Case
1NC Frontline
Surveillance doesn’t affect the majority of Muslim populations — poll data backs us up
Sidhu 7 — Dawinder S. Sidhu, Associate Professor of Law, B.A. 2000 from University of Pennsylvania,
M.A. 2003 from Johns Hopkins University, J.D. 2004 from The George Washington University, Member
of the Maryland Bar, served as a fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, received a
Distinguished Service Award, taught at the Georgetown University Law Center and University of
Baltimore School of Law, held visiting research posts at the Oxford University Faculty of Law and
Georgetown University Law Center, held fellowships at Harvard University and Stanford University
research centers, presented at various law schools, including the University of Pennsylvania Law School
and Stanford Law School, participated in programs at leading think tanks, such as the Aspen Institute
and Council on Foreign Relations, served as a legal observer of the military commissions at Guantanamo,
cited by the Solicitor General of the United States and U.S. Department of Justice, cited in briefs
submitted to the Supreme Court of the United States, 2007 (“The Chilling Effect of Government
Surveillance Programs on the Use of the Internet by Muslim-Americans,” 7 U. Md. L.J. Race, Religion,
Gender & Class, Available online at
http://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/margin7&collection=journals&page=375,
Accessed on 6/21/15)
Identity: Of the 311 respondents, all identified themselves as Muslims.83
General Internet Usage: A vast majority of respondents (80.1%) used the Internet prior to 9/11, while
the rest did not. After 9/11, the Internet usage of the respondents increased 7.7 %, with 87.8% stating
that they have used the Internet after the terrorist attacks, while only 11.9% reporting that they have
not. The trend towards greater Internet usage continued, as 90.4% of respondents note that they
"currently use" the Internet, and only 9.3% state that they do not.
Views Regarding Government Surveillance: 71.7% of respondents believe (48.9% strongly, 22.8%
somewhat) that the government is currently monitoring the activities of Muslims in the United States.
By contrast, only 4.2% (1.6% somewhat and 2.6% strongly) disbelieve that such monitoring is taking
place. Similarly, 70.7% of respondents believe (45.0% strongly, 25.7% somewhat) that the government
is currently monitoring the Internet activities of
Muslims in the United States. Only 4.8% disbelieve (2.9% somewhat, 1.9% strongly) that such
monitoring is taking place.
Alterations in Behavior--Generally: 86.8% of respondents said they have not changed at all their
general activities after 9/11 due to a concern that the government may be monitoring their activities.
Only 11.6% of respondents changed their general activities (6.1% made slight changes, 2.3% made
moderate changes, 1.6% made many changes, 1.6% made significant changes) due to this concern.
65.9% of respondents stated that they were not personally aware of any other Muslims in the United
States who changed, in any way, their general activities after 9/11, because of a concern that the
government may be monitoring their activities. 25.4% of respondents stated they were personally
aware of any other Muslims in the United States who changed, in any way, their general activities after
9/11, because of a concern that the government may be monitoring their activities.
Alterations in Behavior-Internet Usage: 89.1% of respondents said they have not changed their
Internet usage at all -the sites they visit or the amount of time they spend on the Internet-after 9/11
due to a concern that the government may be monitoring their activities. Only 8.4% of respondents
changed their Internet usage (3.9% made slight changes, 1.6% made moderate changes, 1.9% made
many changes, 1.0% made significant changes) due to this concern. Of those who stated that they have
made changes in their Internet usage, 57.6% noted that they did not visit websites after 9/11, because
of a concern that the government may be monitoring their online activities.
77.2% of respondents stated that they were not personally aware of any other Muslims in the United
States who changed, in any way, their Internet usage after 9/11, because of a concern that the
government may be monitoring their activities. 11.9% of respondents stated they were personally
aware of any other Muslims in the United States who changed, in any way, their Internet usage after
9/11, because of a concern that the government may be monitoring their activities. Of these
respondents, 45.6% stated that they are personally aware of other Muslim-Americans who have not
visited certain web sites after 9/11, because of a concern that the government may be monitoring their
online activities.
This card is probably takes out the aff
McMillen 06 [Lucas McMillen, University of St. Thomas, “Eye on Islam: Judicial Scrutiny Along the
Religious Profiling/Suspect Description Reliance Spectrum”,
[http://ir.stthomas.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1107&context=ustlj ]VIGNESH
Immediately after
the September 11th terrorist attacks, Attorney General John Ashcroft converted the Federal Bureau of
early hours," said Ashcroft in a 2002 press conference
announcing the Bureau's reorientation, "the prevention of terrorist acts became the central goal of
the law enforcement and national security mission of the FBI."l But, while Ashcroft may have properly
redirected the FBI toward confronting the primary threat to United States safety and security, his
identification of our enemy was not as particular as it could have been. In 2004, the 9/11 Commission
aimed for further clarity: [T]he enemy is not just "terrorism," some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the
strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by
Investigation into a counterterrorism agency: "That day, in those
Islamist terrorism -especially the al Qaeda network, its affiliates, and its ideology. 2 Indeed, no characteristic unites the
perpetrators of recent terrorist acts so much as their Muslim identity. Middle Eastern nationality may
be thought to provide the link, but this trait proves to be underinclusive: to name just a few examples, Richard
Reid, the "shoe bomber," is a Muslim who was born and educated in the United Kingdom,3 as were the four July 7th London Underground
bombers.4 Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person to be charged and convicted by United States courts in connection with the September 11th
terrorist attacks, is a French Muslim.5 Earnest James Ujaama, an indicted al-Qaeda associate, is a Muslim convert who was born in Denver and
raised in Seattle.6 Furthermore,
of the twenty-six terrorists currently on the FBI's Most Wanted List, three are
from the Philippines; two are from Kenya; one, Abdul Rahman Yasin, is from Indiana-all are Muslims.7 Nor
does Arab ethnicity serve as a reliably accurate terrorist-identifying characteristic: on December 5th,
2005, a white woman who was raised as a Catholic in Belgium became the first European Muslim
suicide bomber when she detonated herself in Baquba.8 Indeed, the use of stereotype-defying terrorist
operatives is entirely consistent with al-Qaeda's expressed intent to employ deceptive tactics in
carrying out its attacks.9 Of course, the one characteristic that Islamist radicals cannot obscure by
selective conscription is Islamic identity. Accordingly, Muslim identity should be considered the
attribute that correlates most positively with terrorist involvement; or, in the words of Abdel Rahman aI-Rashed, the
general manager of Al-Arabiya, a top pan-Arab television station in the Middle East,10 "It is a certain fact that not all Muslims
are terrorists. but it is equally certain, and exceptionally painful, that almost all terrorists are
Muslims."11 Our question then becomes, what is the proper role for Muslim identity in our lawenforcement offIcials' preventive counterterrorism efforts? It is a question that calls for a survey of
our Constitution as well as our conscience, as the answer may compel us to contemplate taking
permissible but regrettable measures against a particular religious group. In 1785, James Madison
wrote: "[A just government] will be best supported by protecting every citizen in the enjoyment of his
Religion with the same equal hand which protects his person and his property."12 But what shall be
done when those two ideals are incompatible, when protecting persons and their property requires
the government to take action that may infringe on others' religious enjoyment? We are faced with
bad (ostracizing Muslims) and worse (suffering another terrorist attack) choices, a predicament
expressed in the dour words of the reliably relevant Winston Churchill, who, speaking in a different
context, said, "We seem to be very near the bleak choice between War and Shame. My feeling is that
we shall choose Shame, and then have War thrown in a little later on even more adverse terms than at
present." 13 To assist legal and law enforcement authorities in avoiding both Shame and War, this
Article will aim to provide a legal framework allowing law enforcement officials greater flexibility in
targeting religious groups. In doing so, it will focus exclusively on religious-group targeting and will not
address the related issues of racial and ethnic profiling, which have been adequately covered by other
commentators. I will begin by discussing the difference between acts of religious profiling and acts of
suspect description reliance, and then discuss how most acts of religious-group targeting can be
plausibly characterized as either. Finally, I will recommend that courts adopt a view toward religiousgroup targeting that allows law-enforcement officials greater flexibility in countering the Islamist
terrorist threat .
Solvency is impossible—Muslims will always be unsure of whether they are being surveyed
and any policy will be circumvented
Kundani 14 [Arun Kundani, The Guardian, March 28, 2014, “No NSA Reform can fix the American Islamophobic
Surveillance Complex”, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/nsa-reform-americanislamophobic-surveillance-complex ] JMOV
Friday 28 March 2014 11.02 EDTLast modified on Friday 3 October 201409.03 EDT¶ Share on Facebook¶ Share on Twitter¶ Share via Email¶
Better oversight of the sprawling American national security
apparatus may finally be coming: President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee unveiled
plans this week to reduce bulk collection of telephone records. The debate opened up by Edward Snowden's whistleblowing is about to get even more legalistic than all the parsing of hops and stores and metadata.¶ These reforms may be
reassuring, if sketchy. But for those living in so-called "suspect communities" – Muslim Americans, left-wing campaigners, "radical"
journalists – the days of living on the receiving end of excessive spying won’t end there.¶ How come when we talk about spying
we don't talk about the lives of ordinary people being spied upon? While we have been rightly outraged at the
government's warehousing of troves of data, we have been less interested in the consequences of mass surveillance
for those most affected by it – such as Muslim Americans.¶ In writing my book on Islamophobia and the War on Terror, I
Share on LinkedIn¶ Share on Google+¶ Shares¶ 1,972¶¶
spoke to dozens of Muslims, from Michigan to Texas and Minnesota to Virginia. Some told me about becoming
aware their mosque was under surveillance only after discovering an FBI informant had joined the congregation. Others spoke about federal
agents turning up at colleges to question every student who happened to be Muslim. All
of them said they felt unsure whether
their telephone calls to relatives abroad were wiretapped or whether their emails were being read by
government officials.¶ There were the young Somali Americans in Minnesota who described how they
and their friends were questioned by FBI agents for no reason other than their ethnic background. Some
had been placed under surveillance by a local police department, which disguised its spying as a youth
mentoring program and then passed the FBI intelligence on Somali-American political opinions.¶ There were
the Muslim students at the City University of New York who discovered that fellow students they had befriended had been informants all along,
working for the New York Police Department's Intelligence Division and tasked with surveilling them. There
was no reasonable
suspicion of any crime; it was enough that the targeted students were active in the Muslim Students Association.¶ And then there was
Luqman Abdullah, a Detroit-based African-American imam, whose mosque was infiltrated by the FBI, leading to a 2009 raid in which he was
shot and killed by federal agents. The government had no evidence of any terrorist plot; the sole pretext was that Abdullah had strongly critical
views of the US government.¶ These
are the types of people whom the National Security Agency can suspect of
being two "hops" away from targets. These are the types of "bad guys" referred toby outgoing NSA director Keith Alexander. Ten
years ago, around 100,000 Arabs and Muslims in America had some sort of national security file compiled on them. Today, that number is likely
to be even higher.¶ A study published last year by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition documented the effects of this kind of mass
surveillance. In targeted communities, a culture of enforced self-censorship takes hold and relationships of trust start to break down. As one
interviewee said: "You
look at your closest friends and ask: are they informants?"¶ This is what real fear of
surveillance looks like: not knowing whom to trust, choosing your words with care when talking politics
in public, the unpredictability of state power. Snowden has rightly drawn our attention to the power of
what intelligence agencies call "signals intelligence" – the surveillance of our digital communications –
but equally important is "human intelligence", the result of informants and undercover agents operating
within communities.¶ Underpinning all the surveillance of Muslim Americans is an assumption that Islamic ideology is linked to
terrorism. Yet, over the last 20 years, far more people have been killed in acts of violence by right-wing extremists than by Muslim American
citizens or permanent residents. The huge numbers being spied upon are not would-be terrorists but law-abiding people, some of whom have
"radical" political opinions that still ought to be protected by the First Amendment to the constitution. Just the same, there are plenty of other
minority Americans who are not would-be "home-grown" terrorists – but they still live in fear that they might be mistaken as one.¶ So
let's
reform the NSA and its countless collections. But let's not forget the FBI's reported 10,000 intelligence
analysts working on counter-terrorism and the15,000 paid informants helping them do it. Let's not
forget the New York Police Department's intelligence and counter-terrorism division with its 1,000
officers, $100m budget and vast program of surveillance. Let's not forget the especially subtle
psychological terror of being Muslim in America, where, sure, maybe your phone calls won't be stored
for much longer, but there's a multitude of other ways you're always being watched.¶
Alt cause — local policies enforce racist surveillance, plan can’t reform these
AP 12 — Samantha Henry, Matt Appuzzo, Wayne Perry, reporters for the Associated Press, American
multinational nonprofit news agency, 2012 (“New Jersey Muslims Angry Over NYPD Surveillance
Findings,” The Huffington Post, May 25, Available online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/25/new-jersey-muslims-cangry-nypdsurveillance_n_1545319.html, Accessed on 6/14/15)
TRENTON, N.J. -- Muslim leaders in New Jersey say they are angry but uncertain what their next step will be after the state's
attorney general found that New York City police did not violate any laws in its surveillance of Muslim businesses, mosques and student groups
in New Jersey. Several mosque leaders who attended a meeting Thursday with Attorney General Jeffrey S. Chiesa said they
were
shocked he found no violation of state criminal or civil laws by the NYPD in operations that many
Muslims considered unjustified surveillance based solely on religion. "This is a big violation of our
civil rights , and we need to go to our communities and explain it?" Imam Mohammad Qatanani, the spiritual leader of the Islamic Center
of Passaic County said Thursday as he left the meeting. Qatanani said he would not tell his congregants to stop collaborating with law
enforcement, but added, "We
need from them to show us the same seriousness and honesty in building
bridges with the Muslim community." Chiesa had been asked by Gov. Chris Christie, who appointed him, to look into operations
in New Jersey that were part of a widespread NYPD program to collect intelligence on Muslim communities both inside New York and beyond.
Undercover officers and informants eavesdropped in Muslim cafes and monitored sermons, even
when there was no evidence of a crime. They infiltrated Muslim student groups, videotaped mosquegoers or collected their license plate numbers as they prayed. The result was that many innocent
business owners, students and others were cataloged in police files. The interstate surveillance
efforts, revealed by The Associated Press earlier this year, angered many Muslims and New Jersey officials. Some, like
Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the state's top FBI official, criticized the tactics. Others, like Christie, focused more on the fact that the NYPD
didn't tell New Jersey exactly what it was up to. In response, Chiesa launched what he described as a fact-finding review. Further, authorities
found that New Jersey has no laws barring outside law enforcement agencies from secretly conducting operations in the state, representatives
of the attorney general's office told the AP. However, New York police have agreed to meet with New Jersey law enforcement regularly to
discuss counterterrorism intelligence and operations, the attorney general said.
NSA reforms can’t solve racist targeting — too deeply ingrained to change
Kundnani 14 — Arun Kundnani, an Adjunct Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New
York University, teaches terrorism studies at John Jay College, has been a Visiting Fellow at Leiden
University, Netherlands, an Open Society Fellow, and the Editor of the journal Race and Class, author of
The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain, 2014 (“No NSA reform can fix the American
Islamophobic surveillance complex,” The Guardian, March 28, Available online at
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/28/nsa-reform-american-islamophobicsurveillance-complex, Accessed on 6/20/15)
In writing my book on Islamophobia and the War on Terror, I
spoke to dozens of Muslims, from Michigan to Texas and
Minnesota to Virginia. Some told me about becoming aware their mosque was under surveillance only after discovering an FBI
informant had joined the congregation. Others spoke about federal agents turning up at colleges to question every student who happened to
be Muslim. All
of them said they felt unsure whether their telephone calls to relatives abroad were
wiretapped or whether their emails were being read by government officials. There were the young
Somali Americans in Minnesota who described how they and their friends were questioned by FBI
agents for no reason other than their ethnic background. Some had been placed under surveillance by a local police
department, which disguised its spying as a youth mentoring program and then passed the FBI
intelligence on Somali-American political opinions. There were the Muslim students at the City University of New York who
discovered that fellow students they had befriended had been informants all along, working for the New York
Police Department's Intelligence Division and tasked
with surveilling them. There was no reasonable suspicion of
any crime; it was enough that the targeted students were active in the Muslim Students Association.
And then there was Luqman Abdullah, a Detroit-based African-American imam, whose mosque was infiltrated by the FBI,
leading to a 2009 raid in which he was shot and killed by federal agents. The government had no evidence of
any terrorist plot; the sole pretext was that Abdullah had strongly critical views of the US government.
These are the types of people whom the National Security Agency can suspect of being two "hops" away from targets. These are the
types of "bad guys" referred to by outgoing NSA director Keith Alexander. Ten years ago, around 100,000 Arabs
and Muslims in America had some sort of national security file compiled on them. Today, that number
is likely to be even higher. A study published last year by the Muslim American Civil Liberties Coalition documented the effects of this
kind of mass surveillance. In
targeted communities, a culture of enforced self-censorship takes hold and
relationships of trust start to break down.
As one interviewee said: "You
look at your closest friends and ask:
are they informants?" This is what real fear of surveillance looks like: not knowing whom to trust,
choosing your words with care when talking politics in public, the unpredictability of state power. Snowden has rightly drawn our
attention to the power of what intelligence agencies call "signals intelligence" – the surveillance of our
digital communications – but equally important is "human intelligence", the result of informants and
undercover agents operating within communities. Underpinning all the surveillance of Muslim Americans is an assumption
that Islamic ideology is linked to terrorism. Yet, over the last 20 years, far more people have been killed in acts of
violence by right-wing extremists than by Muslim American citizens or permanent residents. The huge
numbers being spied upon are not would-be terrorists but law-abiding people, some of whom have
"radical" political opinions that still ought to be protected by the First Amendment to the
constitution. Just the same, there are plenty of other minority Americans who are not would-be "homegrown" terrorists – but they still live in fear that they might be mistaken as one. So let's reform the NSA and its
countless collections. But let's not forget the FBI's reported 10,000 intelligence analysts working on counterterrorism and the 15,000 paid informants helping them do it. Let's not forget the New York Police
Department's intelligence and counter-terrorism division with its 1,000 officers, $100m budget and
vast program of surveillance. Let's not forget the especially subtle psychological terror of being
Muslim in America, where, sure, maybe your phone calls won't be stored for much longer, but there's
a multitude of other ways you're always being watched.
Aff can’t solve — Anti-Arab sentiment is entrenched in mainstream media and history
Salaita 6 — Steven George Salaita, scholar, author and public speaker, received his B.A. in political
science from Radford University in 1997, his M.A. in English from Radford in 1999, and completed his
Ph.D. at the University of Oklahoma in Native American studies with a literature emphasis, became an
assistant professor of English at University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, where he taught American and
ethnic American literature until 2006, associate professor of English at Virginia Tech, won a 2007
Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for writing the book Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where It
Comes from and What it Means for Politics Today, 2006 (“9/11, Anti-Arab Racism, and the Mythos of
National Pride,” Beyond Orientalism and Islamophobia, Fall, Available online at
https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_centennial_review/v006/6.2salaita.pdf, Accessed on 6/23/15)
My second observation that anti-Arab
racism is not confined to the political right also is worth analysis. Racism, as
writers from Elizabeth Cook-Lynn to bell hooks have illustrated, is never limited to particular social or discursive
movements, nor is it ever rooted in consistent sites of cultural or linguistic production. Any
comprehensive survey of popular opinion in the United States over the past decade (a time frame that
purposely straddles 9/11) will
demonstrate that the blatant anti-Arab racism of the political right is, using a
vocabulary appropriate to specific political agendas,
reinscribed continually in the discourse , or at least the ethos,
of mainstream and progressive media . For instance, leftist liberal publications such as Dissent, Tikkun, and
MoveOn.org have
been guilty of expressing racist attitudes either in the form of support for Palestinian dispossession or by
totalizing all Arabs and Muslims as potential terrorists; or the racism arrives subtly by precluding Arabs from speaking on their own behalf. A
similar guilt is shared by mainstream (supposedly liberal) publications such as the New York Times, Newsweek, Los
Angeles Times, and Slate.com, which, given their corporate obligations, cannot realistically be expected to
attack anti-Arab racism when it is so fundamental to the interests of American capitalism (and to the
survival of the publications). Of major concern to this essay is the recognition that, in keeping with the seminal work of Louis Althusser and
Terry Eagleton, we
cannot seriously interrogate racism by attributing it solely to one political ideology
without analyzing how the racism is interpolated through a multitude of discourses at the benefit of
various ideologies. Beyond this intercultural observation, we can say that anti-Arab racism has specific historical
dimensions that render it unique even as it has been an inheritor of countless tensions and anxieties.
Some of those dimensions—travel narratology, Orientalist scholarship, imperialism—have been discussed by others in some detail; the
dimension I invariably find most interesting is the relationship of anti-Arab racism with settler
colonization, both in the New World and Holy Land. This relationship indicates that a centuries-old
Holy Land mania in the United States not only facilitated what Cook-Lynn (2001) calls “antiIndianism,” but has allowed the antiIndianism to evolve into support for a new Messianic conquest
that positions today’s Arabs in a fascinating theological continuum. If Natives were the first victims of racism in
North America, then
Arabs, the new schematic evildoers, are merely the latest to be the first .
Security Good
Security endorsement is necessary to explore human becoming and open space for life
possibilities
Booth 2005 (Ken – visiting researcher – US Naval War College, Critical Security Studies and World Politics, p. 22)
The best starting point for conceptualizing security lies in the real conditions of insecurity suffered by people and collectivities. Look around.
What is immediately striking is that
some degree of insecurity, as a life-determining condition, is universal. To the extent
an individual or group is insecure, to the extent their life choices and changes are taken away; this is
because of the resources and energy they need to invest in seeking safety from domineering threats–
The corollary of the relationship
between insecurity and a determined life is that a degree of security creates life possibilities. Security
might therefore be conceived as synonymous with opening up space in people’s lives. This allows for
whether these are the lack of food for one’s children, or organizing to resist a foreign aggressor.
individual and collective human becoming –the capacity to have some choice about living differently–consistent with
the same but different search by others. Two interrelated conclusion follow from this. First, security can be understood as an
instrumental value; it frees its possessors to a greater or lesser extent from life-determining constraints and so allows different life possibilities
to be explored. Second,
security is not synonymous simply with survival . One can survive without being secure (the
experience of refugees in long-term camps in war-torn parts of the world, for example). Security
is therefore more than mere
animal survival (basic animal existence). It is survival-plus , the plus being the possibility to explore human
becoming. As an instrumental value, security is sought because it free people(s) to some degree to do
other than deal with threats to their human being. The achievement of a level of security–and security is
always relative –
gives to individuals and groups some time, energy, and scope to choose to be
other than merely surviving
as human biological organisms.
or become,
Security is an important dimension of the process
by which the human species can reinvent itself beyond the merely biological.
