Cowlix Wearing my mind on my sleeve

Wednesday, February 20, 2002 Permanent link to this day
COINTELPRO Junior

Fighting Terror With Databases: on the expansion of domestic intelligence-gathering as part of the War on Terror.

In fact, the now-completed interviews and upcoming interrogations of Middle Eastern immigrants who have ignored deportation orders are only the most visible pieces of a broad effort to expand the war on terrorism through domestic intelligence-gathering. The effort will marry 21st-century technology with tactics not seen since the 1950s and '60s, according to federal documents and interviews with informed sources.

The intelligence-gathering system being born will ultimately combine more than $100 million in new funding, powerful new terrorism laws, an expanded role for local police and state-of-the-art computer networks that will link federal agents with thousands of police departments. Local authorities may soon be empowered to obtain virtually all of the FBI's most sensitive information under laws being considered in Congress.

The new role for local police is one of the most significant aspects of the new system. On the FBI's behalf, local police conducted many of the voluntary interviews, returning local law enforcement for the first time in 25 years to the sensitive job of gathering intelligence on political and religious groups suspected of violence.

Back from the brink

Shades of Gray: a series on the recovery of the Eastern North Pacific gray whale. [via Breaching the Web]

Security isn't always just an annoyance

The police, the terrorists and my Mazda: on learning to tolerate extreme security.

Is it really anti-globalization?

Going Global -- The Anti-Globalization Movement Changes Its Tune: more on the maturing of the anti-globalization movement.

Anti-globalists, stung by charges that they are too simplistic, idealistic or just plain behind the times, are beginning to develop an alternative global vision, asking what they stand for, not just what they're against.

The anti-globalization movement isn't really the anti-globalization movement any more. Some of its leading activists are beginning to describe their cause in terms that don't imply dismantling the whole network of linkages that now encircle the world in order to somehow return society to a local or regional scale. And some academics are now attempting to stake out a position on the left that promotes a different model of globalization.

Art returns to Afghanistan

Afghanistan looks at itself: a photo essay on the return of theatre, television, and photography to Afghanistan. Note: the slideshow goes full screen, but provides a close button.

In the wake of the Taliban's departure, Afghanistan has begun once more to look at itself, through lenses of its antiquated TV cameras, through tentative stabs at restarting and rebuilding theatre, through cinema and through photographers wielding homemade portrait cameras on the streets of Kabul.

Dehumanizing

What hurts most is that it doesn't hurt anymore: one Israeli's response to the aftermath of a recent bombing in in Jerusalem.

What's happening to me? I didn't think that I would react like this when encountering just such a situation. I didn't cry, I wasn't shocked, I didn't vomit. Am I a human being? Apparently not so much.

They've managed to peel off our humanity. I've seen all these sights already televised at earlier attacks, I've heard all the sounds and voices on the radio reports, I've read these situation descriptions tens of times in the morning newspapers. I was now simply at a live performance of the same events. Everything was just exactly the same.

Saad Eddin Ibrahim

On the outside: an interview with Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the director of Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies. He was arrested 10 months ago, along with 27 other members of the organization on charges related to a documentary he was making on the Egyptian election system. He was released February 11th.

During his 10 months in prison, Ibrahim (like many on the outside) had plenty of time to ponder just what it was he'd done to draw the government's wrath. At the time of his arrest, the general speculation was of a warning shot to keep the rest of civil society timid in advance of upcoming elections. But the handling of his conviction and the fierceness of the accompanying media smear campaign against him led many to conclude there was a much more personal motivation behind the scenes.

Ibrahim speculates that it was the combined effects of several of his activities and comments-including election monitoring efforts, studies of Muslim-Coptic tensions and his notorious interview with a Saudi magazine about the royal tendencies of Middle Eastern republics.

See also: Despite Fatal Clashes, Egyptian Election Praised as Fairest in Years

Clashes among police, Islamic fundamentalists and others have left as many as five people dead during parliamentary elections held over the past two weeks, but the vote is being hailed as one of the freest in recent Egyptian history and a sign that chaotic efforts to bring about democratic reforms are working.

...

"About 60 percent fair, and about 40 percent irregularity. . . . It is a vast improvement, and I give the regime a lot of credit for that," said Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a professor and democracy activist who was arrested in July in what some analysts said was a government effort to diminish independent criticism of the election.


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Copyright © 2001-2002 by Wes Cowley
wcowley@cowlix.com