"How many people die from falling off ladders?" -- Stephen Colbert
"Thousands every year." -- Steven Pinker (official)
"Should we be invading Ladderstan?" -- Stephen Colbert TSA Expansion Program - The Colbert Report - Video Clip | Comedy Central
Terrorism
Congress should
• repeal the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penally Act of 1996,
• resist efforts to expand wiretapping,
• remove all export controls on encryption, and
• enact appropriations bills forbidding any executive branch
official from spending money to promote the Clipper Chip.
From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Palmer Raids of 1919 to the McCarthy era to the present, proponents of restrictions on civil liberties have made exaggerated claims about various threats posed by American political dissidents and the necessity of a federal' 'crackdown." Indeed, proponents of a crackdown have often claimed that anyone who is skeptical of their exaggerated assertions must be sympathetic to the enemies of America.
Any violent crime is terrible, but terrorism is extremely rare in the United States. The risk that any given American will be killed by a terrorist is about the same as the chance that a randomly selected high school football player will one day be a starting quarterback in the Super Bowl. One's chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is many times less than one's chance of drowning in a bathtub or being killed by a fall from scaffolding or a ladder. We would not adopt the "if it saves one life" theory to justify a ban on bathtubs, even though hundreds of lives would be saved each year. Accordingly, America should reject terrorism legisla- tion that will probably not save any lives and that demands that Americans give up things far more important than bathtubs.
Terrorists cannot destroy a free society, but they can scare a free society into destroying itself. In 1974 Irish Republican Army terrorists bombed pubs in Birmingham, England, killing 21 people.
Jenkins introduced the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill. Approved without objection in Parliament, the bill was supposed to expire in one year, but it has been renewed every year.
Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and subsequent British terrorism legislation, the police may stop and search without warrant any person suspected of terrorism. They may arrest any person they "reasonably suspect" "supports an illegal organization." An arrested person may be detained without court approval for up to a week. It is illegal even to organize a private or public meeting addressed by a member of a proscribed organization, or to wear clothes indicating support of such an organization.
In Britain wiretapping does not need judicial approval. If committed pursuant to an order from a secretary of state, acts such as theft, damage to property, arson, procuring information for blackmail, and leaving planted evidence are not crimes.
A suspect's decision to remain silent during interrogation may now be used against him in court. Although terrorism in Northern Ireland was the stated reason for the change, the change also applies in England and Wales. No one who has seen what is happening in Great Britain can feel confident that repressive measures introduced solely to counter terrorism will not eventually creep into the ordinary criminal justice system.
The Birmingham bombings that led to the Prevention of Terrorism Act resulted in the conviction of a group of defendants called the Birmingham Six, whose confessions were extracted under torture and who were con- victed on what was later admitted to be the perjured testimony of a government forensic scientist. Eventually, they were freed, although if Britain had a death penalty, they would have been executed.
To state the obvious, all the repressive legislation has hardly immunized Britain from terrorism. To the contrary, British citizens are as vulnerable to an IRA car bomb as they were in 1974, and they are at much greater risk of being terrorized by the state itself. For centuries, "the rights of Englishmen" were proudly held up in contrast to the absolutism of the Continent. Far from being an exemplar to the world, the modern "anti- terrorist' ' United Kingdom has been found guilty of human rights violations under the European Convention on Human Rights more often than any other member of the Council of European States. As Britain's recent history illustrates, no matter how great a country's tradition of freedom, freedom can be lost in less than a generation if public officials, and the public, allow terrorism to destroy their traditional way of life.
To study the terrorism agenda being pushed in the United States these days is to study a series of assaults on the Bill of Rights.
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.o.../cato-handbook-policymakers/1997/9/105-21.pdf
"Thousands every year." -- Steven Pinker (official)
"Should we be invading Ladderstan?" -- Stephen Colbert TSA Expansion Program - The Colbert Report - Video Clip | Comedy Central
Terrorism
Congress should
• repeal the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penally Act of 1996,
• resist efforts to expand wiretapping,
• remove all export controls on encryption, and
• enact appropriations bills forbidding any executive branch
official from spending money to promote the Clipper Chip.
From the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to the Palmer Raids of 1919 to the McCarthy era to the present, proponents of restrictions on civil liberties have made exaggerated claims about various threats posed by American political dissidents and the necessity of a federal' 'crackdown." Indeed, proponents of a crackdown have often claimed that anyone who is skeptical of their exaggerated assertions must be sympathetic to the enemies of America.
Any violent crime is terrible, but terrorism is extremely rare in the United States. The risk that any given American will be killed by a terrorist is about the same as the chance that a randomly selected high school football player will one day be a starting quarterback in the Super Bowl. One's chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is many times less than one's chance of drowning in a bathtub or being killed by a fall from scaffolding or a ladder. We would not adopt the "if it saves one life" theory to justify a ban on bathtubs, even though hundreds of lives would be saved each year. Accordingly, America should reject terrorism legisla- tion that will probably not save any lives and that demands that Americans give up things far more important than bathtubs.
Terrorists cannot destroy a free society, but they can scare a free society into destroying itself. In 1974 Irish Republican Army terrorists bombed pubs in Birmingham, England, killing 21 people.
Jenkins introduced the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Bill. Approved without objection in Parliament, the bill was supposed to expire in one year, but it has been renewed every year.
Under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and subsequent British terrorism legislation, the police may stop and search without warrant any person suspected of terrorism. They may arrest any person they "reasonably suspect" "supports an illegal organization." An arrested person may be detained without court approval for up to a week. It is illegal even to organize a private or public meeting addressed by a member of a proscribed organization, or to wear clothes indicating support of such an organization.
In Britain wiretapping does not need judicial approval. If committed pursuant to an order from a secretary of state, acts such as theft, damage to property, arson, procuring information for blackmail, and leaving planted evidence are not crimes.
A suspect's decision to remain silent during interrogation may now be used against him in court. Although terrorism in Northern Ireland was the stated reason for the change, the change also applies in England and Wales. No one who has seen what is happening in Great Britain can feel confident that repressive measures introduced solely to counter terrorism will not eventually creep into the ordinary criminal justice system.
The Birmingham bombings that led to the Prevention of Terrorism Act resulted in the conviction of a group of defendants called the Birmingham Six, whose confessions were extracted under torture and who were con- victed on what was later admitted to be the perjured testimony of a government forensic scientist. Eventually, they were freed, although if Britain had a death penalty, they would have been executed.
To state the obvious, all the repressive legislation has hardly immunized Britain from terrorism. To the contrary, British citizens are as vulnerable to an IRA car bomb as they were in 1974, and they are at much greater risk of being terrorized by the state itself. For centuries, "the rights of Englishmen" were proudly held up in contrast to the absolutism of the Continent. Far from being an exemplar to the world, the modern "anti- terrorist' ' United Kingdom has been found guilty of human rights violations under the European Convention on Human Rights more often than any other member of the Council of European States. As Britain's recent history illustrates, no matter how great a country's tradition of freedom, freedom can be lost in less than a generation if public officials, and the public, allow terrorism to destroy their traditional way of life.
To study the terrorism agenda being pushed in the United States these days is to study a series of assaults on the Bill of Rights.
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.o.../cato-handbook-policymakers/1997/9/105-21.pdf