Realism
Realism and securitization are inevitable
Thayer 2004 – Thayer has been a Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard University and has taught at Dartmouth College and the University of Minnesota (Darwin and International Relations: On the
Evolutionary Origins of War and Ethnic Conflict, University of Kentucky Press, 2004, pg. 75-76)
The central issue here is what causes states to behave as offensive realists predict. Mearsheimer advances a powerful argument that anarchy is the fundamental
cause of such behavior. The
fact that there is no world government compels the leaders of states to take steps
to ensure their security, such as striving to have a powerful military, aggressing when forced to do so,
and forging and maintaining alliances. This is what neorealists call a self-help system: leaders of states arc forced
to take these steps because nothing else can guarantee their security in the anarchic world of international relations. I argue that evolutionary theory
also offers a fundamental cause for offensive realist behavior. Evolutionary theory explains why
individuals are motivated to act as offensive realism expects, whether an individual is a captain of industry or a conquistador.
My argument is that anarchy is even more important than most scholars of international relations recognize. The human environment of
evolutionary adaptation was anarchic; our ancestors lived in a state of nature in which resources were
poor and dangers from other humans and the environment were great—so great that it is truly remarkable that a
mammal standing three feet high—without claws or strong teeth, not particularly strong or swift—survived and evolved to become what we consider human.
Humans endured because natural selection gave them the right behaviors to last in those conditions. This
environment produced the
behaviors examined here: egoism, domination, and the in-group/out-group distinction. These specific
traits arc sufficient to explain why leaders will behave, in the proper circumstances, as offensive
realists expect them to behave. That is, even if they must hurt other humans or risk injury to
themselves, they will strive to maximize their power, defined as either control over others (for example, through wealth or
leadership) or control over ecological circumstances (such as meeting their own and their family's or tribes need for food, shelter, or other resources).
AT: Threatcon -> War
Construction of threats does not cause wars
Kaufman 09 (Stuart J, Prof Poli Sci and IR – U Delaware, “Narratives and Symbols in Violent Mobilization: The Palestinian-Israeli Case,” Security Studies 18:3, 400 – 434)
Even when hostile narratives, group fears, and opportunity are strongly present, war occurs only if
these factors are harnessed . Ethnic narratives and fears must combine to create significant ethnic
hostility among mass publics. Politicians must also seize the opportunity to manipulate that hostility, evoking
hostile narratives and symbols to gain or hold power by riding a wave of chauvinist mobilization. Such mobilization is often
spurred by prominent events (for example, episodes of violence) that increase feelings of hostility and make
chauvinist appeals seem timely. If the other group also mobilizes and if each side’s felt security needs
threaten the security of the other side, the result is a security dilemma spiral of rising fear, hostility, and mutual
threat that results in violence. A virtue of this symbolist theory is that symbolist logic explains why
ethnic peace is more common than ethnonationalist war. Even if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity
exist, severe violence usually can still be avoided if ethnic elites skillfully define group needs in
moderate ways and collaborate across group lines to prevent violence: this is consociationalism. 17 War is
likely only if hostile narratives, fears, and opportunity spur hostile attitudes, chauvinist mobilization, and a
security dilemma.
Terror Apoc good
Critical terror studies are garbage
Jones and Smith 9 – * University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia AND ** King's College,
University of London, London, UK (David and M.L.R.,“We're All Terrorists Now: Critical—or
Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 32, Issue 4 April 2009 ,
pages 292 – 302, Taylor and Francis)
The journal, in other words, is not intended, as one might assume, to evaluate critically those state or non-state actors that might have
recourse to terrorism as a strategy. Instead, the
journal's ambition is to deconstruct what it views as the ambiguity
of the word “terror,” its manipulation by ostensibly liberal democratic state actors, and the complicity of
“orthodox” terrorism studies in this authoritarian enterprise. Exposing the deficiencies in any field of study is, of course,
a legitimate scholarly exercise, but what the symposium introducing the new volume announces questions both the research agenda and
academic integrity of journals like Studies in Conflict and Terrorism and those who contribute to them. Do these claims, one might wonder, have
any substance?¶ Significantly, the original proposal circulated by the publisher Routledge and one of the editors, Richard
Jackson ,
suggested some uncertainty concerning the preferred title of the journal. Critical Studies on Terrorism appeared last on a list where the first
choice was Review of Terror Studies. Evidently, the concision of a review fails to capture the critical perspective the journal promotes. Criticism,
then, is central to the new journal's philosophy and the adjective connotes a distinct ideological and, as shall be seen, far from pluralist and
inclusive purpose. So, one might ask, what exactly does a critical approach to terrorism involve?¶ What it Means to be Critical¶ The editors and
contributors explore what it means to be “critical” in detail, repetition, and opacity, along with an excessive fondness for italics, in the editorial
symposium that introduces the first issue, and in a number of subsequent articles. The editors inform us that the study of terrorism is “a growth
industry,” observing with a mixture of envy and disapproval that “literally thousands of new books and articles on terrorism are published every
year” (pp. l-2). In adding to this literature the editors premise the need for yet another journal on their resistance to what currently constitutes
scholarship in the field of terrorism study and its allegedly uncritical acceptance of the Western democratic state's security perspective.¶
Indeed, to be critical requires a radical reversal of what the journal assumes to be the typical perception of terrorism and the methodology of
terrorism research. To focus on the strategies practiced by non-state actors that feature under the conventional denotation “terror” is, for the
critical theorist, misplaced. As the symposium explains,
“acts of clandestine non-state terrorism are committed by a
tiny number of individuals and result in between a few hundred and a few thousand casualties per year
over the entire world” (original italics) (p. 1). The United States's and its allies' preoccupation with terrorism is, therefore, out of
proportion to its effects.1 At the same time, the more pervasive and repressive terror practiced by the state has been “silenced from public and
… academic discourse” (p. 1).¶ The
complicity of terrorism studies with the increasingly authoritarian demands
of Western, liberal state and media practice, together with the moral and political blindness of
established terrorism analysts to this relationship forms the journal's overriding assumption and one that its
core contributors repeat ad nauseam. Thus, Michael Stohl, in his contribution “Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of
Terrorism” (pp. 5-16), not only discovers ten “myths” informing the understanding of terrorism, but also finds that these myths reflect a “state
centric security focus,” where analysts rarely consider “the violence perpetrated by the state” (p. 5). He complains that the press have become
too close to government over the matter. Somewhat contradictorily Stohl subsequently asserts that media reporting is “central to terrorism
and counter-terrorism as political action,” that media reportage provides the oxygen of terrorism, and that politicians consider journalists to be
“the terrorist's best friend” (p. 7).¶ Stohl further compounds this incoherence, claiming that “the media are far more likely to focus on the
destructive actions, rather than on … grievances or the social conditions that breed [terrorism]—to present episodic rather than thematic
stories” (p. 7). He argues that terror attacks between 1968 and 1980 were scarcely reported in the United States, and that reporters do not
delve deeply into the sources of conflict (p. 8). All of this is quite contentious, with no direct evidence produced to support such statements.
The “media” is after all a very broad term, and to assume that it is monolithic is to replace criticism with conspiracy theory. Moreover, even if it
were true that the media always serves as a government propaganda agency, then by Stohl's own logic, terrorism as a method of political
communication is clearly futile as no rational actor would engage in a campaign doomed to be endlessly misreported.¶ Nevertheless, the
notion that an inherent pro-state bias vitiates terrorism studies pervades the critical position. Anthony
Burke, in “The End of Terrorism Studies” (pp. 37-49), asserts that established analysts like Bruce Hoffman “specifically exclude states as possible
perpetrators” of terror. Consequently, the emergence of “critical terrorism studies” “may signal the end of a particular kind of traditionally
state-focused and directed 'problem-solving' terrorism studies—at least in terms of its ability to assume that its categories and commitments
are immune from challenge and correspond to a stable picture of reality” (p. 42).¶ Elsewhere, Adrian Guelke, in “Great Whites, Paedophiles and
Terrorists: The Need for Critical Thinking in a New Era of Terror” (pp. 17-25), considers British government-induced media “scare-mongering” to
have legitimated an “authoritarian approach” to the purported new era of terror (pp. 22-23). Meanwhile, Joseba Zulaika and William A.
Douglass, in “The Terrorist Subject: Terrorist Studies and the Absent Subjectivity” (pp. 27-36), find the War on Terror constitutes “the single,” all
embracing paradigm of analysis where the critical voice is “not allowed to ask: what is the reality itself?” (original italics) (pp. 28-29). The
construction of this condition, they further reveal, if somewhat abstrusely, reflects an abstract “desire” that demands terror as “an everpresent threat” (p. 31). In order to sustain this fabrication: “Terrorism experts and commentators” function as “realist policemen”; and not very
smart ones at that, who while “gazing at the evidence” are “unable to read the paradoxical logic of the desire that fuels it, whereby lack turns
toexcess” (original italics) (p. 32). Finally, Ken Booth, in “The Human Faces of Terror: Reflections in a Cracked Looking Glass” (pp. 65-79),
reiterates Richard Jackson's contention that state terrorism “is a much more serious problem than nonstate terrorism” (p. 76).¶ Yet, one searches in vain in these articles for evidence to support the
ubiquitous assertion of state bias : assuming this bias in conventional terrorism analysis as a fact
seemingly does not require a corresponding concern with evidence of this fact, merely its continual
reiteration by conceptual fiat. A critical perspective dispenses not only with terrorism studies but
also with the norms of accepted scholarship. Asserting what needs to be demonstrated commits, of course, the elementary
logical fallacy petitio principii. But critical theory apparently emancipates (to use its favorite verb) its practitioners from
the confines of logic, reason, and the usual standards of academic inquiry.¶ Alleging a constitutive weakness in
established scholarship without the necessity of providing proof to support it, therefore, appears to define the critical posture. The
unproved “state centricity” of terrorism studies serves as a platform for further unsubstantiated
accusations about the state of the discipline. Jackson and his fellow editors, along with later claims by Zulaika and
Douglass, and Booth, again assert
that “orthodox” analysts rarely bother “to interview or engage with those
involved in 'terrorist' activity” (p. 2) or spend any time “on the ground in the areas most affected by conflict” (p. 74). Given that
Booth and Jackson spend most of their time on the ground in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, not a notably terror rich environment if we discount the
operations of Meibion Glyndwr who would as a matter of principle avoid pob sais like Jackson and Booth, this seems a bit like the pot calling the
kettle black. It also overlooks the fact that Studies in Conflict and Terrorism first advertised the problem of “talking to terrorists” in 2001 and has
gone to great lengths to rectify this lacuna, if it is one, regularly publishing articles by analysts with first-hand experience of groups like the
Taliban, Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah.¶ A consequence of avoiding primary research, it is further alleged, leads conventional analysts
uncritically to apply psychological and problem-solving approaches to their object of study. This propensity, Booth maintains, occasions another
unrecognized weakness in traditional terrorism research, namely, an inability to engage with “the particular dynamics of the political world” (p.
70). Analogously, Stohl claims that “the US and English [sic] media” exhibit a tendency to psychologize terrorist acts, which reduces “structural
and political problems” into issues of individual pathology (p. 7). Preoccupied with this problem-solving, psychopathologizing methodology,
terrorism analysts have lost the capacity to reflect on both their practice and their research ethics.¶ By contrast, the critical approach is not only
self-reflective, but also and, for good measure, self-reflexive. In fact, the editors and a number of the journal's contributors use these terms
interchangeably, treating a reflection and a reflex as synonyms (p. 2). A cursory encounter with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary would reveal that
they are not. Despite this linguistically challenged misidentification, “reflexivity” is made to do a lot of work in the critical idiom. Reflexivity, the
editors inform us, requires a capacity “to challenge dominant knowledge and understandings, is sensitive to the politics of labelling … is
transparent about its own values and political standpoints, adheres to a set of responsible research ethics, and is committed to a broadly
defined notion of emancipation” (p. 2). This covers a range of not very obviously related but critically approved virtues. Let us examine what
reflexivity involves as Stohl, Guelke, Zulaika and Douglass, Burke, and Booth explore, somewhat repetitively, its implications.¶ Reflexive or
Defective? ¶ Firstly, to
challenge dominant knowledge and understanding and retain sensitivity to labels leads
inevitably to a fixation with language, discourse , the ambiguity of the noun, terror, and its political
use and abuse. Terrorism, Booth enlightens the reader unremarkably, is “a politically loaded term” (p. 72). Meanwhile, Zulaika and
Douglass consider terror “the dominant tropic [sic] space in contemporary political and journalistic discourse” (p. 30). Faced with the “serious
challenge” (Booth p. 72) and pejorative connotation that the noun conveys, critical terrorologists turn to deconstruction and bring the full force
of postmodern obscurantism to bear on its use. Thus the editors proclaim that terrorism is “one of the most powerful signifiers in
contemporary discourse.” There is, moreover, a “yawning gap between the 'terrorism' signifier and the actual acts signified” (p. 1). “[V]irtually
all of this activity,” the editors pronounce ex cathedra, “refers to the response to acts of political violence not the violence itself” (original
italics) (p. 1). Here again they offer no evidence for this curious assertion and assume, it would seem, all conventional terrorism studies address
issues of homeland security.¶ In keeping with this critical orthodoxy that he has done much to define, Anthony Burke also asserts the
“instability (and thoroughly politicized nature) of the unifying master-terms of our field: 'terror' and 'terrorism'” (p. 38). To address this he
contends that a critical stance requires us to “keep this radical instability and inherent politicization of the concept of terrorism at the forefront
of its analysis.” Indeed, “without a conscious reflexivity about the most basic definition of the object, our discourse will not be critical at all” (p.
38). More particularly, drawing on a jargon-infused amalgam of Michel Foucault's identification of a relationship between power and
knowledge, the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School's critique of democratic false consciousness, mixed with the existentialism of the Third Reich's
favorite philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Burke “questions the question.” This intellectual potpourri apparently enables the critical theorist to
“question the ontological status of a 'problem' before any attempt to map out, study or resolve it” (p. 38).¶ Interestingly, Burke, Booth, and the
symposistahood deny that there might be objective data about violence or that a properly focused strategic study of terrorism would not
include any prescriptive goodness or rightness of action. While a strategic theorist or a skeptical social scientist might claim to consider only the
complex relational situation that involves as well as the actions, the attitude of human beings to them, the critical theorist's radical questioning
of language denies this possibility.¶ The
critical approach to language and its deconstruction of an otherwise
useful, if imperfect, political vocabulary has been the source of much confusion and inconsequentiality
in the practice of the social sciences. It dates from the relativist pall that French radical post structural philosophers like Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, cast over the social and historical sciences in order to demonstrate that social and
political knowledge depended on and underpinned power relations that permeated the landscape of the social and reinforced the liberal
democratic state. This
radical assault on the possibility of either neutral fact or value ultimately functions
unfalsifiably, and as a substitute for philosophy, social science, and a real theory of language.¶ The
problem with the critical approach is that, as the Australian philosopher John Anderson demonstrated, to achieve a genuine study one must
either investigate the facts that are talked about or the fact that they are talked about in a certain way. More precisely, as J.L. Mackie explains,
“if we concentrate on the uses of language we fall between these two stools, and we are in danger of taking our discoveries about manners of
speaking as answers to questions about what is there.”2 Indeed, in
so far as an account of the use of language spills over
into ontology it is liable to be a confused mixture of what should be two distinct investigations: the
study of the facts about which the language is used, and the study of the linguistic phenomena
themselves.¶ It is precisely, however, this confused mixture of fact and discourse that critical thinking seeks
to impose on the study of terrorism and infuses the practice of critical theory more generally. From this
confused seed no coherent method grows.¶ What is To Be Done?¶ This ontological confusion notwithstanding, Ken Booth
sees critical theory not only exposing the dubious links between power and knowledge in established
terrorism studies, but also offering an ideological agenda that transforms the face of global politics.
“[C]ritical knowledge,” Booth declares, “involves understandings of the social world that attempt to stand outside prevailing structures,
processes, ideologies and orthodoxies while recognizing that all conceptualizations within the ambit of sociality derive from particular
social/historical conditions” (original italics) (p. 78). Helpfully, Booth, assuming the manner of an Old Testament prophet, provides his critical
disciples with “big-picture navigation aids” (original italics) (p. 66) to achieve this higher knowledge. Booth promulgates fifteen commandments
(as Clemenceau remarked of Woodrow Wilson's nineteen points, in a somewhat different context, “God Almighty only gave us ten”). When not
stating the staggeringly obvious, the Ken Commandments are hopelessly contradictory. Critical
theorists thus should “avoid
exceptionalizing the study of terrorism,” “recognize that states can be agents of terrorism,” and “keep
the long term in sight.” Unexceptional advice to be sure and long recognized by more traditional
students of terrorism. The critical student, if not fully conversant with critical doublethink, however,
might find the fact that she or he lives within “Powerful theories” that are “constitutive of political,
social, and economic life” (6th Commandment, p. 71), sits uneasily with Booth's concluding injunction to “stand
outside” prevailing ideologies (p. 78).¶ In his preferred imperative idiom, Booth further contends that terrorism is best studied in the
3
context of an “academic international relations” whose role “is not only to interpret the world but to change it” (pp. 67-68). Significantly,
academic—or more precisely, critical—international relations, holds no place for a realist appreciation of the status quo but approves instead a
Marxist ideology of praxis. It is within this transformative praxis that critical theory situates terrorism and terrorists.¶ The political goals of those
non-state entities that choose to practice the tactics of terrorism invariably seek a similar transformative praxis and this leads “critical global
theorizing” into a curiously confused empathy with the motives of those engaged in such acts, as well as a disturbing relativism. Thus, Booth
again decrees that the gap between “those who hate terrorism and those who carry it out, those who seek to delegitimize the acts of terrorists
and those who incite them, and those who abjure terror and those who glorify it—is not as great as is implied or asserted by orthodox
terrorism experts, the discourse of governments, or the popular press” (p. 66). The gap “between us/them is a slippery slope, not an
unbridgeable political and ethical chasm” (p. 66). So, while “terrorist actions are always—without exception—wrong, they nevertheless might
be contingently excusable” (p. 66). From this ultimately relativist perspective gang raping a defenseless woman, an act of terror on any critical
or uncritical scale of evaluation, is, it would seem, wrong but potentially excusable.¶ On the basis of this worrying relativism a further Ken
Commandment requires the abolition of the discourse of evil on the somewhat questionable grounds that evil releases agents from
responsibility (pp. 74-75). This not only reveals a profound ignorance of theology, it also underestimates what Eric Voeglin identified as a
central feature of the appeal of modern political religions from the Third Reich to Al Qaeda. As Voeglin observed in 1938, the Nazis represented
an “attractive force.” To understand that force requires not the abolition of evil [so necessary to the relativist] but comprehending its
attractiveness. Significantly, as Barry Cooper argues, “its attractiveness, [like that of al Qaeda] cannot fully be understood apart from its
evilness.”4¶ The line of relativist inquiry that critical theorists like Booth evince toward terrorism leads in fact not to moral clarity but an
inspissated moral confusion. This is paradoxical given that the editors make much in the journal's introductory symposium of their “responsible
research ethics.” The paradox is resolved when one realizes that critical moralizing demands the “ethics of responsibility to the terrorist other.”
For Ken Booth it involves, it appears, empathizing “with the ethic of responsibility” faced by those who, “in extremis” “have some explosives”
(p. 76). Anthony Burke contends that a critically self-conscious normativism requires the analyst, not only to “critique” the “strategic languages”
of the West, but also to “take in” the “side of the Other” or more particularly “engage” “with the highly developed forms of thinking” that
provides groups like Al Qaeda “with legitimizing foundations and a world view of some profundity” (p. 44). This additionally demands a capacity
not only to empathize with the “other,” but also to recognize that both Osama bin Laden in his Messages to the West and Sayyid Qutb in his
Muslim Brotherhood manifesto Milestones not only offer “well observed” criticisms of Western decadence, but also “converges with elements
of critical theory” (p. 45). This is not surprising given that both Islamist and critical theorists share an analogous contempt for Western
democracy, the market, and the international order these structures inhabit and have done much to shape.¶ Histrionically Speaking¶ Critical
theory, then, embraces relativism not only toward language but also toward social action. Relativism and the bizarre ethicism it engenders in its
attempt to empathize with the terrorist other are, moreover, histrionic. As Leo Strauss classically inquired of this relativist tendency in the
social sciences, “is such an understanding dependent upon our own commitment or independent of it?” Strauss explains, if it is independent, I
am committed as an actor and I am uncommitted in another compartment of myself in my capacity as a social scientist. “In that latter capacity I
am completely empty and therefore completely open to the perception and appreciation of all commitments or value systems.” I go through
the process of empathetic understanding in order to reach clarity about my commitment for only a part of me is engaged in my empathetic
understanding. This means, however, that “such understanding is not serious or genuine but histrionic.”5 It is also profoundly dependent on
Western liberalism. For it is only in an open society that questions the values it promotes that the issue of empathy with the non-Western other
could arise. The critical theorist's explicit loathing of the openness that affords her histrionic posturing obscures this constituting fact.¶ On the
basis of this histrionic empathy with the “other,” critical theory concludes that democratic states “do not always abjure acts of terror whether
to advance their foreign policy objectives … or to buttress order at home” (p. 73). Consequently, Ken Booth asserts: “If terror can be part of the
menu of choice for the relatively strong, it is hardly surprising it becomes a weapon of the relatively weak” (p. 73). Zulaika and Douglass
similarly assert that terrorism is “always” a weapon of the weak (p. 33).¶ At
the core of this critical, ethicist, relativism
therefore lies a syllogism that holds all violence is terror: Western states use violence, therefore,
Western states are terrorist. Further, the greater terrorist uses the greater violence: Western
governments exercise the greater violence. Therefore, it is the liberal democracies rather than Al Qaeda
that are the greater terrorists.¶ In its desire to empathize with the transformative ends, if not the means of terrorism generally and
Islamist terror in particular, critical theory reveals itself as a form of Marxist unmasking. Thus, for Booth “terror has multiple forms” (original
italics) and the real terror is economic, the product it would seem of “global capitalism” (p. 75). Only the engagee intellectual academic finding
in deconstructive criticism the philosophical weapons that reveal the illiberal neo-conservative purpose informing the conventional study of
terrorism and the democratic state's prosecution of counterterrorism can identify the real terror lurking behind the “manipulation of the
politics of fear” (p. 75).¶ Moreover, the resolution of this condition of escalating violence requires not any strategic solution that creates
security as the basis for development whether in London or Kabul. Instead, Booth,
Burke, and the editors contend that the
only solution to “the world-historical crisis that is facing human society globally” (p. 76) is universal human
“emancipation.” This, according to Burke, is “the normative end” that critical theory pursues. Following Jurgen Habermas, the godfather
of critical theory, terrorism is really a form of distorted communication. The solution to this problem of failed communication resides not only
in the improvement of living conditions, and “the political taming of unbounded capitalism,” but also in “the telos of mutual understanding.”
