Land Of The No Longer Free

As terrorists struck New York on September 11th, the United States vowed to fight back and protect their country, their people and their freedom. But 10 years on, it seems that freedom is just an illusion, and the US is becoming an Orwellian state.

When George W Bush spoke about the necessity of “protecting the homeland of our country”, he probably thought that the homeland was literally just that – a land that one calls home. And while most people focused on the fact that the then US president had once again made a grammatical blunder, many saw a hidden danger in his statement – not only because of the Big Brother-type security changes ahead, but also because of the very nature of the word “homeland”.

Bush decided that there are weapons more appropriate than freedom.

Because freedom – that greatly advertised American concept – was effectively taken away from the people, with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Under the new Patriot Act, The Federal Bureau of Investigation began probing almost every second of every life in the country and when people wanted to leave the country, the Transport Security Administration probed them. The Big German-sounding Brother was fully established, the people living in the ‘land of the free’ under surveillance at all times.

The Patriot Act is probably one of the most controversial pieces of legislature in American history. An acronym that, for all the old and new security bureaus, Provides Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism. But the tools included in the bill weren’t – and still aren’t –considered appropriate by many. Wiretaps and electronic surveillance were legalized. Arrests were made on a daily basis. When the number of those detained reached 1200, officials stopped counting. Personal records no longer remained personal – and that was only the domestic beginning.

What followed – and still continues today – may be labeled by politicians as a ‘war on terror’ or ‘defense of their people’, but really it is just shy of a full-scale military offensive on multiple countries.

While the Department of Homeland Security watched over the land of the no-longer-free, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with the Department of Defense, took the war on terror overseas. The result? Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and multiple ‘black sites’ across Europe, where prisoners and suspected terrorists were tortured, abused and killed. Since 9/11, more than 600 men have been brought to Guantanamo Bay prison alone – and only one has so far been charged.

Many will argue that this is in fact proof of the Patriot Act’s success. But there is a logical issue. The act’s objective is to prevent attacks on America by bringing terrorists under state control – not to investigate or prosecute past cases. Therefore, any evaluation of the Patriot Act requires the disproving of a negative. If there have been no further Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, it may mean that the act has done its job. But if there are no attacks, how does one prove they were “prevented” by the Patriot Act?