I feel like I can spout off because my resume says patrolman and police detective and Secret Service special agent and I figure I know a little about law enforcement. And yeah, I figure this to be more a law enforcement issue than a military issue.

Reading about the FBI's capture in Florida of the would-be al Qaeda bombers of the Sears Tower a couple of weeks ago got me thinking about this whole controversy over civil liberty - versus - national security. Some of my neighbors are afraid that Bush and Cheney and the boys are crazy and they’re willing to do anything even put a tap on every phone in the country, to catch the bad guys. But trust me, the FBI is only maintaining surveillance on people when there’s what we call a "criminal predicate." For you non-law enforcement types, that means there’s information to establish sufficient facts to give an investigator reasonable suspicion that a particular individual is a serious threat. In other words, despite the patriot act, probable cause is still the gold standard for watching. That’s the way us law enforcement types are trained from jump street, and we can’t just blow it off. So, unless you’re doing something shady, nobody wants to know what you’re talking about.

Of course, it’s more of a challenge now. Plain old crooks start small and move up and eventually work their way into a police database. But the recruits to Islamic fanaticism, suicide bombers and such, are mostly first-timers. And the smart ones, the leaders, fly below the radar of probable cause, below the threshold for FBI curiosity. That’s why we have conspiracy laws. Because this is really organized crime we’re talking about.

Now, anybody who knows me knows I support the current national leadership. But from the beginning I’ve disagreed on one big point. We need to define the enemy. We need to stop fighting “terrorism” and declare open season on “terrorists.” We need to define the threat, and use all the stuff we already have that was designed to fight the Mafia, and to fight communists. Because we are a tolerant, freedom loving people, nobody wants to say out loud that our enemies are Islamic terrorist, but folks, that’s who’s threatening us. And if you don’t narrow it down like that, people are justified in thinking the surveillance powers are too broad. But we need to make it clear that we aren’t tapping everybody’s phones, and beyond that, that wiretaps on revolutionary Islamic fanatics is not the same as wiretaps on patriotic citizens, war protestors or civil rights workers - all mistakes that I know were made in the past.

One other thing: nobody is really LISTENING to these conversations anyway. It’s not like a couple of cops with headphones are sitting in a hotel listening to the people in the next room. Actually, we’re talking about computers applying transaction analytics to telephone traffic, looking for patterns that add up to probable terrorist activity. You don’t want to make that list? Quit calling your cousin in Syria asking him where you should send money.

When I was growing up in Berlin the Polizei never had a problem stopping a fight, because everybody believed they were crazy and would do whatever it took. I never saw it happen, but they maintained that image and it kept them from having to bust too many heads. Now, if the bad guys slow down and back off because they think Bush and Cheney and the boys are like the German polizei, well, maybe I don’t want to convince them otherwise.