Only through this telos with its “strong normative bias towards non violence” (p. 43) can a universal condition of peace and justice transform
the globe. In
other words, the only ethical solution to terrorism is conversation: sitting around an uncoerced table presided over by Kofi Annan, along with Ken Booth, Osama bin Laden, President Obama,
and some European Union pacifist sandalista, a transcendental communicative reason will emerge to
promulgate norms of transformative justice. As Burke enunciates, the panacea of un-coerced communication would establish
“a secularism that might create an enduring architecture of basic shared values” (p. 46).¶ In the end, un-coerced norm projection is
not concerned with the world as it is, but how it ought to be. This not only compounds the logical
errors that permeate critical theory, it advances an ultimately utopian agenda under the guise of soidisant cosmopolitanism where one somewhat vaguely recognizes the “human interconnection and
mutual vulnerability to nature, the cosmos and each other” (p. 47) and no doubt bursts into spontaneous
chanting of Kumbaya .¶ In analogous visionary terms, Booth defines real security as emancipation in a way that denies any definitional
rigor to either term. The struggle against terrorism is, then, a struggle for emancipation from the oppression of political violence everywhere.
Consequently, in this Manichean struggle for global emancipation against the real terror of Western democracy, Booth
further
maintains that universities have a crucial role to play. This also is something of a concern for those who
do not share the critical vision, as university international relations departments are not now, it would
seem, in business to pursue dispassionate analysis but instead are to serve as cheerleaders for this
critically inspired vision.¶ Overall, the journal's fallacious commitment to emancipation undermines any ostensible claim to pluralism
and diversity. Over determined by this transformative approach to world politics, it necessarily denies the
possibility of a realist or prudential appreciation of politics and the promotion not of universal solutions
but pragmatic ones that accept the best that may be achieved in the circumstances. Ultimately, to present
the world how it ought to be rather than as it is conceals a deep intolerance notable in the contempt
with which many of the contributors to the journal appear to hold Western politicians and the Western
media.6¶ It
is the exploitation of this oughtistic style of thinking that leads the critic into a Humpty
Dumpty world where words mean exactly what the critical theorist “chooses them to mean—neither
more nor less.” However, in order to justify their disciplinary niche they have to insist on the failure of
established modes of terrorism study. Having identified a source of government grants and academic perquisites, critical studies
in fact does not deal with the notion of terrorism as such, but instead the manner in which the Western liberal democratic state has supposedly
manipulated the use of violence by non-state actors in order to “other” minority communities and create a politics of fear.¶ Critical Studies and
Strategic Theory—A Missed Opportunity¶ Of course, the doubtful contribution of critical theory by no means implies that all is well with what
one might call conventional terrorism studies. The subject area has in the past produced superficial assessments that have done little to
contribute to an informed understanding of conflict. This is a point readily conceded by John Horgan and Michael Boyle who put “A Case
Against 'Critical Terrorism Studies'” (pp. 51-74). Although they do not seek to challenge the agenda, assumptions, and contradictions inherent
in the critical approach, their contribution to the new journal distinguishes itself by actually having a well-organized and well-supported
argument. The authors' willingness to acknowledge deficiencies in some terrorism research shows that critical
self-reflection is
already present in existing terrorism studies . It is ironic, in fact, that the most clearly reflective, original, and critical
contribution in the first edition should come from established terrorism researchers who critique the critical position.¶ Interestingly, the
specter haunting both conventional and critical terrorism studies is that both assume that terrorism is an existential phenomenon, and thus has
causes and solutions. Burke makes this explicit: “The inauguration of this journal,” he declares, “indeed suggests broad agreement that there is
a phenomenon called terrorism” (p. 39). Yet this is not the only way of looking at terrorism. For a strategic theorist the notion of terrorism does
not exist as an independent phenomenon. It is an abstract noun. More precisely, it is merely a tactic—the creation of fear for political ends—
that can be employed by any social actor, be it state or non-state, in any context, without any necessary moral value being involved.¶ Ironically,
then, strategic theory
offers a far more “critical perspective on terrorism” than do the perspectives
advanced in this journal. Guelke, for example, propounds a curiously orthodox standpoint when he asserts: “to describe an act as one
of terrorism, without the qualification of quotation marks to indicate the author's distance from such a judgement, is to condemn it as
absolutely illegitimate” (p. 19). If you are a strategic theorist this is an invalid claim. Terrorism
is simply a method to achieve an
end. Any moral judgment on the act is entirely separate. To fuse the two is a category mistake. In strategic
theory, which Guelke ignores, terrorism does not, ipso facto, denote “absolutely illegitimate violence.”¶ Intriguingly, Stohl, Booth, and Burke
also imply that a strategic understanding forms part of their critical viewpoint. Booth, for instance, argues in one of his commandments that
terrorism should be seen as a conscious human choice. Few strategic theorists would disagree. Similarly, Burke feels that there does “appear to
be a consensus” that terrorism is a “form of instrumental political violence” (p. 38). The problem for the contributors to this volume is that they
cannot emancipate themselves from the very orthodox assumption that the word terrorism is pejorative. That may be the popular
understanding of the term, but inherently terrorism conveys no necessary connotation of moral condemnation. “Is terrorism a form of warfare,
insurgency, struggle, resistance, coercion, atrocity, or great political crime,” Burke asks rhetorically. But once more he misses the point. All
violence is instrumental. Grading it according to whether it is insurgency, resistance, or atrocity is
irrelevant. Any strategic actor may practice forms of warfare. For this reason Burke's further claim that
existing definitions of terrorism have “specifically excluded states as possible perpetrators and privilege
them as targets,” is wholly inaccurate (p. 38). Strategic theory has never excluded state-directed terrorism as an object of study,
and neither for that matter, as Horgan and Boyle point out, have more conventional studies of terrorism.¶ Yet, Burke offers—as a critical
revelation—that “the strategic intent behind the US bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, Israel's bombing of Lebanon, or the sanctions
against Iraq is also terrorist.” He continues: “My point is not to remind us that states practise terror, but to show how mainstream strategic
doctrines are terrorist in these terms and undermine any prospect of achieving the normative consensus if such terrorism is to be reduced and
eventually eliminated” (original italics) (p. 41). This is not merely confused, it displays remarkable nescience on the part of one engaged in
teaching the next generation of graduates from the Australian Defence Force Academy. Strategic theory conventionally recognizes that actions
on the part of state or non-state actors that aim to create fear (such as the allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II or the nuclear
deterrent posture of Mutually Assured Destruction) can be terroristic in nature.7 The problem for critical analysts like Burke is that they impute
their own moral valuations to the term terror. Strategic theorists do not. Moreover, the statement that this undermines any prospect that
terrorism can be eliminated is illogical: you can never eliminate an abstract noun.¶ Consequently, those
interested in a truly
“critical” approach to the subject should perhaps turn to strategic theory for some relief from the
strictures that have traditionally governed the study of terrorism, not to self-proclaimed critical theorists
who only replicate the flawed understandings of those whom they criticize. Horgan and Boyle conclude their
thoughtful article by claiming that critical terrorism studies has more in common with traditional terrorism research than critical theorists
would possibly like to admit. These reviewers agree: they are two sides of the same coin.¶ Conclusion¶ In the looking glass world of critical
terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast, critical
theory's ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive gaze reveals that we are all terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors
who have recourse to violence for whatever motive. Despite their intolerable othering by media and governments, terrorists are really no
different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state.
Terrorists therefore deserve empathy and they must be discursively engaged.¶ At
the core of this understanding sits a radical
pacifism and an idealism that requires not the status quo but communication and “human
emancipation.” Until this radical post-national utopia arrives both force and the discourse of evil must
be abandoned and instead therapy and un-coerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama
Boston Legal Judge Brown perennially referred to the vague, irrelevant , jargon-ridden statements of
lawyers as “jibber jabber .” The Aberystwyth-based school of critical internationalist utopianism that
increasingly dominates the study of international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order
incoherence that may be termed Aber jabber. The pages of the journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism
are its natural home.
Internal Link Defense
The aff is woefully inadequate the deep-rooted anti-Muslim bias is rooted in american
psyche, discourse, and alternate policy—question the effectiveness of the affirmatives
method
Ali 12 [Yaser, Managing Attorney at Yaser Ali Law and J.D at University of California, Berkeley - School of
Law, “Shariah and Citizenship—How Islamophobia Is Creating a Second-Class Citizenry in America”,
CALIFORNIA LAW REVIEW, 8-1-2012,
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4176&context=californialawreview]
alla
One would assume that anti-Muslim sentiment reached its high water mark after 9/11. To the
contrary, however, it has increased dramatically in the third phase of Islamophobia, which began
during President Obama’s 2008 campaign . If Volpp’s contentions about Muslims’ being relegated to secondclass citizenship were true in 2002, then today that distinction has crystallized even further .136
Whereas a vast majority of the incursions in the second phase occurred under the umbrella of
national security, Islamophobia has now evolved beyond simply encouraging profiling and other
surveillance techniques aimed at Muslims under the professed interests of national security. An
institutionalized version of Islamophobia in this third phase now focuses on the "creeping threat of
Shariah" and, in the process, more explicitly threatens the foundational conceptions of citizenship
described by Professor Bosniak. Further, while citizens enjoy some fundamental level of respect for their
individual beliefs and practices, this is no longer the case with regard to Muslims, both in journalism
and politics today.
Whereas it is widely
recognized as socially unacceptable to be openly disparaging
toward minority groups, the privilege reflected in that norm is increasingly denied to Muslims . In this
third phase of Islamophobia , mainstream discourse now explicitly challenges the notion that
American Muslims deserve the same liberal notions of rights that other citizens enjoy. One might surmise
that since the contours of this phase cannot easily be demarcated, the third phase is in fact a difference
in degree rather than in kind. It is true that unlike the transition from the first to the second phase,
there is no single demonstrable event or tipping point that represents the transition from the second
to third period; however, there was a gradual progression that increased in intensity since the
presidential campaign of 2008 when the term "Muslim" was actually converted into a slur , as political
opponents "accused" then-Senator Obama of secretly being a Muslim. The suggestion
that a Muslim citizen would be less
suited for office represents the deep-seated fear and mistrust of Muslims in the American
consciousness . President Obama's opponents recognized this fact and knew that it would be a powerful tool for discrediting him. Yet
what was perhaps most striking about the "allegations" was not the partisan claims themselves, but the responses that President Obama and
other government leaders offered. Obama
felt compelled to reject the "accusations," doing his best to distance
himself from the Muslim community and choosing not to make any campaign stops in mosques or
meet with any Muslim organizations during the campaign (despite making numerous stops at churches and
synagogues). President Obama did not state, that although he was not a Muslim, there was nothing wrong with Muslims per se. Instead,
he
reiterated the bias by referring to the accusations on his website as a "smear."
Further, during one campaign
rally, his aides asked two young Muslim women dressed in headscarves to exit the stage area where he would be speaking. Arguably, the
pervasiveness of such insidious discourse from the President helped
Muslims are not "citizens," but indeed "others ."
normalize the notion to the public that American
Strict Scrutiny Standard Defense
Strict Scrutiny is arbitrary which undercuts solvency—status quo legal standards are better
Riccucci 7 [Norma Riccucci, Rutgers University, June 2007, “Moving Away From a Strict Scrutiny Standard
for Affirmative Action Implications for Public Management”,
http://arp.sagepub.com/content/37/2/123.short] JMOV
This article addresses the concept of strict scrutiny, the burden of persuasion test used by the courts to
determine the constitutionality of affirmative action. Through a systematic analysis of U.S. Supreme
Court decisions, it illustrates that strict scrutiny has been applied in an inconsistent, arbitrary manner
and, therefore, should not serve as the basis for judicial review of affirmative action programs. It
shows that the rule of law established under the Civil Rights Act provides an equally if not more
compelling basis for judging the legality of affirmative action programs. Relying on the legal standards
advanced by the courts under civil rights statutes provides managers with greater flexibility in
developing and implementing affirmative action programs. In effect, the ability of governments to
promote diversity of their workforces is greatly enhanced.
Seriously it sucks
Riccucci 7 [Norma Riccucci, Rutgers University, June 2007, “Moving Away From a Strict Scrutiny Standard
for Affirmative Action Implications for Public Management”,
http://arp.sagepub.com/content/37/2/123.short] JMOV
The constitutional litmus test for judging affirmative action is a failure—it gets an unequivocal “F.” It
lacks reliability, validity, and hence legitimacy, characteristics that even the most basic civil service tests
are required to demonstrate. More over, it becomes almost impossible for policymakers in educational
or employment settings to develop affirmative action policies that will meet some rule of law, when
those rules are hollow and inconstant. It must be questioned at this point in the history of affirmative
action: why does the Court continue to wrestle with appropriate standards of review, when it will
ultimately disregard those standards on a whim or apply them in an erratic, illogical manner? Perhaps
strict scrutiny is simply one area where the Court will expressly continue to “legislate from the bench.”
As argued here, the framework advanced under Title VII is much less cryptic, arcane, and mercurial, and
therefore, could be applied more broadly to all questions of law concerning affirmative action programs
and policies. This will greatly facilitate the work of managers and policymakers who are striving to create
culturally diverse environments for public employees and students in public universities. As the
composition of the Supreme Court has changed since the 2003 Grutter ruling, it becomes imperative for
public administrators and policymakers to engage in a dialogue around the irrelevance of strict scrutiny.
Strict scrutiny fails—specifically in the context of Muslim Surveillance
Figueroa 12 (Tiffani B. Figueroa, associate in Morrison Foerster’s Litigation Department, J.D. magna cum laude from Hofstra University
School of Law, "ALL MUSLIMS ARE LIKE THAT": HOW ISLAMOPHOBIA IS DIMINISHING AMERICANS' RIGHT TO RECEIVE INFORMATION, Hofstra
Law Review, Winter 2012, SM)
As discussed above, the
fear of Muslims or those perceived as Muslim has resulted in the government's
failure to protect Americans' First Amendment right to receive information. n332 The strict scrutiny test
[*499] that courts normally employ when assessing the content-neutrality of a regulation on speech has
not been effective in light of the increased development of Islamophobia. n333 Following the 9/11 attacks,
Islamophobia has impacted the free speech rights of Muslims and the mobility of foreign scholars, as well as the right
to receive information for all Americans. n334 "In an age of official insecurity and anxiety, the most difficult
constitutional problem may not be controlling arbitrariness in permitting, but compensating for a chronic tendency
to overestimate the likelihood of any damage to public security from public exercises of freedom of speech." n335 Given
the current state of events and the vulnerability of the right to receive information, a new standard to
deal with the right to receive information in times of political controversy is required. In order to resolve this issue of
dealing with national security and the right to receive information, courts should adopt a specific test under First
Amendment speech analysis where: (1) there is a political conflict and (2) there is a clear group that
society and the government targets because of the conflict. As discussed earlier, the government may
restrict the content of speech in certain situations; however, it cannot favor one viewpoint over
another. n336 The test will essentially focus on the effects of a regulation on speech when a specific group is targeted by the government
action. n337 Once the court determines there is a disparate impact on a certain group, the court will then
resolve the issue as to whether the government has curtailed the right to receive information through
this disproportionate treatment of the specified group. By first looking at the effects of a government action, courts will
provide a framework for which they can work through their First Amendment analysis. n338 When dealing with political
conflicts, such as [*500] the war on terror, there are often certain groups that are discriminated against
through practices that seem constitutional. Such discrimination is not only overlooked, but it has a
subsequent effect on all Americans who are willing to explore different ideas other than those the
government makes readily available. n339 The government's actions discussed above, such as dealing with speech at a
protest, n340 forcing a woman to remove her hijab in prison, n341 and revoking the visas of foreign scholars
n342 serve
as examples. These actions appear to be neutral; however, the effects of the actions
unevenly target one particular group: Muslims and those perceived as Muslim . n343 It is important
that the courts look beyond the language of the laws or government actions in order to gauge
whether the government is in fact practicing viewpoint discrimination and violating the First
Amendment right to receive information for Americans. n344 When looking at the effects of government actions: A
law [may] not discriminate against a particular viewpoint on its face, and there [may be] no evidence
of an improper legislative purpose in enacting the law. Within that framework of facial neutrality, however, we must
examine restrictions on speech with particular care when their effects fall unevenly on different
viewpoints and groups in society. n345 Looking at the effects of regulation on speech is something that
the Supreme Court itself has taken into consideration when looking at the right to receive
information. n346 As determined in Martin v. Struthers, n347 the Court explained that, "in considering legislation which
thus limits the dissemination of knowledge, we must "be astute to examine the effect of the
challenged legislation' and must "weigh the circumstances and appraise the substantiality of the
reasons advanced in support of the regulation.'" n348 Courts have taken a similar stance in other cases. n349 The [*501]
bottom line is:
courts must look at the effects of government regulations because laws that have a
disparate impact on one viewpoint run the risk of being viewpoint-based . n350 As in the case of
Islamophobia, it is easy to target a specific group because some Americans automatically associated
the 9/11 hijackers with all Muslims and those perceived as Muslim . n351 Similarly, in the interest of
national security, the government at times partook in practices that people may view as
discriminatory. The government failed to protect the free speech rights of Muslims as a targeted group, and
these actions subsequently harmed the right to receive information for Americans. Although the
government's purpose in enforcing the laws discussed in this Note was not to close off Muslim ideas, the
effects may show otherwise. n352 Justice Antonin Scalia stated, "the vice of content-based legislation - what renders it
deserving of the high standard of strict scrutiny - is not that it is always used for invidious, thoughtcontrol purposes, but that it lends itself to use for those purposes." n353 "Unavoidable targeting" stemming
from a government regulation is included within this "vice of content-based legislation." This phenomenon may shine
light on what has occurred following the 9/11 attacks. By employing an effects test in the First Amendment analysis,
courts will more efficiently investigate whether there is viewpoint discrimination affecting the right to
receive information since the courts must first establish if a government action falls disproportionately
on a specific group. n354 [*502] VI. Conclusion Surely, the government has a highly supported interest in protecting the United States at
all times. However, protection should not ensue at the expense of severely limiting civil liberties and
substantially restricting the marketplace of ideas. In times of political strife, such as facing terrorism
today, the courts' current approach to dealing with First Amendment violations of the right to receive
information fails to protect civil liberties. By looking at the discriminatory effects of regulations on
speech, the court can protect a thriving marketplace of ideas.
Lack of specificity makes it harder for social justice—turns solvency
Bunker et al. 11 [MD Bunker, Clay Calvert, William C. Nevin, “Strict in Theory, But Feeble in Fact? First
Amendment Strict Scrutiny and The Protection of Speech”,
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10811680.2011.603624#.VZV-0-1Vikp] JMOV
Professor Gerald Gunther famously declared strict scrutiny to be
“‘strict’ in theory and fatal in fact” in 1972. Although Professor
Gunther's pithy and influential slogan may have been a reasonably accurate characterization at that time, strict scrutiny in the
realm of the First Amendment is now much less fatal to government regulation of expression. This article
explores the beginnings of the strict scrutiny test and the underpinnings of its subsequent dilution. The article examines the multiple ways
courts can avoid applying strict scrutiny and argues that compelling state interests are proliferating in a
manner that is harmful to robust speech protection. It also critiques the lack of precision in narrow
tailoring analysis. The article concludes that First Amendment strict scrutiny has serious weaknesses that
threaten to undermine vigorous protection for expression and offers suggestions for increasing the rigor
and precision of the doctrine.
Profiling is distinct from description reliance—they conflate the two—its constitutional and
logical to investigate suspects based on description
McMillen 06 [Lucas McMillen, University of St. Thomas, “Eye on Islam: Judicial Scrutiny Along the
Religious Profiling/Suspect Description Reliance Spectrum”,
[http://ir.stthomas.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1107&context=ustlj] VIGNESH
"Religious profiling," in this Article, will be understood as the situation in which law-enforcement
authorities act on the inference that a particular adherent of a certain religion is more likely to engage
in criminal or terrorist behavior than any particular adherent of another religion.14 Put an-other way,
acts of religious profiling stem from an unfair prejudice towards members of a religious group, a
prejudice that attributes criminal or terroristic propensities to all members of the group. But
discriminatory bias will not account for all counterterrorist action based on the trait of Muslim
identity. Muslim identity can simply be a part of a suspect description, and be as legitimate a trait for
the police to rely upon in targeting potential suspects as height. weight. gender, or skin color. This
Article's next section will discuss the difference between religious profiling and suspect description
reliance , a difference that becomes crucial when determining the degree of judicial scrutiny to give
police action that targets Muslims. A. Suspect Description Reliance, Religious Profiling, and the Question
of Discrimination Profiling-understood as presuming a person's criminal propensity from their
membership in a particular group-is located at the unconstitutional end of the investigative-technique
gamut. The other end of this spectrum is maintained by the permissible and wholly logical lawenforcement technique of relying on suspect descriptions. Whether a court will consider lawenforcement targeting of Muslims to be unconstitutional will largely tum on which end of the suspect
description reliance/religious profiling spectrum that the court locates the targeting, as religious
profiling will trigger the nearly insurmountable strict scrutiny, while suspect description reliance
triggers the deferential rational basis scrutiny. Suspect description reliance is the rather simple
concept that police officers, in choosing whom to investigate, may take into account certain
characteristics-e.g., race, gender, physical markings, visible religious manifestations-because those
characteristics match the physical description of the suspect provided by a victim or witness. 15 Such a
technique is neither invidious nor unconstitutional; it is, simply put, "police work." For example, if a
white robbery suspect is seen running into a bar where only three of the bar's patrons are white, the
sole fact that the three men are white undoubtedly provides the police with the reasonable suspicion
needed to justify detaining those men (or even probable cause justifying their arrest).16 While this
police action involves targeting persons based on race, it is not "profiling" -presuming criminality from
group membership; it is seeking and arresting individuals who match the suspect's description, which
in this case happens to be based on race.
