Patriot Act

...

the Patriot Act, come on.

This is good stuff.

Yeah, doggy.

Which I

think is really interesting because we passed a whole lot of laws, Patriot Act, Pfizer.

You look at what happened with the NSA and the Snowden revelations in data protection, the sort of problems that's caused between America and Europe afterwards.

You know, I think it's fair to say that Europe puts kind of liberty over security in a way, whereas America seems to put security over liberty.

And

America locked everything down.

We passed the USA Patriot Act, which is one of the most horrendous pieces of law I think I've ever seen.

Not saying it wasn't warranted right after, but it never went away.

I mean, it's incredible what they got away with.

That Patriot Act was written well before 9-11 ever happened.

Well

before, yeah.

deal

the reason why i said 99 is something i wanted to bring up tonight is because it seemed like things started changing after 9 11 You could say something that's actually provable is the Patriot Act.

It seems like they weaponized the Patriot Act to take away some of our freedoms.

Or, you know, they did it in the theme of homeland security or, you know, for our public safety.

But really, it was, you know, and things have been the same.

So, you know, we all spent the 25th anniversary together at the Ahern Hotel in memoriam of the 9-11 events.

And unfortunately, you know, the Patriot Act and what was enacted after the 9-11 really led to a lot of the politicians ability to to reign in these elections for themselves, rig them for themselves and consistently get the outcomes that they want.

And I think, you know, and I know you agree with this, and I'm sure your audience agrees with it, but I think what Trump's here to do is bring back free and fair elections.

Yeah, of course

Um, and, and when you look at the best available methods for calculating numbers, it's really hard to get a sense of scale, and that was one of the things that I tried to do with my research, um, was kind of how do you put a sense of what scale we're talking about here when we're thinking about indirect deaths in the post-9/11 wars? And I found that it was about 4.5 million people died as a reasonable and conservative estimate of total direct and indirect deaths in the war zone, so it's a really astronomical number.

Stephanie, I just wanted to talk a bit more about, uh, the other costs, consequential costs of the wars that emanated from 9/11 a- and that includes the erosion of civil liberties with the Patriot Act legislation, mass surveillance, aggressive US foreign policy, and the lack of accountability for US government officials who ordered the torture of US-held prisoners in violation of, uh, US and international law that took place at Guantanamo.

That's right.

You named a lot of, uh, a lot of what we see as the social and political costs of the post-9/11 wars.

And a year later, President W was telling us he was going after the state sponsors of terror.

And while we quibbled, and I even had problems at the moment of its passage on the Patriot Act, and the guardrails that it lifts from the government, see flock cameras and artificial intelligence and the other things that have grabbed our attention, much of it would be permitted as under the Patriot Act.

see parents getting in trouble for telling a school board member they're going to start a recall petition.

I've been threatened.

Democrats and Republicans said, let's fund this.

Democrats and Republicans said, yay, Patriot Act.

Let's have the government surveil us.

The NYPD, if you recall, did warrantless surveillance on Muslim communities.

But the point is, as far as I'm concerned, I don't think that's what the founders envisioned when they were talking about Fourth Amendment protections, that there would be checkpoints 50 miles from the border.

You know what I, this really reminds me of right now, the time period is when Bush was in office after 9/11 and they started pushing the Patriot Act, and I was like up in arms, concerned, worried, telling people.

And everyone's like, "Oh, this is, you're not a terrorist.

You have nothing to worry about." Well, and then it was just a few years later when Obama was in office, when mothers protesting at s- at schools end up on the terrorist watch list.