Difference between strict scrutiny and rational basis—and explanation by Justice Kennedy
McMillen 06 [Lucas McMillen, University of St. Thomas, “Eye on Islam: Judicial Scrutiny Along the
Religious Profiling/Suspect Description Reliance Spectrum”,
[http://ir.stthomas.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1107&context=ustlj] VIGNESH
For the issue of religious-group targeting, of course, one must address an issue that Oneonta did not.
While Oneonta's issue of racial profiling is a Fourteenth Amendment question exclusively, the issue of
religious-group targeting-involving a potentially discriminatory infringement of religious exerciserepresents a point of convergence for the protections of the First and Fourteenth Amendments.25
When these two constitutional claims are collapsed, a court's analysis of them collapses as well, such
that a court will use the Fourteenth Amendment's analytical framework to evaluate the state's
imposition on First Amendment free exercise rights. Put another way, in reviewing a potentially
unconstitutional state infringement on free exercise, a court will evaluate the infringement with one
of two levels of scrutiny26: it will determine whether the infringement is either (1) rationally related
to a legitimate government purpose ("rational basis scrutiny"),27 or (2) whether it is necessary to
achieve a compelling government purpose ("strict scrutiny ").28 The question of which level of scrutiny
will be applied is, of course, the crux of the matter, as rational basis scrutiny is enormously deferential,
while strict scrutiny has generally proven to be, to quote Professor Gunther, " strict in theory and fatal
in fact ."29 1. Level of Scrutiny In Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah,30 the Court
employed the converged First-and-Fourteenth-Amendment analysis and established that its critical
question of scrutiny turns on whether government officials, in imposing upon religious exercise, have
done so with intent to suppress the targeted religion-discriminatory intent. At issue in Lukumi was the
constitutionality of the City of Hialeah's animal sacrifice prohibition, a prohibition contained in a series
of ordinances that the city's Santeria practitioners challenged as being a thinly veiled effort to curtail
their religious activities.3l Justice Kennedy, writing for the Lukumi majority, began describing the
mechanics of the Court's merged First-and-Fourteenth-Amendment analysis by discussing
Employment Division v. Smith,32 the case in which the Court gave a rational basis review to an
Oregon peyote prohibition that frustrated Native American religious practice.33 According to
Kennedy, Smith establishes the first direction that a court can take in the merged analysis: when it
finds that conditions similar to those in Smith are present-Le., when the state's action is neutrally
postured towards religion-a court should review that action with light scrutiny. To this effect,
Kennedy wrote, "A law that is neutral and of general applicability need not be justified by a
compelling governmental interest even if the law has the incidental effect of burdening a particular
religious practice."34Kennedy then continued, moving on to describe the second direction of the
merged analysis, which he deemed to be the proper direction to take in Lukumi: when a court finds
that the conditions of Smith are not met, such that discriminatory intent is the state action's raison
d'etre, the state's action will be subjected to strict scrutiny . Kennedy worded the second direction this
way: "If the object of a law is to infringe upon or restrict practices because of their religious motivation,
the law is not neutral; and it is invalid unless it is justified by a compelling interest and is narrowly
tailored to advance that interest."3s Ultimately, the Court determined that discriminatory intent lay
behind Lukumi's animal sacrifice prohibition-that it "had as [its] object the suppression of religion"and struck it down as unconstitutional.
Strict scrutiny is not applied on prisons and prisoners religious practices
Nelson 09 [James D. Nelson, graduated from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was
Editor-in-Chief of the Virginia Law Review and received the Roger and Madeleine Traynor Prize and the
Robert E. Goldsten Award for distinction in the classroom. After graduating, he clerked for Judge Jerry E.
Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Nelson then served as a trial attorney in the Civil
Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, before joining Columbia Law School as an Associate in Law
and Lecturer in 2012. He is also the Editor-at-Large of Columbia Law School’s Blog on Corporations and
the Capital Markets,
December 11, 2009, “INCARCERATION, ACCOMMODATION, AND STRICT SCRUTINY”,
http://www.virginialawreview.org/sites/virginialawreview.org/files/2053.pdf]
VIGNESH
More specifically, federal courts have divided over the question of how to apply strict scrutiny under
RLUIPA. According to the statute, government policies imposing a substantial burden on a prisoner’s
religious exercise must be justified as the least restrictive means of achieving a compelling state
interest. But courts have not agreed on how this standard of review should be applied in the prison
context. Some courts apply a deferential model of review, finding most religious burdens to be
insubstantial and relying on the judgment of prison administrators regarding the weight of state
interests. Other courts, however, are applying a “hard look” model of review that takes more
seriously claims that prison policies burden religion and requires prison officials to demonstrate the
need for such policies. The rise of a hard look model under RLUIPA is surprising. First, in reviewing
claims for religious accommodation outside the prison context, courts have often applied strict
scrutiny with far less stringency than the standard traditionally requires . Courts have held that
burdens on religious practice had to be unbearable in order to count as “substantial,” while accepting
“less than compelling” government interests to satisfy the standard.6 Second, commentators
predicted that courts would be even more deferential in the prison context. Of those who might bring
claims for religious exemptions, incarcerated persons would be among the least likely to benefit from
judicial review of governmental action.7 There are a number of reasons for such skepticism. First,
courts may doubt that prisoners are sincere in the religious beliefs they claim and hold suspicion that
such beliefs are feigned in an effort to obtain special treatment.8 Second, courts may generally lack
sympathy for those convicted of criminal offenses.9 Finally, courts may doubt their own institutional
competence to review decisions regarding the administration of a prison.10 In light of these
considerations, few expected to see a change in the level of deference accorded to prison officials.
No Solvency/ Squo Solves
Some Profiled Surveillance has to be justified- the Aff is incredibly bias and the method is
problematic--We cite 4 examples that their aff tries to spin as offense
Spencer 14 [Robert Spencer, July 13, 2014, “4 Muslims Who Deserve to Be Under Surveillance”,
http://pjmedia.com/blog/4-muslims-who-deserve-to-be-under-surveillance/5/] JMOV
Leftists and Islamic supremacists are enraged this week over the revelation that the FBI and NSA, despite their officially politically correct SeeNo-Islam Hear-No-Islam Speak No-Islam stance, have had four prominent Muslim leaders in the U.S. under surveillance. They
have
appealed to Barack Obama to stop this surveillance and all related monitoring of Muslims immediately,
which he almost certainly will, and have mounted a Twitter campaign based around the bitterly ironic hashtag #IAmATarget, which applies
more to infidels in the line of jihad attacks than it ever will to Muslim leaders in the United States.¶ The
only problem with all the
righteous indignation that Leftists and Islamic supremacist leaders have summoned about this
surveillance is that it is entirely justified. The uproar began with an exposé titled “Under Surveillance:
Meet the Muslim-American Leaders the FBI and NSA Have Been Spying On,” written by none other than Glenn
Greenwald, along with another far-Left journalist,
Murtaza Hussain. Greenwald and Hussain purport to demonstrate
that five Muslim leaders whom the NSA and FBI have been watching are undeserving of such scrutiny, as
they’re honest, patriotic Americans whose only misdeed is to oppose administration policies.¶ This is, of
course, absurd. Opposing U.S. government policies from the Left won’t get you placed under surveillance; it’ll get you media adulation,
foundation grants, and awards from philanthropic groups. Obama’s IRS persecutes conservative groups, not Leftists, and several military
presentations in recent years have claimed that “right-wing extremists” are a terror threat, with nary a word about genuinely violent Left-wing
extremist groups such as the Occupy movement and others.¶ Bizarrely,
and perhaps because they couldn’t find enough
Muslims to fit their victim paradigm, Greenwald and Hussain include in their list of persecuted Muslims
Hooshang Amirahmadi, an Iranian-American professor at Rutgers, who is a professing atheist; for the
actual Muslims on their list, they gloss over the genuine reasons why the FBI and NSA have placed these
men under surveillance:¶ 4. Faisal Gill¶ Faisal Gill is “a longtime Republican Party operative and one-time candidate for public
office who held a top-secret security clearance and served in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush.”
Greenwald and Hussain note that he “worked as a consultant for the American Muslim Council, which
was founded by the political activist Abdul Rahman al-Amoudi to encourage participation by American
Muslims in the political process.” Later he joined the Department of Homeland Security.¶ Gill’s problems
began, according to Greenwald and Hussain, in 2003, when “al-Amoudi was arrested for participating in
a Libyan plot to assassinate Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah and for illegal financial transactions with the
Libyan government, crimes for which he eventually pleaded guilty.” Gill was investigated, disclaimed any close
relationship with Alamoudi, and returned to work at the DHS. But he was, we now learn, kept under surveillance.¶ They’re outraged
over this surveillance, but Greenwald and Hussain don’t mention that, according to Discover the
Networks, the plot to assassinate Abdullah involved “two U.K.-based al Qaeda operatives,” and that he
“ultimately pled guilty to, and was convicted of, being a senior al Qaeda financier who had funneled at
least $1 million into the coffers of that terrorist organization.Ӧ Faisal Gill worked as a consultant for
Alamoudi’s group – that is, a group founded and headed by a confessed senior al Qaeda financier. Would
Greenwald and Hussain be this outraged that he was under surveillance if he had worked as a consultant for a group headed by a senior Ku Klux
Klan financier? Somehow I doubt it. 3.
Asim Ghafoor¶ Asim Ghafoor is “a prominent attorney who has represented
clients in terrorism-related cases.” He had some controversial clients, including the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, which has
been linked to Osama bin Laden, and Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law. But everyone
is entitled to
representation, and representation does not require that an attorney endorse his client’s actions.¶
However, here again Greenwald and Hussain leave out salient details. Discover the Networks reports that,¶ Asim
Ghafoor was a political consultant, spokesman, and public relations director for the Global Relief
Foundation (GRF), which the U.S. government shut down in December 2001 because of the
organization’s ties to terrorism….GRF is not the only organization with ties to terrorism with which
Ghafoor has been involved. While he was with GRF, Ghafoor was also the spokesman for Care International.
The December 6, 2002 Wall Street Journal reports: ‘Records indicate close ties between [Care
International] and the Boston branch of Al Kifah Refugee Center, the Brooklyn branch of which was
named by prosecutors as the locus of the 1993 conspiracy to bomb the World Trade Center.¶ Reason
enough to put Ghafoor under surveillance? How could it not be?¶ 2. Agha Saeed¶ Agha Saeed is “a former
political science professor at California State University who champions Muslim civil liberties and
Palestinian rights” – including, say Greenwald and Hu ssain, “the right of Palestinians to armed resistance against
occupation if peaceful means fail—a right affirmed in a series of resolutions by the United Nations
General Assembly.”¶ The fact that the corrupt and morally compromised UN endorsed the “Palestinian”
jihad is hardly a ringing affirmation of its moral rectitude, and in any case, the groups that pursue
“armed resistance against occupation” are jihad terror groups such as Hamas, Hizballah, and Islamic
Jihad. Saeed supports this “armed resistance,” so he may be in contact with some of the leaders or
members of such groups, and surveillance could reveal something that could be used to stop their jihad
terror attacks against civilians. So here again, surveillance is warranted.¶ 1. Nihad Awad¶ Nihad Awad is “the
executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights
organization in the country.” (Greenwald, the article fastidiously notes, “has given paid speeches before CAIR’s regional affiliates.”)¶
“Despite its political moderation and relationship to federal law enforcement agencies,” say Greenwald and Hussain, “CAIR became a primary
target of hardline neoconservatives after 9/11.” This apparently resulted in the fact that “in 2007, the Justice Department named the group as
one of more than 300 ‘unindicted co-conspirators’
in its controversial prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation,
then the largest Muslim charity in the U.S., which was eventually convicted of providing material
support to Hamas.”¶ Greenwald and Hussain notes that “in 1994, Awad voiced public support for Hamas—before
the group’s campaign of suicide attacks against civilians and subsequent placement on the State
Department’s terrorist list in 1997.” But it adds:¶ “I do not support Hamas,” Awad says today, pointing out that the group was not
involved in terrorist activities at the time he made the statement. “It was not on the list of organizations that sponsor or conduct terrorism by
the State Department. And when the organization took those acts, CAIR has condemned it, repeatedly.”…¶
So we are to understand
that Awad supported Hamas in 1994, but in 1997, when it was placed on the State Department’s
terrorist list, he stopped supporting it. Here is part of the old Hamas website’s “Glory Record” of attacks
against Israelis – the terrorist organization’s own record of its murderous actions. On a page that
remained on its website well after 9/11, it celebrated the pre-1994 murders of Israeli civilian Ya’coub
Berey; civilians on a bus to Tel Aviv attacked by Hamas jihadi Ahmed Hussein Shukry; civilians in a crowd
in Jaffa who were murdered by another Hamas jihadi in 1992; and a civilian at Beit Lahya who was
murdered by a member of Hamas’s al Qassam Brigades. The site also celebrated the stabbings by Hamas
members of an Israeli bus driver, a group of Israelis at a bus station in Keryat Youval, a group of Israeli
citrus packers, and a group of Israelis who were run down by jihadist cab driver Jameel Ismail al-Baz.¶ All
these acts were committed and publicly celebrated before 1994, when Awad professed his support for
Hamas. That they give Awad a platform for his dissembling is typical of the dishonesty of the entire
Greenwald/Hussain piece. But it will accomplish its purpose: the ending of surveillance of these and
other Muslim leaders and the further weakening of counter-terror operations in general. And
Americans will be in even greater danger than they were before.
Indiscriminate Surveillance inevitable and harms are only felt after surveillance activity is
reported
Serwer 14 [Adam Serwer, Reporter at MSNBC, Feb 20, 2014, “Judge throws out lawsuit challenging
NYPD’s spying on Muslims”, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/nypd-allowed-spy-muslim-americans] JMOV
Religious profiling is okay, as long as you have a really good reason.¶ That’s the logic behind a decision reached by
federal judge William Martini Thursday, in dismissing a lawsuit against New York Police Department over the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslim
American communities in the region.¶ “The
police could not have monitored New Jersey for Muslim terrorist
activities without monitoring the Muslim community itself,” Martini wrote. “The motive for the program
was not solely to discriminate against Muslims, but rather to find Muslim terrorists hiding among ordinary, lawabiding Muslims.Ӧ Any
harm suffered by Muslims who were spied on, Martini wrote, was not the fault of the
NYPD, but of the Associated Press reporters who first revealed the existence of the surveillance
effort.¶ MELISSA HARRIS-PERRY, 1/19/14, 1:09 PM ET¶ The downside to living in an electronic age ¶ “Nowhere in the Complaint do
Plaintiffs allege that they suffered harm prior to the unauthorized release of the documents by the Associated Press. This confirms that
Plaintiffs’ alleged injuries flow from the Associated Press’s unauthorized disclosure of the documents,” Martini wrote. “The
harms are
not ‘fairly traceable’ to any act of surveillance.” The Associated Press declined to comment on the ruling.
National Data collection and Local Police reform are uniquely key to preventing oppression
toward minorities
Natarajan 14 Ranjana Natarajan (“Racial profiling has destroyed public trust in police. Cops are
exploiting our weak laws against it”, December
15,http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/15/racial-profiling-has-destroyedpublic-trust-in-police-cops-are-exploiting-our-weak-laws-against-it/,Accessed 6/21/15)
The #BlackLivesMatter movement has sparked nationwide protests and has raised awareness
worldwide about the unequal treatment of black people by police in the United States. Listening to the
voices from the movement — and learning from the death of Eric Garner and the series of other deaths of unarmed black men — it’s clear
that two issues need to be addressed: racial profiling and police use of excessive force. Both run afoul of the
U.S. Constitution, but remain common practices in law enforcement, too often with tragic results. In Garner’s case, for example,
police targeted him for the petty crime of selling loose cigarettes — the types of crimes black people
are targeted for at higher rates — and then attempted to arrest him with a chokehold, banned by the
department. Whatever else we have learned from the recent tragedies of police violence, it is clear that we need comprehensive federal,
state and local policies that outlaw racial profiling and rein in police excessive force. Racial profiling — as well as profiling based on
religion, ethnicity and national origin — continues to plague our nation despite the constitutional guarantee of
equal treatment under the law. In a 2011 report, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights found evidence
of widespread racial profiling, showing that African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately likely to be stopped and
searched by police, even though they’re less likely to be found possessing contraband or committing a
criminal act. In Illinois, for example, black and Hispanic drivers were twice as likely to be searched after a traffic stop compared to white
drivers, but white drivers were twice as likely to have contraband. The NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk program
shows similar evidence of racial profiling, with police targeting blacks and Latinos about 85 percent of
the time. In nearly nine out of 10 searches, police find nothing. Likewise, excessive force by police persists
despite the Constitution’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. In lawsuits and investigations, the
U.S. Department of Justice has concluded that a number of major police departments have engaged in a pattern or
practice of excessive force. The Cleveland Police Department was most recently found to be an offender, but it follows a long line of
other wayward law enforcement agencies: Seattle, New Orleans, Portland, Newark and Albuquerque among them. Clearly, cases like Eric
Garner’s are not isolated — police use of excessive force is a systemic, national problem. The DOJ has
recommended revising and clarifying local policies regarding appropriate uses of force, improving officer training and supervision, and
implementing rigorous internal accountability systems, among other things. But recommendations are not enough. Conquering
this
systemic issue demands a national mandate. Profiling undermines public safety and strains police-community trust. When
law enforcement officers target residents based on race, religion or national origin rather than
behavior, crime-fighting is less effective and community distrust of police grows. A study of the Los Angeles
Police Department showed that minority communities that had been unfairly targeted in the past continue to
experience greater mistrust and fear of police officers. To root out this ineffective tactic that undermines public
confidence, we need stronger policies against racial profiling at all levels — from local to federal — as well as more effective training and
oversight of police officers, and systems of accountability. Twenty
states have no laws prohibiting racial profiling by
law enforcement, according to an NAACP report released in September. Among states that do, the policies vary widely in
implementation and effectiveness. Only 17 of those states require data collection on all police stops and
searches, and only 15 require analysis and publication of other racial profiling data. Limited and inconsistent
data collection makes it impossible to devise effective remedies for racial profiling. Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice
unveiled a newly revised guide on use of profiling by law enforcement, distinguishing between legitimate uses
(such as using race and other characteristics in a suspect description) and illegitimate uses (such as criminal stereotypes). Among other things,
the guide explains that uses of race and other characteristics should be based on particularized and
trustworthy information relevant to the specific investigation, rather than generalized stereotypes. The
policy also provides general provisions on training, data collection and accountability, and it was expanded to include national origin, religion,
gender, sexual orientation and gender identity. Civil rights groups have been calling for this updated guide for years. However, the
Department of Justice did not address all concerns. Civil rights advocates had also called for the elimination of loopholes
for national security and border enforcement, which the DOJ did not adopt. The document states: This Guidance does not apply to
Federal non-law enforcement personnel, including U.S. military, intelligence, or diplomatic personnel,
and their activities. In addition, this Guidance does not apply to interdiction activities in the vicinity of the
border, or to protective, inspection, or screening activities. The DOJ policy, however, is far clearer and stronger than
policies held by many states and localities. As the NAACP found, some states and localities ban the use of pretextual
traffic stops, others explicitly prohibit racial profiling, and still others require mandatory data collection — but few contain all of
the elements of an effective racial profiling ban, and many states lack profiling laws altogether . Since
Americans encounter local police in far greater numbers than any federal law enforcement officers,
the adoption of state and local laws and policies banning profiling is critical. Excessive force and racial profiling
are two destructive modes of police misconduct that require concerted, vigilant action to reduce and eliminate. While racial profiling
can end in tragic police killings of unarmed individuals, such as with Eric Garner or Michael Brown, it
also results in many unnecessary stops and searches, harassment and intimidation, and even
confiscation of property without due process. The steps to curb this are clear: At all levels of government, we need
definitive anti-profiling laws and policies, training of officers on the elimination of explicit and implicit
bias, data collection on traffic stops and other police-community contacts, and development of
internal and external accountability systems. With these efforts, police departments across the country can
rebuild public trust and ensure that policing methods reinforce rather than undermine our democratic
values.
Squo solves, Federal gov’t already expanding rules, but local law enforcement is not
Apuzzo 14, Matt Apuzzo(”U.S. to Expand Rules Limiting Use of Profiling by Federal Agents”,January 16,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/16/us/politics/us-to-expand-rules-limiting-use-of-profiling-byfederal-agents.html?_r=0, Accessed 6/21/15)
The Justice Department will significantly expand its definition of racial profiling to prohibit federal
agents from considering religion, national origin, gender and sexual orientation in their investigations, a
government official said Wednesday. The move addresses a decade of criticism from civil rights groups that say
federal authorities have in particular singled out Muslims in counterterrorism investigations and
Latinos for immigration investigations. The Bush administration banned profiling in 2003, but with
two caveats: It did not apply to national security cases, and it covered only race, not religion, ancestry
or other factors. Since taking office, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has been under pressure from Democrats in Congress to eliminate
those provisions. “These exceptions are a license to profile American Muslims and Hispanic-Americans,”
Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in 2012. President George W. Bush said in 2001 that racial profiling was wrong and
promised “to end it in America.” But that was before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. After those attacks, federal agents arrested and detained
dozens of Muslim men who had no ties to terrorism. The government also began a program known as special registration, which required tens
of thousands of Arab and Muslim men to register with the authorities because of their nationalities. “Putting an end to this practice not only
comports with the Constitution, it would put real teeth to the F.B.I.’s claims that it wants better relationships with religious minorities,” said
Hina Shamsi, a national security lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. It is not clear whether Mr. Holder also intends to make the rules
apply to national security investigations, which would further respond to complaints from Muslim groups. “Adding religion and national origin is
huge,” said Linda Sarsour, advocacy director for the National Network for Arab American Communities. “But if they don’t close the national
security loophole, then it’s really irrelevant.” Ms. Sarsour said she also hoped that Mr. Holder would declare that surveillance, not just traffic
stops and arrests, was prohibited based on religion. The Justice Department has been reviewing the rules for several years and has not publicly
signaled how it might change them. Mr.
Holder disclosed his plans in a meeting on Wednesday with Mayor Bill
de Blasio of New York, according to an official briefed on the meeting who spoke on the condition of
anonymity because the conversation was private. Mr. de Blasio was elected in November after running
a campaign in which he heavily criticized the Police Department’s stop-and-frisk tactic, which
overwhelmingly targets minorities and which a federal judge declared unconstitutional. The mayor and
attorney general did not discuss when the rule change would be announced, the official said. A senior
Democratic congressional aide, however, said the Obama administration had indicated an announcement was “imminent.” The Justice
Department would not confirm the new rules on Wednesday night but released a short statement saying that the
mayor and the attorney general discussed “preventing crime while protecting civil rights and civil
liberties.” In the past, Mr. Holder has spoken out forcefully against profiling. “Racial profiling is wrong,” he said
in a 2010 speech. “It can leave a lasting scar on communities and individuals. And it is, quite simply, bad policing — whatever city, whatever
state.” Officials in the Bush administration made similar statements, however, which is why civil rights groups have eagerly waited to hear not
just Mr. Holder’s opinion, but also the rules he plans to enact. As written,
the Justice Department’s rules prohibit federal
agents from using race as a factor in their investigations unless there is specific, credible information
that makes race relevant to a case. For example, narcotics investigators may not increase traffic stops in minority neighborhoods
on the belief that some minorities are more likely to sell drugs. They can, however, rely on information from witnesses who
use race in their descriptions of suspects. The rules cover federal law enforcement agencies such as
the F.B.I. They do not cover local or state police departments. That is significant because Muslim
groups have sued the New York Police Department over surveillance programs that mapped Muslim
neighborhoods, photographed their businesses and built files on where they eat, shop and pray. Mr.
Holder’s comments about the new racial profiling rules came up in a conversation about that topic, the official said. William J. Bratton, the city’s
new police commissioner, has said he will review those practices. While
the rules directly control only federal law
enforcement activities, their indirect effect is much broader, said Fahd Ahmed, the legal director of
the Queens-based South Asian immigrant advocacy group Desis Rising Up and Moving. For instance,
he said, immigration bills in Congress have copied the Justice Department profiling language. And civil
rights groups can use the rules to pressure state and local agencies to change their policies. “Federal guidelines definitely have an impact,” Mr.
Ahmed said.
“Local organizers can say, ‘These policies are not in line with what’s coming from the federal
level.’ ”
Status quo solves – Sensitive Operations Review Committee checks discrimination practices
Bullard ’13 (Ben Bullard; June 14, 2013; Personal Liberty; “The FBI Can Pull Back Your Curtain, But
Mosques Are Off-Limits”; http://personalliberty.com/the-fbi-can-pull-back-your-curtain-but-mosquesare-off-limits/)//CC
Ever since Islamic groups cried out against the FBI’s semi-successful surveillance into terrorist plots
that emanated from mosques, the agency has been forced to turn its attention elsewhere in the
ongoing campaign to uncover domestic terrorism. In February 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union
(ACLU) joined the Council for American-Islamic Relations of Greater Los Angeles in filing a Federal
class-action lawsuit against the FBI for infiltrating mosques in Southern California and allegedly
gathering general information without probable cause. Regardless of the merits of that suit, the
backlash over the Southern California case had a subversive effect on Federal domestic surveillance
policy. Later that same year, the Administration of President Barack Obama established a review panel
within the Department of Justice called the Sensitive Operations Review Committee, effectively
carving out special treatment for the religious, political, journalistic and academic spheres: A sensitive
investigative matter (SIM) is defined as an investigative matter involving the activities of a domestic
public official or domestic political candidate (involving corruption or a threat to the national security), a
religious or domestic political organization or individual prominent in such an organization, or the news
media; an investigative matter having an academic nexus; or any other matter which, in the judgment of
the official authorizing the investigation, should be brought to the attention of FBI Headquarters (FBIHQ)
and other DOJ officials. (Attorney General’s Guidelines for Domestic FBI Operations (AGG-I Dom), Part
VILN.) As a matter of FBI policy, “judgment” means that the decision of the authorizing official is
discretionary. Whether the FBI should be indiscriminately watching any individual or affiliated group is a
matter for a separate article (indeed, we’ve written several of them), and recent scandals showing that
the Nation’s vast enforcement empire is doing just that are both loathsome and alarming. But if Obama
is going to watch most of us, it’s only fair (and makes a fair amount of sense) that he watch all of us.
The aff doesn’t solve racist local police tactics like stop and frisk, fusion centers, biometric
scanning—comparatively more invasive
Cyril 15 [Malkia Amala, founder and executive director of the Center for Media Justice (CMJ) and cofounder of the Media Action Grassroots Network, a national network of 175 organizations working to
ensure media access, rights, and representation for marginalized communities, March 30, 2015, “Black
America's State of Surveillance”, http://www.progressive.org/news/2015/03/188074/black-americasstate-surveillance] alla
This model is deceptive, however, because it presumes data inputs to be neutral. They aren’t. In a racially discriminatory criminal justice
system, surveillance technologies reproduce injustice. Instead of reducing discrimination,
predictive policing is a face of what
author Michelle Alexander calls the “New Jim Crow”—a de facto system of separate and unequal
application of laws, police practices, conviction rates, sentencing terms, and conditions of
confinement that operate more as a system of social control by racial hierarchy than as crime
prevention or punishment. In New York City, the predictive policing approach in use is “Broken
Windows.” This approach to policing places an undue focus on quality of life crimes—like selling
loose cigarettes, the kind of offense for which Eric Garner was choked to death . Without oversight,
accountability, transparency, or rights, predictive policing is just high-tech racial profiling—
indiscriminate data collection that drives discriminatory policing practices . As local law enforcement
agencies increasingly
adopt surveillance technologies, they use them in three primary ways: to listen in
on specific conversations on and offline; to observe daily movements of individuals and groups; and
to observe data trends. Police departments like Bratton’s aim to use sophisticated technologies to do all three. They will use
technologies like license plate readers , which the Electronic Frontier Foundation found to be disproportionately
used in communities of color and communities in the process of being gentrified . They will use facial
recognition, biometric scanning software, which the FBI has now rolled out as a national system, to be adopted by
local police departments for any criminal justice purpose. They intend to use body and dashboard cameras, which have
been touted as an effective step toward accountability based on the results of one study, yet storage and archiving procedures, among many
other issues, remain unclear. They will use Stingray cellphone interceptors. According to the ACLU, Stingray technology is an invasive cellphone
surveillance device that mimics cellphone towers and sends out signals to trick cellphones in the area into transmitting their locations and
identifying information. When used to track a suspect’s cellphone, they also gather information about the phones of countless bystanders who
happen to be nearby. The same is true of domestic drones, which are in increasing use by U.S. law enforcement to conduct routine aerial
surveillance. While drones are currently unarmed, drone manufacturers are considering arming these remote-controlled aircraft with weapons
like rubber bullets, tasers, and tear gas. They
will use fusion centers. Originally designed to increase interagency
collaboration for the purposes of counterterrorism, these have instead become the local arm of the
intelligence community. According to Electronic Frontier Foundation, there are currently seventy-eight on record. They are the
clearinghouse for increasingly used “suspicious activity reports”—described as “official documentation of observed behavior reasonably
indicative of pre-operational planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity.” These reports and other collected data are often stored in
massive databases like e-Verify and Prism. As anybody who’s ever dealt with gang databases knows, it’s almost impossible to get off a federal
or state database, even when the data collected is incorrect or no longer true. Predictive
policing doesn’t just lead to racial
and religious profiling—it relies on it. Just as stop and frisk legitimized an initial, unwarranted contact
between police and people of color, almost 90 percent of whom turn out to be innocent of any crime,
suspicious activities reporting and the dragnet approach of fusion centers target communities of color.
One review of such reports collected in Los Angeles shows approximately 75 percent were of people of color.
Fusions centers are the only way that Federal and Local law enforcement data is shared—
those fail—means federal changes don’t affect local communities
PSI 12 [PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS, the oldest subcommittee of the U.S. Senate
Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “FEDERAL SUPPORT FOR AND
INVOLVEMENT IN STATE AND LOCAL FUSION CENTERS”, October 3,
2012,https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0
CCYQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.hsgac.senate.gov%2Fdownload%2Freport_federal-support-forand-involvement-in-state-and-local-fusions-centers&ei=jqeFVa_FE8TeQHf2oLIDg&usg=AFQjCNEY5sKmzFYKts_5F0R5KDR3QwwZg&sig2=VTn5HU2_sLH1AfWAJEsjBg&bvm=bv.96339352,d.cWw] alla
Sharing terrorism-related information between state, local and Federal officials is crucial to protecting
the United States from another terrorist attack. Achieving this objective was the motivation for
Congress and the White House to invest hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars over the last nine
years in support of dozens of state and local fusion centers across the United States. 1 Congress
directed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to lead this initiative. A bipartisan investigation by
the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations has found, however, that DHS’s work with those state
and local fusion centers has not produced useful intelligence to support Federal counterterrorism
efforts. The Subcommittee investigation found that DHS-assigned detailees to the fusion centers
forwarded “intelligence” of uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes
endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from alreadypublished public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism . The Subcommittee
investigation also found that DHS officials’ public claims about fusion centers were not always
accurate. For instance, DHS officials asserted that some fusion centers existed when they did not. At
times, DHS officials overstated fusion centers’ “success stories.” At other times, DHS officials failed to
disclose or acknowledge non-public evaluations highlighting a host of problems at fusion centers and
in DHS’s own operations.
Modeling args are wrong—no correlation between grants and modeling—only our studies
include the broader law enforcement environment—other things are more important than
federal influence
Burruss et al 12 [George W. Burruss has a Ph.D. in Criminology & Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois
University Carbondale, Joseph A. Schafer has a Ph.D from Michigan State in Social Science (Criminal
Justice), Matthew J. Giblin, an associate professor and undergraduate program director in the
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Melissa R.
Haynes, Member of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, “Homeland Security in Small
Law Enforcement Jurisdictions: Preparedness, Efficacy, and Proximity to Big-City Peers”, September
2012, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/239466.pdf] alla
Second, much of the literature implicitly or explicitly assumes that homeland security preparedness
can be improved through funding allocations (e.g., grants), particularly from state and local
governments (Davis et al., 2006; Gerber et al., 2005). Alternatively, other writings have assumed that
preparedness is simply a byproduct of, or rational response to, the potential for a terrorist attack in a
jurisdiction (Davis, 2004; Henry, 2002). What these studies tend to ignore is the larger environment .
The efficacy of efforts to enhance homeland security may not be just a function of perceived/actual
risk or funding, but both of those forces and others. For example, enhanced preparedness and
innovative practices may also flow from written products such as books and journals, as well as
conferences, training, and other professional networks and channels. These sources, as shown in a study
of Illinois law enforcement agencies, play a significant role in determining preparedness levels,
independent of risk and resource allocation (Burruss, Giblin, & Schafer, 2010). To date, however,
researchers have largely ignored these sources (termed institutional pressures) as determinants of
homeland security practices. Moreover, if these channels are salient, the proximity of small agencies
to big-city peers might be irrelevant as learning and modeling is indirect rather than direct. This
omission is glaring considering that research verifying the significance of these factors could be used
to shape the diffusion of a range of innovations across the law enforcement industry.
No federal modeling internal link—local law enforcement models regional agencies—our ev is
comparative
Burruss et al 12 [George W. Burruss has a Ph.D. in Criminology & Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois
University Carbondale, Joseph A. Schafer has a Ph.D from Michigan State in Social Science (Criminal
Justice), Matthew J. Giblin, an associate professor and undergraduate program director in the
Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Melissa R.
Haynes, Member of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, “Homeland Security in Small
Law Enforcement Jurisdictions: Preparedness, Efficacy, and Proximity to Big-City Peers”, September
2012, https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/239466.pdf] alla
Respondents were asked a range of questions designed to assess the extent to which institutional
pressures influenced their approaches to homeland security. The measures address factors that are
independent of any one person in the organization; that is, they focus on the influence of other
agencies, professional associations, and publications without addressing who within the organization
was specifically affected by these factors .10 Table 8 reports the results of a number of questions
measuring whether agency practices were influenced by the actions of their peers. In evaluating their
own homeland security performance, 25.8 percent of respondents indicated they paid significant
attention to other agencies like their own . An additional 59.8 percent of agencies paid some attention to similar agencies.
Less than one percent of responding agencies reported that they paid no attention to similar agencies in evaluating their homeland security
performance. Participating agencies were asked to what extent their agency modeled homeland security policies and practices after other
agencies that they viewed as successful. The majority of agencies indicated they did engage in such modeling often (35.3 percent) or
defining
homeland security practices and approaches agencies might be influenced by the resources offered by
these other entities. Respondents were asked to rate the influence of four sources of influence on a
occasionally (54.9 percent). Other sources of institutional pressure are professional associations and relevant publications. In
three-point scale from not at all influential (0.0) to very influential (2.0). Peer agencies were reported
to be the most influential . Strong influence was also indicated for professional associations and government publications. Journal
articles and books were the least influential, with an average rating between somewhat influential and not at all influential. Grant programs
and other funding opportunities were generally less influential. In relative terms, federal and state grant funding for equipment and training
were most influential. Private or community funding sources were least influential in formulating homeland security approaches and practices.
Massive alt cause—local police bigotry and racism disproportionally impacts black people—
(exposure to local police is more common and direct than exposure to federal law
enforcement--so the alt cause outweighs the aff’s internal link)
Lee 14 [Jaeah, Jaeah reports, writes, codes, and charts at Mother Jones. Her writings have appeared in
The Atlantic, the Guardian, Wired, Christian Science Monitor, Global Post, Huffington Post, Talking
Points Memo, and Grist, “Exactly How Often Do Police Shoot Unarmed Black Men?”, Aug. 15, 2014,
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/08/police-shootings-michael-brown-ferguson-black-men]
alla
The killing
of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was no anomaly: As we reported yesterday,
Brown is one of at least four unarmed black men who died at the hands of police in the last month
alone. There are many more cases from years past. As Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Missouri
chapter put it in a statement of condolence to Brown's family, "Unarmed African-American men are shot and killed by
police at an alarming rate. This pattern must stop." But quantifying that pattern is difficult. Federal databases that
track police use of force or arrest-related deaths paint only a partial picture. Police department data is
scattered and fragmented. No agency appears to track the number of police shootings or killings of
unarmed victims in a systematic, comprehensive way. Here's some of what we do know: Previous attempts to
analyze racial bias in police shootings have arrived at similar conclusions. In 2007, ColorLines and the
Chicago Reporter investigated fatal police shootings in 10 major cities, and found that there were a
disproportionately high number of African Americans among police shooting victims in every one ,
particularly in New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas. "We need not look for individual racists to say that we have a culture of policing that is
really rubbing salt into longstanding racial wounds," NAACP president Cornell Williams Brooks told Mother Jones. It's a culture in which people
suspected of minor crimes are met with "overwhelmingly major, often lethal, use of force," he says. In Oakland, California, the
NAACP
reported that out of 45 officer-involved shootings in the city between 2004 and 2008, 37 of those
shot were black. None were white . One-third of the shootings resulted in fatalities. Although weapons were not found in 40
percent of cases, the NAACP found, no officers were charged. (These numbers don't include 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was shot and killed
by a transit authority officer at the Fruitvale BART station on New Year's Day of 2009.) The
New York City Police Department
has reported similar trends in its firearms discharge report, which shows that more black people have
been shot by NYPD officers between 2000 and 2011 than have Hispanics or whites. When you look at the racial
breakdown of New Yorkers, black people are disproportionately represented among those targeted as
criminal shooting suspects, firearms arrestees, and those fired upon or struck by police gunfire. Often,
the police officers do not get convicted or sentenced. Delores Jones-Brown, a law professor and director of the Center on Race, Crime, and
Statistics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has identified dozens of black men and women who have died at the
hands of police going back as far as 1994. She notes that while these incidents happen regularly, it often takes a high-profile case, such as
Brown's, to bring other recent incidents to national attention. "Unfortunately, the
patterns that we've been seeing recently
are consistent: The police don't show as much care when they are handling incidents that involve
young black men and women, and so they do shoot and kill," says Jones-Brown, a former assistant prosecutor in
Monmouth County, New Jersey. "And then for whatever reason, juries and prosecutor's offices are much less likely to
indict or convict." Between 2003 and 2009, the DOJ reported that 4,813 people died while in the process of arrest or in the custody of
law enforcement. These include people who died before an officer physically placed him or her under custody or arrest. This data, known as
arrest-related deaths, doesn't reveal a significant discrepancy between whites, blacks, or hispanics. It also doesn't specify how many victims
were unarmed. According to the FBI, which has tracked justifiable homicides up to 2012, 410 felons died at the hands of a law enforcement
officer in the line of duty.* But black
people are more likely than whites or Hispanics to experience a police
officer's threat or use of force, according to the Department of Justice's Police Public Contact Survey in
2008, the latest year for which data is available. Of those who felt that police had used or threatened them with force that
year, about 74 percent felt those actions were excessive. In another DOJ survey of police behavior during traffic and street stops in 2011, blacks
and Hispanics were less likely than whites to believe that the reason for the stop was legitimate. The Justice Department has investigated
possible systemic abuse of power by police in at least 16 cities. Police
shootings of unarmed black people aren't limited
to poor or predominantly black communities. Jones-Brown points to examples where police officers
have shot unarmed black men and women in Hollywood, Riverside (California), and Prince Georges
County—a Maryland suburb known as the most affluent US county with an African-American
majority. "Part of the problem is that black people realize that you don't have to be poor, you don't have to
be in your own community...and this can happen to you ," she says. These killings occur against black
people of varying socioeconomic backgrounds: "Actors, professional football players, college students,
high school grads. They happen to black cops, too." Yet, the lack of comprehensive data means that we can't know if there's been an
upsurge in such cases, says Samuel Walker, a criminal justice scholar at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and author of The Color of Justice:
Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America. "It's impossible to make any definitive statement on whether there were more incidents in the last 5 to
10 years than in the past," he says. "We just don't have that kind of data." But what is certain, Walker says, is that the fatal shooting in Ferguson
"was just the tip of the iceberg."
Local-federal police data distribution fails—it’s too unorganized—local law enforcement
cellphone data collection is another alt cause
Ackerman 13 [Spencer, national security editor for Guardian US and won the 2012 National Magazine
Award for Digital Reporting, “Data-sharing among US law agencies amounts to 'organised chaos' –
report”, December 10, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/10/data-sharing-lawenforcement-organised-chaos] alla
The sharing
of crucial intelligence about counter-terrorism between the FBI, the Department of
Homeland Security and local police departments takes place through a patchwork process that
amounts to “organized chaos”, according to a new report. The report, released Tuesday by the Brennan Center for Justice, a publicpolicy institute at New York University law school that has a track record of being skeptical of government surveillance, found
inconsistent rules, inadequate oversight, apparent wastefulness and insufficient regard for civil
liberties nationwide. “This poorly organized system not only wastes time and resources; it also risks
masking reliable intelligence that could be crucial to an investigation,” the report says, warning that a “din of
data” is overwhelming law enforcement. “There’s a lot of irrelevant information being collected,” said
Michael Price, a counsel with the Brennan Center and the author of the report. “As a result of that, it seems pretty easy for
information to slip through the cracks.” A Department of Homeland Security spokesman took vigorous exception to the report’s
factual presentation and its conclusions, saying that much of the responsibility for the patchwork rules should properly be attributed to
discrepancies in laws across the 50 states and arguing that the fusion centers contribute strongly to national security while protecting civil
liberties. Scrutiny
of the wide-reaching intelligence apparatus in federal, state and local law enforcement
since 9/11 has largely taken a backseat during the past six months’ worth of revelations from
whistleblower Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s surveillance activities . But this
week, several reports pointed to an enormous amount of data collected by police departments –
particularly from cellular towers . The Brennan Center report examined 16 major police departments across the
US, along with 19 affiliated “fusion centers” – controversial data-sharing pools between federal, state
and local agencies – and 14 of the FBI’s joint terrorism task force partnerships with police. It found,
among other problems, inconsistent quality control, which permitted a flood of local tips – some as
innocuous as “ordering food at a restaurant and leav[ing] before the food arrives ” (an example from
California, according to a Fusion Center training document obtained by the report's authors) – into fusion centers. Data
like that does
not meet the legal standard for "reasonable suspicion" normally required to pursue surveillance, let
alone the requirements of probable cause. Yet it can be stored within fusion centers and accessed by
a variety of law enforcement and homeland security agencies for up to a year , the report said. Despite
efforts by the Department of Homeland Security, most of the fusion centers operate with “minimal
oversight, or no oversight whatsoever”, the report found. Out of 19 centers reviewed, only five
require independent audits of retained data. “We’re calling for clear, consistent processes and stronger standards for
collecting and sharing information to reduce some of the noise coming from this din of data,” Price said. A Department of Homeland Security
spokesman contended Tuesday that the report misrepresented the complexities of data-sharing across local, state and federal agencies, and
strongly defended the relevance and performance of fusion centers. “This report fundamentally misunderstands the role of fusion centers
within our national security structure and their value to state and local law enforcement,” said DHS press secretary Peter Boogaard. “As pointed
out by congressional leaders and major law enforcement organizations across the country, fusion centers greatly improve information sharing
and co-ordination between federal, state and local law enforcement. By receiving classified and unclassified information from the federal
government and assessing its local implications, fusion centers help law enforcement on the front lines better protect their communities from
all threats, whether it is terrorism or other criminal activities.” The FBI did not respond to a request for comment made after a media embargo
on the Brennan Center report lifted. Fusion
centers have been the subject of criticism from both civil libertarians
and powerful elected officials. A 2012 investigation by the bipartisan Senate permanent
subcommittee on investigations of more than 80,000 fusion center documents could not find any
contribution the centers had made to “disrupt[ing] an active terrorist plot”. DHS disputes the results of that
investigation, as do several legislators on committees overseeing the department. Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoman who serves as the top
Republican on the Senate government reform and homeland security committee, has emerged as a leading legislative critic of fusion centers
and joint terrorism task forces, for many of the same reasons detailed in the Brennan Center report. After a government inquiry indicated many
federal data-sharing efforts were duplicative, Coburn issued a statement in April calling them “a vital component of national security”, but
adding, “that is not an excuse to waste taxpayer funds”. The Brennan Center’s report comes as
use of cellphone data is attracting new scrutiny.
On Monday, the
police departments’ widespread
Washington Post revealed that police
departments around the country relied 9,000 times last year on so-called “tower dumps”, or data
collected from cellphone signals that went to a given cellphone tower during a certain period of time.
That data necessarily includes call information from cellphone subscribers who are never suspected of
any crime. “There are serious questions about how law enforcement handles the information of
innocent people swept up in these digital dragnets,”
congressman Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who plans to
introduce legislation limiting tower dumps, told the Post. Also on Monday, USA Today reported that approximately a
quarter of police
departments in the US have employed tower dumps, and at least 25 departments around the country
employ a portable piece of spoofing hardware, called a Stingray, that tricks cellphones into thinking it
is a cell tower, allowing it siphon data and send it directly to police. And all that information is on top of the fruits of
the NSA’s vast data collection efforts, which are not entirely off limits to federal law enforcement. The controversial bulk collection of
Americans’ phone data has been repeatedly described by the NSA as a tool to aid the FBI in detecting domestic terrorism activity. NSA deputy
director John C Inglis recently stated that the FBI cannot search directly through the NSA’s data troves, but the agency shares telephone
metadata with the bureau following searches through its databases based on “reasonable articulable suspicion” of connections to specific
terrorist organizations. The Brennan Center report did not specifically analyze law enforcement tower dumps, but Price called the reports of
them alarming. “This is another indication of the vast trove of information that state and local police are collecting about law abiding
Americans,” Price said. “To date, that information does not appear to be particularly useful in preventing terror attacks.”
Fusion centers fail—local law enforcement doesn’t have oversight
Price 13 [Michael, serves as counsel for the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program,
“NATIONAL SECURITY AND LOCAL POLICE, December 10, 2013,
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/NationalSecurity_LocalPolice_web.pdf]
alla
Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, many state
and local law enforcement agencies have assumed a critical
but unfamiliar role at the front lines of the domestic fight against terrorism. The federal government has
encouraged their participation, viewing them as a tremendous “force multiplier”2 with approximately 800,000 officers nationwide.3 Indeed, by
collecting and sharing information about the communities they serve, police departments have been able to significantly increase the data
accessible to members of the federal intelligence community.4 At the same time,
however, the headlong rush into
counterterrorism intelligence has created risks for state and local agencies, with too little attention
paid to how to manage them.
Although prevention
of terrorist attacks is often described as a new, post-
9/11 paradigm for law enforcement, the prevention of all crime has been a central tenet of modern
policing since its debut nearly 200 years ago.5 Intelligence activities, including the use of surveillance,
undercover officers, and informants, have helped fulfill this mandate. But due to the potential for
abuse that came to light during the 1960s and 70s, many courts and legislatures placed checks on
police intelligence operations. Most importantly, they required officers engaged in intelligence activities to have reasonable
suspicion that a person or group is involved in criminal activity before collecting, maintaining, or sharing information about them. Of course,
this rule does not apply to most other police activities. Officers responding to an emergency, for example, may record a victim’s statement or
document an eyewitness account without suspecting either individual of wrongdoing. But for many police departments, reasonable suspicion
became a prerequisite for creating intelligence files.6 Since
9/11, some police departments have established
counterterrorism programs to collect and share intelligence information about the everyday activities
of law-abiding Americans, even in the absence of reasonable suspicion.7 This information is fed into
an array of federal information sharing networks, creating mountains of data.8 Whether these practices have
made us safer is debatable.9 What is clear is that they raise issues of accountability and oversight in ways that have not been given sufficient
attention. The centerpiece of this new counterterrorism architecture is a national information sharing network connecting police departments
and federal agencies, known as the Information Sharing Environment (ISE). But
there is little consistency regarding the
types of information that local law enforcement agencies collect and share with their federal
counterparts. The policies and procedures governing such activities are often opaque or unavailable
to the public, while a deliberately decentralized system produces rules that vary considerably across
the country. Inconsistent rules jeopardize the quality of shared intelligence and raise serious civil
liberties concerns. In some jurisdictions, for example, police have used aggressive information gathering tactics
to target American Muslim communities without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such practices have not generated investigative
leads or proven especially useful in preventing potential terrorist attacks.10 But they have strained community relations with law enforcement,
thereby jeopardizing the very terrorism prevention mission they are intended to accomplish.11 Many state
and local intelligence
programs lack adequate oversight. While federal agencies operate under the watch of independent
inspectors general, there is often no equivalent for state and local information sharing ventures. Very
few local governments have built the kind of oversight structures that should accompany such a significant expansion of police functions.
Multitude of barriers to data-sharing—localized law enforcement cannot effectively
model/cooperate with federal agencies
AFCEA International 7 [The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA)
established in 1946, is a non-profit membership association serving the military, government, industry,
and academia as an ethical forum for advancing professional knowledge and relationships in the fields of
communications, information technology, intelligence, and security, “The Need to Share: The U.S.
Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement”, April 2007,
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CB4Q
FjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.afcea.org%2Fmission%2Fintel%2Fdocuments%2FSpringIntel07whitepa
per_000.pdf&ei=5LSEVarfJeq1sATX0YGQAQ&usg=AFQjCNFXOVotodHFFBsKU6WKdjvU_u5slw&sig2=
KthG2NXEpzngYQ_75f9lLQ&bvm=bv.96339352,d.cWc] alla
The committee believes certain steps can help the intelligence and law enforcement communities move forward in their ability to share
information and intelligence better. Communicate and Reinforce the Need for Sharing: People
have a natural tendency to resist
change. For this reason, leaders throughout the intelligence and law enforcement communities must
consistently and repeatedly deliver the message of change and ensure that everyone understands the
importance of sharing information. Analysts who have been told for years that releasing certain types
of information violates the law must now be strongly encouraged to exchange the information with
others . The new Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, has made a strong statement to all intelligence professionals with his
direction that it is not enough to share intelligence: There is a responsibility to provide it. Earn
Public Trust: Abuses of the past
have made the public skeptical about the government’s role in personal lives. Yet, the public wants
and deserves a collaborative intelligence and law enforcement community effectively working
together to prevent another terrorist attack. A Markle Foundation task force7 noted, “For information sharing to succeed,
there must be trust.… Building trust requires strong leadership, clear laws and guidelines, and advanced technologies to ensure that
information sharing serves important purposes and operates consistently with American values.” The communities must ensure compliance
with the law and make the commitment visible to the public. Manage Risk: The intelligence and law enforcement communities have been risk
averse in the past regarding sharing information—often for good reasons. Today’s environment calls for a different approach. The
risk of
sharing information must be balanced against the risk of not “connecting the dots.” What is the true
value of having important information—even if it comes from a tenuous source in some cases—if the
information is never shared with others who may need it and who may add value to the information?
As a first step, local law enforcement should have a formal role and presence within the NCTC. This
would give law enforcement officials early warning about terrorist tactics used overseas before the
terrorists try to apply them in the United States, and it would help law enforcement plan and train
better. Create Clear, Understandable, and Consistent Guidelines: Many current guidelines and policies are complex, confusing, inconsistent,
and make sharing information difficult to achieve. This complexity causes delays in sharing data and undermines its utility. People are more apt
to give up if the rules are too hard to follow. Eliminate the Construct of “Data Ownership:” The
“owners” do not always
appreciate why information they control could be significant to others. For sharing to be effective,
those who have a broader picture may be the best advocates regarding what needs to be shared. For
example, local and state law enforcement, fire, and public health organizations can make a critical
contribution in terms of detection, prevention, and response. The federal intelligence or law
enforcement communities may not be taking full advantage of these capabilities and skills because
they do not have a clear understanding of what they can contribute. These individuals on the “front
lines” may hold key pieces of the puzzle. The fact that some of their information comes from an
unclassified source does not automatically mean it is not useful or important. Use Technology in a
Meaningful Way: Most of the obstacles to meaningful change in this arena are cultural, but
technology still can play an important role. Most, if not all, of the technological impediments to
protecting sources and methods while enabling effective information sharing have been solved. Technology
should be embraced as a key in easing the administrative burdens of sharing information. Emphasize Training: Effective and focused training
can improve the confidence of community members and the public’s perception that information is being handled appropriately. The right
training, coupled with intelligence policies, will better enable sharing and ultimately will help change the cultures. Share Good Ideas and
Lessons Learned: The District of Columbia, among others, has taken first and useful steps. It has initiated discussions in the law enforcement
and intelligence communities to broaden understanding of what types of information are needed and why.
Once state or local law
enforcement organizations articulate and justify specific needs, and it becomes clear the contribution
they can make to mission success, the willingness to share information will improve significantly.
Other steps are possible. In the early 1980s the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) partnered with local
law enforcement to educate U.S. police officers on the trends, tactics, and patterns of the South
American drug cartels. As a result, local law enforcement officers knew what behavior, precursor
chemicals, and modes of transportation were associated with major trafficking and violent crimes of
the international cartels. Such partnerships work. Leaders in both communities should look to the partnership model within the Joint
Terrorism Task Force as an approach to enabling information sharing. The Director of National Intelligence has recently created an Information
Sharing Steering Committee (ISSC) and declared the ISSC will “move the Intelligence Community beyond the ‘need to share’ philosophy and
more to a ‘responsibility to provide.’”8 This commitment can steer the federal, state, and local communities closer to the goal of a shared
information environment. Conclusion Since September 11, 2001, the intelligence and law enforcement communities have struggled to adapt to
new challenges and to refocus and reorder priorities.
Nonetheless, the seam between federal, state, and local
communities has inhibited the United States’ ability to fight terrorism. Although Congress has
removed many of the existing barriers to cooperation, and limited examples of progress exist,
implementation is lagging. The key to change is strong leadership in both communities. Leaders must
understand and nurture cultural change that emphasizes a responsibility for providing information—
not just for sharing it.
They must also communicate to their subordinates a willingness to accept risk in sharing data and must
deemphasize data ownership. These steps, along with clear guidelines, inter-community training, the exchange of lessons learned, and the
effective use of technology, can open doors of cooperation that have been closed for too long.
Alt Causes
Local Police Departments are oppressive – federal data and Maple Heights proves
Dewan 14, Shaila Dewan, Reporter for the New York Times, 2014 (Mostly White Forces in Mostly Black
Towns: Police Struggle for Racial Diversity, New York Times, September 9,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/10/us/for-small-police-departments-increasing-diversity-is-astruggle.html, Accessed on 6/20/15)
Maple Heights police officers with a driver stopped for a traffic violation. The department has only two black officers out of 35. Credit Michael
F. McElroy for The New York Times MAPLE HEIGHTS, Ohio — The population of this working-class Cleveland suburb has gone from nearly all
white to two-thirds black since its mayor declared more than 35 years ago that he did not know “what a minority is.” But its police and fire
departments have not kept pace: The Maple Heights police force today still has only two black officers out of 35; the fire department is 100
percent white. Maple Heights is far from unique. Across
the country, police departments still struggle to hire and
retain minority candidates — in some cases despite great efforts, in others because of a lack of
initiative. But now, the problem has taken on new relevance since the fatal shooting of a young black
man last month in Ferguson, Mo., where just four of the 53 police officers are black, according to the police
chief. Nationwide, the total number of minority police officers has risen, but they remain heavily concentrated in larger cities, with the numbers
falling off sharply in smaller ones, like Ferguson and Maple Heights. In 1977, Maple Heights agreed to increase minorities in its police and fire
departments. But officials did not follow through. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times Data
from a federal survey of
police departments in 2007, analyzed for The New York Times by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, found that
nearly 400 departments, most with fewer than a hundred officers, were substantially whiter than the
populations they served. In these departments, the share of white officers was greater than the share of
white residents by more than 50 percentage points. Ferguson and Maple Heights are about the same size, just over 20,000
people, and in both, the black population has surged in recent decades. Both cities have white mayors and largely white political leaderships.
And both police departments have fallen far short of reflecting the communities they serve — even as some of Maple Heights’s neighboring
police departments have achieved much higher levels of diversity. Critics
point to the lack of racial balance in police
departments as evidence of systemic racism. But experts say the experiences of the two towns illustrate the obstacles to
achieving diversity in law enforcement, even for departments that have made it a priority. “I see all these pundits come on the Sunday talk
shows and say: ‘Of course you can hire more black people. Of course they’re not trying,’ ” said Nelson Lim, a senior sociologist at the RAND
Corporation’s Center on Quality Policing who has consulted with departments in Los Angeles and San Diego. “But it’s very, very, very difficult.”
There is little hard evidence that diversity correlates with better performance, in part because it is difficult to control for complex variables and
to know which outcomes, from crime rates to brutality cases, to measure. In fact, one study of a Florida police department found that black
officers were more likely than white to use force against black suspects. A review of court cases going back to the early 1990s revealed only a
handful of civil rights or excessive-force cases against the Maple Heights police, two of which involved a white officer who is no longer with the
department, and none that involved a fatality like the shooting in Ferguson. Still, it
is an accepted tenet of community
policing that when departments reflect the communities they serve, they have an easier time building
trust and defusing, rather than escalating, tense situations. In Maple Heights, some residents said they would like to see
more black officers, while others said that it was the attitude, experience and training of the officer, not race, that mattered. Chris Turney, a
home renovator who lives with his wife and two daughters, said it was more important for officers to live in the city. All but one do not. “The
police come here, they do their jobs, they don’t try to get to know anybody,” said Mr. Turney, who is black. “The police don’t wave.”
Hundreds of police departments across the nation have forces with a white percentage that is more
than 30 percentage points higher than the communities they serve. Other residents drew a contrast between police
attitudes in Maple Heights and neighboring Bedford Heights, where three-quarters of the residents, and nine of 28 police officers, are black.
“Bedford’s not going to do you like Maple,” said Carlos Walker, 41, who is black. “You have to do something real stupid for Bedford. Maple,
soon as they get behind you, you sweating.” In her 11 years as an officer in Bedford Heights, Detective Ericka Payne, who is black, has often
provided backup on calls in Maple Heights. “There
are definitely differences in the ways the departments interact
with the outside community,” Detective Payne said. “We try to be a little bit more community oriented. Because we are a little bit
more diverse, we understand those dynamics and maybe have a little bit more ease dealing with that.” Several Maple Heights officials said the
diversity of the police and fire departments had never been a major issue. It is hard to find qualified candidates of any race, said John C.
Popielarczyk, who has been with the Maple Heights Police Department since 1990 and the acting police chief since May. Maple Heights,
devastated by the foreclosure crisis, has fallen on hard times, and the police force has shrunk. And with most officers staying on the job for 25
years, Chief Popielarczyk said, the opportunity to hire is scarce. Of eight recent hires, two were black. One, the chief said, was fired for cause
before his probationary period ended. The department has advertised in minority newspapers and changed the private company that
administers its Civil Service exam in hopes that more minority candidates would pass, he said. But he added: “The real goal of the department is
to provide qualified officers who are competent and can provide quality service regardless of race. I don’t think people really care about the
color of the officer that responds; they care that the officer responds quickly, is effective, treats them well and is respectful.” The acting fire
chief, James Castelucci, said much the same, adding that one promising black candidate withdrew when his current employer offered him more
money. The obstacles to diversity are many, Dr. Lim, the sociologist, said. Candidates usually must pass written tests, physical agility tests,
psychological tests, polygraphs and background checks, some of which can have a disparate impact on minority candidates. Qualified black
candidates are sought after not just by competing police departments, but also by employers in other industries. And some police chiefs have
cited a negative attitude toward law enforcement among blacks that hinders recruiting. Police departments have tried all kinds of remedies,
from personal trainers to help with physical fitness tests to tailored recruiting. (A RAND survey found that women were attracted to the good
salaries in policing, blacks to the profession’s prestige and Asians to the excitement of the job.) But many small departments lack the resources,
or the will, to conduct an exhaustive review of their hiring practices. In Maple Heights, job candidates are ranked by how well they score on the
written exam, earning bonus points for factors like previous training, military experience and city residency. For each opening, the candidates
are considered one by one, in order of their score. Frank Ross said he did not accept the city’s explanations for having few minority police
officers. Credit Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times Some nearby suburbs like Bedford Heights and Cleveland Heights — where about 40
percent of the residents and 22 of 102 officers are black — do things differently. The chiefs of both departments said officials were allowed to
consider the top 10 candidates on the list, which helps them hire more minority candidates. Both chiefs said their cities took an aggressive
approach to diversity as early as the 1970s. Cleveland Heights has two types of officer positions, one that requires a Civil Service exam and a
college degree, and a lower tier, called basic patrol, that does not. Once a basic patrol officer is hired, the city will reimburse tuition costs, and
many eventually earn a degree and work their way to the upper tier. The diversity of neighboring police departments poses a challenge to cities
like Maple Heights, Dr. Lim said: “If the leadership, if the police chief, is dedicated to getting more diversity in the work force, how hard is it to
figure out how the other department is doing such a good job?” Asked why Maple Heights considered only one candidate at a time, Chief
Popielarczyk said: “We’ve always done it that way. My understanding is that that’s how we’re supposed to do it.” Some Maple Heights
residents have tried to persuade the city to hire more blacks, forming a committee called the Maple Heights Citizens for Change. In 2012, Elaine
Stone, a committee member who runs a blog called the Maple Heights African American Gazette, was digging around and discovered a longforgotten affirmative action agreement, signed by the mayor, a citizens’ committee and a representative from the federal Justice Department in
1977. In that deal, Maple
Heights, at the time about 96 percent white, agreed that within three years minorities would
make up at least 4 percent of its police and fire departments. But it soon became clear that the city
was less than fully committed to this goal. “I figure we’re all minorities,” the mayor at the time, Emil J. Lisy Jr., told
reporters when he was criticized for failing to live up to the agreement. “The first thing is to find out what a minority is, and I haven’t figured
that out.” Federal officials threatened to withhold $500,000 in funds, but backed down after the mayor submitted a 65-page response. When
Ms. Stone learned about the agreement, she contacted Frank Ross, the only surviving signer of the document. Mr. Ross
was a teacher in his 20s when he came to Maple Heights, at a time when real estate brokers steered black customers to a part of town called
Presidential Row. He now lives 12 miles away, but agreed
to go to meetings of the committee, where he suggested
that the group call the Community Relations Service of the Justice Department, the same office that helped
broker the earlier deal. Though new discussions were opened between the city and the service, which
provides mediation and training to governments, residents feel the talks have stalled. Neither the mayor nor
the Maple Heights legal director returned calls for comment for this article, and the service does not publicly discuss its work. Participation by
local governments is strictly voluntary. Ms. Stone said economics, not overt racism, had kept the police and fire departments largely white.
“There was white flight, but people were trying to hold on to their jobs,” she said. “I can understand you don’t want to give up that job.” Mr.
Ross said apathy among black voters was partly to blame for the situation. But he does not accept the city’s excuses.
“They’re telling me in 40 years they can’t find any African-American policemen?” he said. “Forty years
later — it’s very emotional for me. Forty years later, I’m still dealing with the same thing.”
Alt cause – Local police is the problem—community oriented policing is failing
Jrank Law Library, No Date, (,No Date,http://law.jrank.org/pages/2228/Urban-Police-Policingminority-citizens.html, Accessed 6/19/2015)
Historically, cooperation
and communication between police and minorities has been troubled. Williams
and Murphy described a history of policing shaped by the enforcement of laws that have
discriminated against minority groups, particularly African Americans. Slavery, segregation, and discrimination
are historical realities that shaped the current distrustful, strained, and often hostile relationship
between police and minority citizens. This poor relationship reached its pinnacle during the police-citizen crisis of the 1960s. The
civil rights movement had gained momentum and become more militant. Protesters gathered to demonstrate against race discrimination and
injustice within the criminal justice system. Police
officers responded to protesters with physical brutality, which
increased the tension between minorities and the police. This tension exploded in the form of riots and civil
disobedience, often sparked by incidents involving the police (Walker, 1999). As a result of several crime commission reports and
research findings questioning the effectiveness of "professional" police organizations , police organizational
strategies evolved to focus on strengthening relationships and creating partnerships between the police and citizens. Police departments
attempted to improve community relations through the creation of police-community relations units, race relations training for officers, and
the hiring of more minorities and women. Some of these techniques were relatively successful. As reported by Walker (1999), African American
officers represented a majority of the force in departments such as Detroit, Washington, and Atlanta in 1993. In addition, African Americans
were selected as police chiefs in several large departments, including New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, and others.
Furthermore, by the mid-1990s, women represented 13 percent of all officers in large police departments. Despite these advances,
police
still struggle with minority community relations. In 1993, the acquittal of four officers accused of beating Rodney King, an
African American motorist in Los Angeles, sparked race riots across the country. Other major cases of police abuse of force in the 1990s (e.g.,
26 percent of
African American citizens surveyed reported they had very little or no confidence in the police,
compared to only 9 percent of white respondents (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1996). Furthermore, when asked about
attitudes toward use of force, 60 percent of whites had favorable attitudes compared to 33 percent of African
Americans and 42 percent of Hispanics (Huang and Vaughn). Serious questions regarding police discrimination remain. Studies
routinely show that minorities are overrepresented as suspects who have force used against them, and who
are shot and killed by officers. Worden's analysis of 1977 data showed that police were more likely to use both reasonable and
unreasonable force against black male suspects. This is also true of the use of deadly force. However, changes in police
departments' administrative policies led to decreases in the use of deadly force by officers. In a study of
the New York City Police Department, Fyfe found that changes in the department's formal policies governing police
shootings in 1972 reduced the average numbers of shots fired by officers by 30 percent. The total number of
the Louima and Diallo cases in New York City) further increased tension between the police and minorities. In 1996,
uses of deadly force decreased by nearly 50 percent from 1970 to 1984. In that same time period, the ratio of African Americans to whites who
had deadly force used against them decreased from six-to-one to three-to-one (Walker, 1999). Reductions in police use of deadly force toward
minorities were also noted after the fleeing-felon standard guiding police use of deadly force was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court
in Tennessee v. Garner, 105 S. Ct. 1694 (1985). African
Americans are also disproportionately arrested more often
than whites. It is unclear whether these disparities in arrest statistics represent actual discrimination (i.e., disparity based on extra legal
factors, such as race). When other factors are taken into consideration (e.g., seriousness of the offense, the evidence available, demeanor of
the suspect, etc.), it appears that arrest decisions are influenced more by situational and legal factors than strictly race (Riksheim and Chermak).
However, police
are more likely to police inner-city neighborhoods, which are predominantly minority
areas. In this sense, police may be showing a form of contextual discrimination by heavily policing
particular neighborhoods or particular types of crimes. A concern is that police officers are profiling citizens
based on race and ethnicity. The term DWB or driving while black is a vivid descriptor of this phenomenon. Minority groups
claim that police are more likely to pull over motorists simply because of their race. In fact, studies of New
Jersey State Police have shown that minorities are pulled over disproportionately. This same argument is made in urban areas, where minorities
believe they have become the targets of police harassment through tactics of aggressive enforcement of minor crimes. Studies of police have
shown that African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately stopped, questioned, and frisked by police (Browning et al.). Surveys
of
citizens also indicated that African Americans and Hispanics are more likely to be stopped and
interrogated by police. One survey of African American high school students revealed that 80 percent had been stopped
by police and 62 percent of those stopped said the police treated them disrespectfully (Walker, Spohn, and
DeLone). At the same time, however, minority citizens complain that police are not responding to their needs in these areas. Citizens
allege that police are not providing adequate protection or attention in their neighborhoods. According to
Walker, this apparent contradiction can be explained by "the diversity within racial and ethnic minority communities . . . . Complaints about
police harassment generally come from young males who have a high level of contact with the police. Most
members of racial
minority communities, however, are law-abiding adults with jobs and families. Like their white counterparts,
they want more not less police protection" (1999, p. 222). In the 1980s, new strategies of community oriented policing
have encouraged the partnership between citizens and the police. Research has shown, however, that strategies
of community policing tend to have the strongest impact on neighborhoods where they are least
needed. Satisfaction with community policing techniques is highest in homogeneous, higher socioeconomic status communities, and lowest
in heterogeneous, lower socioeconomic status communities (Bayley, 1988). It is clear that new approaches to improve police-minority relations
are needed.
Alt Cause—Underrepresentation of local minorities in the police force is a larger problem
Badger, Keating, and Elliot 14 Emily Badger, Dan Keating, and Kennedy Elliot, (“Where minority
communities still have overwhelmingly white police”, August 14,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/08/14/where-minority-communities-stillhave-overwhelmingly-white-police/, Accessed on 6/21/15)
There is something unsettling about the scenes this week out of Ferguson, Mo., that goes beyond the
rare sight of military equipment on city streets or the disproportionate deployment of it. In so many
of these images, the unarmed residents are black. But almost all of the officers facing them are white.
The fatal police shooting Saturday of an unarmed black teen that set off these confrontations in a St. Louis suburb has raised questions not just
about the conduct of one officer, but the makeup of an entire police force. How
could a community that's two-thirds black
have a police force that's almost entirely white? How could such divisions ubiquitous in the 1960s persist in 2014? Across
the country, this racial imbalance is not rare. Fifty years after the Civil Rights movement called attention to the underrepresentation of minorities in police departments, the pattern is still widespread. More than three quarters of cities on
which the Census Bureau has collected data have a police presence that's disproportionately white
relative to the local population. Meanwhile, in more than 40 percent of cities, blacks are under-represented among
police officers, a Washington Post analysis of Census data revealed. While the pattern is widespread, broad
variations exist. The charts below show which cities have the greatest and smallest disparities between population and police. These
numbers are more encompassing than a mere count of officers in a municipal police department. From
the point of view of residents in each community, they reflect the larger police presence one might encounter . The
center line in each chart represents equality — or how we might expect a police force to look if it perfectly reflected the demographics of the
city it serves. Non-Hispanic white representation in most cities is above this line; in other words, the share of white police officers in Memphis
If we count cities within five percentage points of that
line as having relative equality, just one in 10 cities and towns in America meets that standard. If we
look at the data from the perspective of black officers, about 45 percent of cities and towns meet this
definition of equality. That number, though, is largely driven by cities with few or no black officers but also very small black
populations. Remove cities where less than 5 percent of the population is black, and 72 percent of all such
places — 446 in total — have police forces where blacks are under-represented. In the 609
communities where Hispanics make up at least 5 percent of the population, they are underrepresented among police as well in 66 percent of places. Even the best intentions by police
departments won't automatically create perfect equality because city demographics shift over time —
in some places more rapidly than others. The Department of Justice, which has filed hundreds of lawsuits against
discriminatory local agencies since the 1970s, has historically looked at demographic data like this, along with hiring and recruiting practices. It
is striking on the above charts, however, that many of America's biggest cities are hovering more
closely around equality than others. These are the same cities where fierce battles were fought and
federal lawsuits waged over unequal hiring practices after 1972, when amendments to the Civil Rights Act extended
or Charlotte is higher than the share of whites living in those cities.
protection from discrimination to state and local government employers. "Politicians realized that they couldn’t have an all-white police force in
a city with a substantial minority population," says Richard Ugelow, who worked on such lawsuits in the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ for 29
years. "That changed the culture of the police departments and the willingness of law enforcement, police and fire departments to become
more diverse. You see that in
Chicago, New York, Atlanta, in these large cities. They want to have a diverse
workforce. You don’t have those same pressures in these smaller communities." The public outcry and federal pressure
that made such inequality so visible in Chicago — prompting dramatic change there — hasn't historically
extended to places like Ferguson, a suburb of 21,000 with 53 commissioned police officers. "It's hard for the government to bring
a lawsuit," Ugelow says, "against a police force of 100 people." The above charts show many places with either all-white or no-black police
forces. Many of them are smaller cities, such as Niagara Falls, N.Y., where 20 percent of the population is black but all 250 police are white,
according to the data. In Florissant, Mo., a quarter of the population is black, but none of the 25 police are. Some
seemingly unequal
communities have also experienced demographic shifts that have exacerbated the imbalance
between the police presence and the population. Ferguson is an example of such a place: In 1990, the city was almost
three-quarters white. By 2010, it was two-thirds black. Its police force today may in some ways be a legacy of the
makeup and policies of an earlier moment of time. Ugelow doubts that the picture above is the result of intentional
discrimination today — "blacks need not apply." But some of the same historic practices and applicant tests that
effectively excluded minorities may still exist in departments that never updated their policies . During
the recession, small-town police agencies that have had to cut resources may have trimmed the HR staffs and recruitment programs that
address this issue. Ugelow also worries that, since the Bush Administration, the DOJ has eased up on its civil rights litigation. Historically, the
issue of inequality in police departments has focused on the relationship between blacks and whites.
But as the country's Hispanic population continues to grow, communities have to take into account
demographic patterns that encompass more than white and black. In San Antonio, for instance, blacks and whites
only account for one-third of the local population, and a slightly higher proportion of the police; Hispanics make up 63 percent of the
population, and 58 percent of the police. As a note,
the data above draws from a special 2010 Census count of
workers in 755 cities and towns, including every place with a population of at least 50,000 at that
time. Once a decade, the Census creates this employment file for federal agencies that monitor employment practices and enforce civil rights
laws. The data include the number and demographics of police officers — counting police and sheriff's
patrol officers, and transit and railroad police — working in each city. The data do not include detectives, security
guards or parking enforcement officers.
MASSIVE alt cause—they can’t solve racial profiling by local law enforcement agencies—
comparatively more exposure to them than federal law enforcement
Harris 99 [David A., Distinguished Faculty Scholar and Professor of Law at University of Pittsburgh,
“DRIVING WHILE BLACK: RACIAL PROFILING ON OUR NATION'S HIGHWAYS”, June 1999,
https://www.aclu.org/report/driving-while-black-racial-profiling-our-nations-highways] alla
On a hot
summer afternoon in August 1998, 37-year-old U.S. Army Sergeant First Class Rossano V.
Gerald and his young son Gregory drove across the Oklahoma border into a nightmare. A career soldier and
a highly decorated veteran of Desert Storm and Operation United Shield in Somalia, SFC Gerald, a
black man of Panamanian descent, found that he could not travel more than 30 minutes through the
state without being stopped twice: first by the Roland City Police Department, and then by the
Oklahoma Highway Patrol.
During the second stop, which lasted two-and-half hours, the troopers
terrorized SFC
Gerald's 12-year-old son with a police dog, placed both father and son in a closed car with the air
conditioning off and fans blowing hot air, and warned that the dog would attack if they attempted to
escape. Halfway through the episode – perhaps realizing the extent of their lawlessness – the troopers
shut off the patrol car's video evidence camera. Perhaps, too, the officers understood the power of an
image to stir people to action. SFC Gerald was only an infant in 1963 when a stunned nation watched on television as Birmingham
Police Commissioner "Bull" Connor used powerful fire hoses and vicious police attack dogs against nonviolent black civil rights protesters. That
incident, and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s stirring I Have a Dream speech at the historic march on Washington in August of that year, were the low
and high points, respectively, of the great era of civil rights legislation: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. How
did it
come to be, then, that 35 years later SFC Gerald found himself standing on the side of a dusty road next to a
barking police dog, listening to his son weep while officers rummaged through his belongings simply
because he was black? I feel like I'm a guy who's pretty much walked the straight line and that's
respecting people and everything. We just constantly get harassed. So we just feel like we can't go
anywhere without being bothered... I'm not trying to bother anybody. But yet a cop pulls me over and
says I'm weaving in the road. And I just came from a friend's house, no alcohol, nothing. It just makes
you wonder – was it just because I'm black?" – James, 28, advertising account executive Rossano and Gregory Gerald were
victims of discriminatory racial profiling by police. There is nothing new about this problem. Police abuse
against people of color is a legacy of African American enslavement, repression, and legal inequality.
Indeed, during hearings of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders ("The Kerner Commission") in the fall of 1967 where more than
130 witnesses testified about the events leading up to the urban riots that had taken place in 150 cities the previous summer, one of the
complaints that came up repeatedly was "the stopping of Negroes on foot or in cars without obvious basis." Significant blame for this rampant
abuse of power also can be laid at the feet of the government's "war on drugs," a fundamentally misguided crusade enthusiastically embraced
by lawmakers and administrations of both parties at every level of government. From the outset, the
war on drugs has in fact
been a war on people and their constitutional rights, with African Americans, Latinos and other
minorities bearing the brunt of the damage. It is a war that has, among other depredations, spawned
racist profiles of supposed drug couriers. On our nation's highways today, police ostensibly looking for
drug criminals routinely stop drivers based on the color of their skin. This p ractice is so common that
the minority community has given it the derisive term, "driving while black or brown"
– a play on the real
offense of "driving while intoxicated." One of the core
principles of the Fourth Amendment is that the police cannot
stop and detain an individual without some reason – probable cause, or at least reasonable suspicion
– to believe that he or she is involved in criminal activity. But recent Supreme Court decisions allow
the police to use traffic stops as a pretext in order to "fish" for evidence. Both anecdotal and
quantitative data show that nationwide, the police exercise this discretionary power primarily against
African Americans and Latinos. No person of color is safe from this treatment anywhere, regardless of
their obedience to the law, their age, the type of car they drive, or their station in life. In short, skin
color has become evidence of the propensity to commit crime, and police use this "evidence" against
minority drivers on the road all the time.
NYPD is an example of local, racist policies that the plan can’t reform
AP 12 — Samantha Henry, Matt Appuzzo, Wayne Perry, reporters for the Associated Press, American
multinational nonprofit news agency, 2012 (“New Jersey Muslims Angry Over NYPD Surveillance
Findings,” The Huffington Post, May 25, Available online at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/25/new-jersey-muslims-cangry-nypdsurveillance_n_1545319.html, Accessed on 6/15/15)
Muslim leaders said they were told that every instance of NYPD activity in New Jersey had been justified by a lead, but that the
attorney
general would not provide any details on the nature of any of those leads, saying the fact-finding was ongoing.
Imam Mustafa El-Amin of the Newark-based Masjid Ibrahim said he was concerned that Chiesa refused to explain what
leads had been received. With the NYPD compiling a map of every mosque in Newark – including his – he said he wanted to
know about any problems or potential dangers in his mosque he might be unaware of. "We
understand the need for surveillance and security," said El-Amin, "We just don't appreciate how this
was done. We as Muslims feel we were violated, simply because we are Muslims."
Several Muslim leaders at
Thursday's meeting said that they
did not find the assertion that the NYPD had leads for all their operations in
New Jersey credible, adding that efforts to maintain communication between the community and law enforcement would be hurt by
the findings that the NYPD had done nothing wrong – and could keep doing what they have been doing. "It was basically an, `FYI, good
Thursday afternoon, let it die in the media before the Memorial Day weekend,'" said Mohamed El-Filali, executive director of the Islamic Center
of Passaic County, across the Hudson River from New York. If
the surveillance of every mosque, burger joint and
barbershop targeted was justified, he asked, why were no arrests made? Aref Assaf of the American Arab Forum
said the
attorney general made them feel like second-class citizens. "I said to him it's not only insulting, it's
offensive to our sense of justice , that you bring us to Trenton to tell us that you accept as legal and valid the actions of the NYPD,
and I
will not be surprised if you're issuing an order informing your law enforcement officials that they
too can spy on American Muslisms because if it's legal for NYPD, than it must be legal for NJ to do the
same." The Muslim leaders said they would consider all legal options, including renewed appeals for action by the U.S. Justice Department. A
federal civil rights lawsuit has also been considered.
Local police surveillance targeted at Muslims is unchangeable
Friedersdorf 13 — Conor Friedersdorf, staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and
national affairs, has a Masters degree in Journalism from New York University and a BA in Politics,
Philosophy, and Economics from Pomona college, 2013 (“The Horrifying Effects of NYPD Ethnic Profiling
on Innocent Muslim Americans,” The Atlantic, March 28, Available online at
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/03/the-horrifying-effects-of-nypd-ethnic-profilingon-innocent-muslim-americans/274434/, Accessed on 6/16/15)
the NYPD's clandestine spying on Muslims to the public's attention in a series of vital stories.
Starting shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, officers infiltrated Muslim communities and
spied on hundreds or perhaps thousands of totally innocent Americans at mosques, colleges, and
elsewhere. These officers "put American citizens under surveillance and scrutinized where they ate,
The Associated Press brought
prayed and worked, not because of charges of wrongdoing but because of their ethnicity ," the news
agency reported, citing
NYPD documents. Informants were paid to bait Muslims into making inflammatory
statements. The NYPD even conducted surveillance on Muslim Americans outside its jurisdiction,
drawing a rebuke from an FBI field office, where a top official charged that "the department's
surveillance of Muslims in the state has hindered investigations and created 'additional risks' in
counterterrorism." NYPD brass and Mayor Michael Bloomberg defend these policies as counterterrorism efforts that are necessary to
keep New Yorkers safe. As you ponder the specific costs of these policies, as evocatively described below, keep in mind one thing about the
ostensible benefits: "In
more than six years of spying on Muslim neighborhoods, eavesdropping on
conversations and cataloguing mosques," the Associated Press reported, "the New York Police
Department's secret Demographics Unit never generated a lead or triggered a terrorism
investigation ." They acknowledged, in court testimony, having generated zero leads.
Offense
DA Links
Terror Links
Muslim surveillance is key to stop terrorism – France proves
Kamisar 1/7 (Ben; January 7, 2015; The Hill; “GOP rep: French attack shows need for more Muslim
surveillance”; http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/228756-gop-rep-french-attack-showsneed-for-muslim-surveillance)//CC
Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) said Wednesday that the terrorist attack on a French satirical newspaper
underscores the need for increased surveillance in Muslim communities. “We should put political
correctness aside and realize that it is important to have police in the communities, using sources,
using informants,” he said on Fox News’s “America’s Newsroom.” “Let’s face it: The threat is coming
for the most part out of the Muslim community. It’s a small percentage, but that’s where it’s coming
from,” King said. King added that that it’s not clear that increased surveillance “would have stopped the
attack” but said the French attack “shows the absolute necessity of having” those programs. He’s
called for these policies after previous terrorist attacks and defended of the now-defunct New York
Police Department program that assigned undercover officers to Muslim communities. King noted that
police similarly targeted the Italian community while working to stamp out mob organizations, among
other examples. The New York Republican also said Wednesday’s attack in France should serve as a
“wake-up call” for Congress to iron out differences on Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funding.
King warned that Congress’s fight over immigration and DHS funding shouldn’t also jeopardize the
nation’s counterterrorism programs. “We have not funded the Department of Homeland Security, and
that’s because of this [fight] over immigration,” he said. “Whatever we do on that as far as immigration
cannot in any way be allowed to interfere with our counterterrorism methods.” As retribution for
President Obama’s recent executive order that granted work permits and deferred deportation for
millions of immigrants living in the U.S. illegally, Republicans led a charge to only authorize DHS funding
until the end of February. That way, GOP leaders will be able to negotiate the agency’s funding with
more leverage, since the party now controls both houses of Congress. But King said that negotiators
should not put U.S. security at risk and also keep optics in mind. “The juxtaposition would be terrible:
a terrorist slaughter in Paris and the U.S. cuts back on Homeland Security funding,” he said. “We
cannot in any way allow the funding or the programs that stop terrorism in this country to be impeded
in any way whatsoever.”
The US is experiencing a spike in Islamic terrorist strikes – surveillance is necessary to prevent
attacks
Inserra 6/25 (David - a Research Associate for Homeland Security and Cyber Security in the Douglas
and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign and National Security Policy; June 25, 2015; The Heritage
Foundation; “Terrorist Plot No. 71: Rise in Terrorism Calls for Increased Vigilance”;
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/06/terrorist-plot-no-71-rise-in-terrorism-calls-forincreased-vigilance)//CC
On Monday, the FBI charged Justin Sullivan with attempting to provide material support to a terrorist
group as well as two weapons charges. Sullivan was planning to attack a public venue, such as a bar or a concert,
with a rifle in support of the Islamic State (ISIS). This is the 71st Islamist terrorist plot or attack against
the U.S. homeland since 9/11 according to publicly available information. It is the third plot foiled this
month alone and part of an ongoing spike in terrorist activity within the U.S. The U.S. must recognize that
terrorists have not stopped trying to strike us and, indeed, have only grown bolder in the past few
months. While the U.S. should not give in to fearmongering, it cannot naively ignore the threat that confronts it. The U.S. must use
all the tools of its national power to prevent terrorists from striking. In April 2015, Sullivan’s father called 9-1-1 after
Sullivan began to destroy various household items, particularly religious items, seemingly in support of ISIS. Sullivan’s father said that they were
“scared to leave the house.” Following this incident, the FBI assigned an undercover agent (UC) to communicate with Sullivan. Sullivan praised
ISIS and swore his allegiance to it, describing himself as a “mujahid,” a guerilla fighter engaging in violent jihad. Sullivan told the UC that the two
of them should remain in the U.S. to support ISIS since they would likely be captured if they tried to travel. Instead, Sullivan had settled on
attacking a U.S. target with a gun, saying that “[yo]u only need 600 dollars… for the gun and bullets.”[1] Sullivan said that he would be
purchasing an AR-15 rifle “in about two weeks” at a nearby gun show, promising that “I’ll kill people this month.” Sullivan estimated that he and
the UC could kill 1,000 people with AR-15s.[2] Sullivan then began to talk about firearm silencers and poisons that could be used on the bullets
or in a bomb. He asked if the UC could make the silencers for use in June or possibly July. In addition to seeking out a silencer and poisons,
Sullivan also sought 100-round drum magazines for the AR-15 as well.[3] After gaining as much information as possible from Sullivan, the FBI
then provided him with a silencer that Sullivan believed was homemade on June 19. The FBI then raided the Sullivans’ house, finding the
silencer and arresting Sullivan. Sullivan admitted that he was planning to use the silencer during an attack on a bar or a concert between June
21 and June 23. He intended to buy a rifle from a gun show on June 20.[4] This 71st plot is the ninth Islamist terrorist plot in this calendar year
and the third in June alone. As was the case with all the other plots this year, Sullivan was inspired by ISIS. Sullivan’s was also the 60th plot or
attack involving a homegrown terrorist, meaning one who was radicalized here in the U.S. In targeting a bar or a concert, Sullivan was also
going after the third most common terrorist target: different types of mass gatherings (plots against the U.S. military and New York City are the
most and second most common targets, respectively). Together with the recent release of State Department research showing a spike in global
terrorism in 2014, the U.S. must come to grips with the true nature of the terrorist threat, both at home and abroad.[5] To combat the real and
growing threat of terrorism, Congress should: Ensure that the FBI shares information more readily and regularly with state and local law
enforcement and treats state and local partners as critical actors in the fight against terrorism. In this case, a local 9-1-1 call seems to have
triggered FBI involvement. While using state and local partners as important sources of information is half the battle, local partners must also
receive timely information from the FBI. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should play a role in supporting these partners’ efforts by
acting as a source or conduit for information and coordinating information sharing between the FBI and its partners. Designate an office in DHS
to coordinate countering violent extremism (CVE) efforts. CVE efforts are spread across all levels of government and society. DHS is uniquely
situated to lead the federal government’s efforts to empower local partners. Currently, DHS’s CVE working group coordinates efforts across
DHS components, but a more substantial office will be necessary to manage this broader task. Support state, local, and civil society partners.
Congress and the Administration should not lose sight of the fact that all of the federal government’s efforts must be focused on empowering
local partners. The federal government is not the tip of the spear for CVE efforts; it exists to support local partners who are in the best position
to recognize and counter radicalization in their own communities. Maintain essential counterterrorism tools. Support for important
investigative tools is essential to maintaining the security of the U.S. and combating terrorist threats. Legitimate
government
surveillance programs are also a vital component of U.S. national security and should be allowed to
continue. The need for effective counterterrorism operations, however, does not relieve the government of its obligation to follow the law
and respect individual privacy and liberty. In the American system, the government must do both equally well. As the U.S. experiences
the highest level of terrorist activity since 9/11, Congress must remember that this is not a short-term
skirmish but a long war. Failure to recognize the nature of this conflict, our enemy, or the reality of
the threat will leave the U.S. unprepared. Instead, the U.S. must remain vigilant and provide U.S.
counterterrorism officials with additional legal tools to confront the growing threat.
Targeted surveillance is necessary – Boston bombing proves
Careccia ‘13 (John; June 17, 2013; Western Journalism; “Islamic Mosques: Excluded From Surveillance
By Feds”; http://www.westernjournalism.com/islamic-mosques-excluded-from-surveillance-byfeds/)//CC
Homeland Insecurity: The White House assures us that tracking our every phone call and keystroke is
necessary to stop terrorists, and yet it won’t snoop in mosques, where the terrorists emanate from. Fact
– Many of the terrorists have been radicalized in Mosques and Muslim agencies right here in America.
According to the NSA the government’s sweeping surveillance of our most private communications
excludes Mosques and Muslim affiliated facilities. Supposedly this is done to protect the sensibilities of
innocent Muslims who worship in Mosques. Since October 2011, mosques have been off-limits to FBI
agents. Surveillance or undercover sting operations are not allowed without high-level approval from a
special oversight body at the Justice Department dubbed the Sensitive Operations Review Committee
(SORC). Who makes up this body, and under what methodology do they review requests – nobody
knows. The names of the chairman, members and staff are kept secret. Why is it necessary to keep the
names and titles of the people who decide whether or not to protect the rest of the country from radical
Muslims, secret? We do know the panel was set up under pressure from Islamist groups who
complained about FBI stings at mosques. Just months before the panel’s formation, the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) teamed up with the ACLU to sue the FBI for allegedly violating the civil
rights of Muslims in Los Angeles by hiring an undercover agent to infiltrate and monitor mosques in
America’s second largest city. Another defeat for the politically correct imbeciles in our government.
Before mosques were excluded from the otherwise wide domestic spy net the administration has cast,
the FBI launched dozens of successful sting operations against homegrown radicals inside mosques,
and disrupted dozens of plots against innocent American citizens across the United States. If only they
were allowed to continue, perhaps the many innocent victims of the Boston Marathon bombings
would not have lost their lives and limbs. The FBI never canvassed Boston mosques until four days after
the April 15 attacks, and it did not check out the radical Boston mosque where the Muslim bombers
worshiped even though they were supposedly on the government’s watch list. The bureau didn’t even
contact mosque leaders for help in identifying their images after those images were captured on closedcircuit TV cameras and cellphones. As I have repeatedly pointed out, the Politically Correct attitude of
the Obama administration is dangerous to the well being of the average hard working American
citizen. There are many religious communities in the United States. How can the government attack one
of the oldest and most established religions in the United States and choose to defend the actions of
another belief system that espouses violence and murder of Westerners who they classify as infidels.
Even though the FBI was tipped by Russia more than a year before about the leanings of the two Boston
bombers, they apparently chose to ignore it. Now after the fact we learn that one of the Muslim
bombers made extremist outbursts during worship, yet because the mosque wasn’t monitored, red
flags didn’t go off inside the FBI about his increasing radicalization before the attacks.
Arab Americans won’t give up their radicals – surveillance is key
Careccia ‘13 (John; June 17, 2013; Western Journalism; “Islamic Mosques: Excluded From Surveillance
By Feds”; http://www.westernjournalism.com/islamic-mosques-excluded-from-surveillance-byfeds/)//CC
Why didn’t the Imam contact the FBI? Why don’t these people of peace speak up when they hear
people in their congregation espousing hate of the country they have adopted. Maybe it’s because
they see us as an opportunity to expand their Caliphate and don’t really care what happens to the
infidels in their way who don’t deserve to live. This is particularly disturbing in light of recent
independent surveys of American mosques, which reveal some 80% of them preach violent jihad and
distribute violent literature to worshipers. Even though Islam is not a religion in the strict sense (it is
more of a socio-economic way of life), if Church doors are open to anyone or anything then Mosques
should be too. If Muslims have nothing to hide then they should not object to being treated the same
or equal to other religious organizations. If our Federal agencies are going to protect us from attack,
they have to adopt strong measures to root out these radicals and a plan to counter those who would
commit atrocities against citizens of the the United States.
Muslim Surveillance is essential to stop terrorism
Moore and Lemire ’12 (Tina and Jonathon; March 3, 2012; Daily News; “Ray Kelly defends spying on
students, calling it an essential safety strategy for city”;
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/raymond-kelly-defends-spying-calling-essential-safetystrategy-city-article-1.1032607)//CC
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly gave an impassioned defense of the NYPD’s controversial Muslim
surveillance program Saturday — declaring it essential for the city’s safety. The tactics, which allegedly
include spying on mosques, cafes and shops, have come under fire from Muslim and civil rights groups,
but Kelly said the Police Department’s strategy has been “misrepresented.” “For some, the very act of
intelligence gathering seems illegitimate when applied to the crime of terrorism,” Kelly said in his most
wide-ranging remarks to date on the hot-button topic. “In fact, the Police Department uses many of the
same methods to find and stop terrorists that we use to arrest drug dealers, human traffickers and
gang leaders,” the commissioner told a Fordham Law School alumni group. Even as more than 100
protesters demonstrated outside his speech, Kelly did not back down, declaring that the surveillance
program was not just legal, but a vital part of the successful takedowns of more than a dozen terror
plots since Sept. 11, 2001. “A broad base of knowledge is critically important to our ability to
investigate terrorism,” said Kelly, who suggested that the NYPD did not do enough after the first
World Trade Center attack. “It was precisely our failure to understand the context in 1993 that left us
vulnerable in 2001,” he said. “We won’t make that mistake again — on Mayor Bloomberg’s watch or
mine.” Claiming reconnaissance was necessary to gather intelligence needed to penetrate dangerous
groups, Kelly defended the NYPD’s focus on Muslim neighborhoods and student groups. “We know that
while the vast majority of Muslim student associations and their members are law-abiding,” Kelly said,
“we have seen too many cases in which such groups were exploited.”
Terror Rollback
French Attacks prove rollback—Numerous foreign governments strengthen surveillance too—
that’s devastating for the aff
Business Insider 1/11/15 [Business Insider, January 11, 2015, “The Paris Attacks Could Be Used As
Justification For Tighter Borders And More Internet Surveillance ”,
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-internet-and-border-monitoring-needed-to-thwart-furtherattacks-2015-1#ixzz3dv0f31I4] JMOV
Paris (AFP) - Increased
Internet surveillance and tighter border checks are "urgently" needed to foil
jihadist attacks of the sort that rocked Paris this week, European, US and Canadian security ministers
agreed Sunday.¶ The gathering of interior and justice ministers at the French interior ministry was held
before a massive anti-terror march in Paris that included dozens of foreign leaders.¶ A joint statement by the
ministers -- representing 11 EU nations including France, Britain, Germany, Sweden and Poland, as well as the European commissioner for
migration and home affairs, and US
Attorney General Eric Holder -- emphasized their "determination to fight
together against terrorism".¶ They said it was "essential" that major Internet providers cooperate with
governments in closely monitoring and, if necessary, removing online content "that aims to incite hatred
and terror".¶ They also want to "step up the detection and screening of travel movements of European
nationals" leaving or entering the EU's external borders, and modify Europe's internal Schengen freedom-of-movement rules to widen
information sharing and subject suspect passengers to greater checks. ¶ They saw a "crucial and urgent need" to establish an EU-wide database
of passenger information for travel inside Europe and for flights leaving or entering the 28-nation bloc.¶ The proposed measures are to be
discussed further at a February 12 EU summit focused on reinforcing security.¶ Holder announced a broader February 18 summit in Washington
to be hosted by US President Barack Obama.¶ The steps were unveiled after three days of carnage in Paris by three gunmen who claimed
allegiance to Al-Qaeda in Yemen and the rival Islamic State group.¶ The violence began with a bloody attack on the satirical newspaper Charlie
Hebdo on Wednesday, when two of the gunmen killed 12 people.¶ Twin assaults by French commandos on the gunmen holed up in two
separate locations -- in a town outside Paris and in a Jewish supermarket in the capital -- ended with the Islamists' deaths on Friday.¶
Civil
liberty concerns REUTERS¶ Holder said Sunday that the announced US summit would "discuss ways in
which we can counteract this violent extremism that exists around the world".¶ "Only if we work
together, through sharing of information, by pooling our resources, will we ultimately be able to defeat
those who are in a struggle with us about our fundamental values," he told reporters.¶ The interior and justice
ministers stressed in their joint statement that the enhanced monitoring of the Internet should be done with respect to it remaining "a forum
for free expression".¶ But
there are fears by some civil liberty groups that such state pressure on private
Internet companies could erode citizens' rights and freedom of expression online, especially in the wake
of the scandal over electronic snooping by the United States' NSA.¶ The increased checks on travel by Europeans was
also of concern. ¶ The European parliament and others want to ensure limits are imposed on the sharing of passenger data with the US to
prevent Europeans being exposed to unwarranted prying.¶ Undermining Schengen freedoms that have opened up most of the EU's internal
borders are also seen as a slapdown of one of the bloc's most cherished principles.¶ European-born jihadists ¶Interior Minister Bernard
Cazeneuve speaks to the press at the offices of the French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015 in Paris, France.¶ In the wake
of the Paris attacks, though, voices demanding reinforced domestic security against jihadists were louder than those championing personal
freedoms.¶ The EU commissioner for migration and home affairs, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said authorities are "determined to move ahead in
coordinating our efforts within Europe and with our international friends in order to give an end to this drama and this phenomenon".¶ French
Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve emphasised the problem of "foreign jihadist fighters in Syria and Iraq" many of whom come from EU
countries -- particularly those with sizeable Muslim populations such as France, Britain and Germany.¶ Information on them and on "terrorist
networks" must be shared between the allied countries, he said.¶ "We
news conference.¶
are resolved to fight against terrorism," Cazeneuve told a
Politics
Plan links to politics the house and the senate don’t like Islamic sensitivity bills
CAIR ’13 ( Council on American Islamic Relations Chicago; March 19, 2013; “THE INFLUENCE OF
ISLAMOPHOBIA IN CONGRESSIONAL POLITICS”; http://www.cairchicago.org/blog/2013/03/theinfluence-of-islamophobic-propagandists-in-congressional-politics/) //CC
A select group of expert propagandists wield considerable influence in congressional politics. These
so-called scholars and activists compile misinformation that is widely discredited and peddle it to
sympathetic right-leaning politicians who regurgitate its resulting hateful rhetoric on the national
stage. The most odious of these “misinformation experts” include Brigette Gabriel, Frank Gaffney,
Daniel Pipes, Walid Phares, Zuhdi Jasser and David Yerushalmi, just to name a few. Their rhetoric is
bigoted and incorrect, yet insidiously shapes our national discourse through their political allies who
hold influential positions in House Committees. The most influential political allies include: Rep. Peter
King, Rep. Allen West, Rep. Sue Myrick, Rep. Michele Bauchman, and Rep. Paul Broun among others.
Through their various think tanks and advocacy organizations, misinformation experts fear-monger
and propagate baseless and inflammatory rhetoric that shapes state and national discourse and policy.
Detention CP
Detention CP
Text: The Unites States federal government should end Islamophobic indefinite detention
policies.
Counterplan solves Islamophobic detention policies shape the War on Terror
Ralph 6 (Diana Ralph, PhD in Psychology and a Master of Social Work. She is an Associate Professor of Social Work at Carleton University,
"ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THE ‘‘WAR ON TERROR’’: THE CONTINUING PRETEXT FOR U.S. IMPERIAL CONQUEST", The Hidden History of 9-11-2001
Research in Political Economy, Volume 23, Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.261-298, 911blogger.com/node/16381)
Standing with Muslims against the “War on Terror ” In this chapter, I have demonstrated that: The overriding
motive for Bush’s ‘‘war on terror’’ is to secure control over the Middle East and Central Asia for U.S. oil,
military, and corporate interests. Bush’s handlers have been planning imperial conquest of the world since the Soviet Union
collapsed in 1989. From the evidence here and elsewhere, it is difficult to draw another conclusion than that Bush’s associates organized the 911 attacks to kick start popular support for this war. They
have continued to justify the ‘‘war on terror’’ by claiming
that Muslim terrorists pose an immanent danger to Americans. In fact, however, terrorism actually poses
minimal risk to Americans. The ‘‘war on terror’’ is a concept modeled on Israel’s assaults on Palestinians to provide a cover for
campaigns of territorial conquest. Far from being ‘‘under attack,’’ America has pre-emptively attacked and conquered two sovereign states, and
is threatening military domination of the entire world. In other words, Bush’s ‘‘war
on terror’’ is a massive con job,
perpetrated by a few oil and military elites, at the expense of Muslims particularly, but threatening
the security and well-being of virtually everyone on the planet . An immensely wealthy and powerful republic has
been hijacked by a small cabal of individuals...The American people have...been deliberately lied to, their interests cynically
misrepresented and misreported, the real aims and intentons of this private war of Bush the son and his junta concealed with complete
arrogance." (Said, 2003) Thomas Donnelly, author of the RAD blueprint for Bush’s ‘‘war on terror,’’ recently reaffirmed the neo-conservative
commitment, not to protect Americans from ‘‘terrorism,’’ but to conquer the world. This war, properly understood, is a struggle to build a
[new] ... order throughout the ‘‘greater Middle East,’’ that giant swath of the planet that extends from West Africa to Southeast Asia.
...Operation Iraqi Freedom represented the first step in a generational commitment to Iraq, but also the commitment of many generations to
transforming the greater Middle East....The vision of the Bush Doctrine is hugely ambitious; in embracing this great vision, the United States
must obligate the resources and create the institutions necessary to realize it." (Donnelly, 2004, pp. ix, 111) 4.1. ‘‘Either you are with us, or you
are with the Terrorists’’ Fear
and hatred of a scapegoated ‘‘enemy’’ are powerful tools by which despots
confuse people into believing that their oppressors are their salvation. Just as anti-Semitism served to
divide and silence progressive German movements in the early Nazi era, Islamophobia is dividing and
silencing us now. No one wants to associate with “terrorists”, much less be labelled and persecuted as one.
Many progressive Western people
fear and despise “fundmentalist” Muslims, and thereby fall into the
trap of allying themselves with, or at least not opposing, Islamophobic laws and practices in the name of
opposing “terrorism”. They thereby collude in undercutting the fabric of rights, due process, and equality
on which they too depend. The Bush Doctrine rhetoric has succeeded in convincing most white Americans
that “terrorists” pose a serious threat to their personal safety, and that the “war on terror” is
necessary to protect them. Islamophobic language and values have seeped into the fiber of our daily lives .
Bookstores now have “terrorism” sections, displaying some of the 5,036 mostly new books on the topic.15 Several U.S. colleges and universities
now offer degrees in “homeland security.” Media images of “Arab extremists” have become routine. Most Americans now believe that
“terrorism” is such a big problem, that they should pay with their taxes, their freedoms, their decimated public services, and their children’s
lives. In the summer of 2005, polls found that 79 percent of Americans believed that “the threat of terrorism against the U.S.” has increased or
stayed about the same (Polling Report.com, 2005). Seventy-six percent thought “Osama bin Laden himself is currently planning a significant
terrorist attack against the United States,” and 64 percent supported the Patriot Act. Sixty-four percent would be “willing to give up some of
[their] personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism” (PollingReport.com, 2005). Almost half of all Americans “believe the U.S.
government should restrict the civil liberties of Muslim-Americans” (Dean, 2005). In the wake of Hurricane Katrina and shocking revelations of
torture at Abu Ghraib prison, however, popular support for the “war on terror” plummetted. In November, 2005, 55 percent of Americans
disapproved of the way Bush is “dealing with the war on terrorism” (PollingReport.com, 2005). 4.2. Which Side are you on? Before 911, the anti-globalization movement had been rapidly gaining influence and unity worldwide. Opposition to U.S.-dominated institutions like the
World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G-8, NATO and APEC, had succeeded in disrupting and exposing several of their gatherings.
And in their place, the World Social Forum and other progressive people’s movements were demonstrating that indeed there are excellent
alternatives to globalization and corporate rule. The 9-11 “attacks” and the
“war on terror” derailed these hopeful
movements and imposed crippling constraints on dissent, democracy, and national sovereignty .
Under cover of Islamophobic targeting of Muslims, the U.S. is waging war on all movements for social
justice
both domestically and internationally, using
its new post 9-11 legislative powers and bloated military and
policing budgets. Domestically, the Bush administration is attacking democracy, abortion rights, the judiciary, environmental protections,
social security, public education, women’s rights, union rights, and civil rights (Dorhrn, 2003). Internationally, it pressures other nations to enact
similar “anti-terror” laws and policies, as well as demanding that they open their economies to full U.S. corporate rule. As Bernadette Dorhn
points out: “The result is a chilling effect. That is to say, people around the targets back away, get silent, don’t stand up when they
see the cost of simply expressing your opinion or even making a joke, let alone publicly objecting to what’s going on” (2003). Many progressive
groups oppose Islamophobia and support Muslim victims of U.S. and Israeli assaults. These include civil liberties associations, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, anti-Zionist Jewish and Christian groups, unions, peace groups, and student organizations like the Canadian
Federation of Students. Secular, Jewish, and Christian groups have formed alliances with Palestinians and Iraqis in oppostion to the Israeli
occupation of the West Bank. In
the U.S. the C enter for C onstitutional R ights works to end arbitrary
detention of Muslim detainees in Guantanamo
Bay and
elsewhere. In Canada, the Campaign to Stop Secret Trials in
Canada has mobilized broad support for Muslim detainees and their rights. However, even these
groups have not dared to challenge the Islamophobic base of the “anti-terror” legislation, for fear of
being called pro-terrorist. They are thereby left arguing that the particular individuals for whom they advocate aren’t terrorists,
while implicitly condoning the myth that “real” terrorists are lurking in the shadows. But under the Bush Doctrine, all
Muslims are presumed to be either current or potential terrorists, and their civil liberties have been sacrificed in the name of “national
security”. To
defeat the Bush plot for world control, we will need to challenge Islamophobic fear of
“terrorists”, to assert clearly that there is little substantive
terrorist
threat . What terrorism there is could better be
addressed through criminal justice systems and international law. More importantly we need to insist that the U.S. desist from both overt
preemptive wars and covert state-financed terrorism. The
actual security of both Americans and all other people will
be best served by ending the occupations of the West Bank, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and recognizing the right of all
nations to self-determination (including oil policies). We need to stand in solidarity with all Muslims, regardless
of their religious beliefs. At this juncture, Islamophobia is the key barrier to effective mobilization against the
Bush regime.
2NC
No aff can “solve” islamophobia but the counterplans challenge to indefinite detention
policies is sufficient to challenge islamophobia.
Butler 06 (Judith Butler, Professor at UC Berkeley, “Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence” Ch. 3: Indefinite Detention, p.
50, 2006)
If a person is simply deemed dangerous, then it is no longer a matter of deciding whether criminal acts
occurred. Indeed, "deeming" someone dangerous is an unsubstantiated judgment that in these cases works to
preempt determinations for which evidence is required. The license to brand and categorize and detain on the basis of
suspicion alone, expressed in this operation of "deeming," is potentially enormous. We have already seen it at
work in racial profiling, in the detention of thousands of Arab residents or Arab-American citizens,
sometimes on the basis of last names alone ; the harassment of any number of US and non-US citizens
at the immigration borders because some official "perceives"• a potential difficulty; the attacks on individuals of
Middle Eastern descent on US streets, and the targeting of Arab-American professors on campuses.
When Rumsfeld has sent the US into periodic panics or "alerts,"• he has not told the population what to look out for, but only to have a
heightened awareness of suspicious activity. This
objectless panic translates too quickly into suspicion of all darkskinned peoples, especially those who are Arab, or appear to look so to a population not always well
versed in making visual distinctions, say, between Sikhs and Muslims or, indeed, Sephardic or Arab Jews
and Pakistani-Americans. Although "deeming"• someone dangerous is considered a state prerogative
in these discussions, it is also a potential license for prejudicial perception and a virtual mandate to heighten
racialized ways of looking and judging in the name of national security. A population of Islamic
peoples, or those taken to be Islamic, has become targeted by this government mandate to be on
heightened alert , with the effect that the Arab population in the US becomes visually rounded up,
stared down, watched, hounded and monitored by a group of citizens who understand themselves as
foot soldiers in the war against terrorism. What kind of public culture is being created when a certain "indefinite
containment"• takes place outside the prison walls, on the subway, in the airports, on the street, in the workplace? A falafel restaurant run by
Lebanese Christians that does not exhibit the American flag becomes immediately suspect, as if the failure to fly the flag in the months
following September Il, zooi were a sign of sympathy with al-Qaeda, a deduction that has no justification, but which nevertheless ruled public
culture-and business interests_at that time. If it is the person, or the people, who are deemed dangerous, and no dangerous acts need to be
proven to establish this as true, then
the state constitutes the detained population unilaterally, taking them
out of the jurisdiction of the law , depriving them of the legal protections to which subjects under
national and international law are entitled . These are surely populations that are not regarded as
subjects, humans who are not conceptualized within the frame of a political culture in which human
lives are underwritten by legal entitlements, law, and so humans who are not humans. We saw evidence for
this derealization of the human in the photos of the shackled bodies in Guantanamo released by the Department of Defense. The DOD did not
hide these photos, but published them openly. My speculation is that they published these photographs to make known that a certain
vanquishing had taken place, the reversal of national humiliation, a sign of a successful vindication. These were not photographs leaked to the
press by some human rights agency or concerned media enterprise. So the international response was no doubt disconcerting, since instead of
moral triumph, many people, British parliamentarians and European human rights activists among them, saw serious moral failure. Instead of
vindication, many saw instead revenge, cruelty, and a nationalist and self-satisfied flouting of international convention. So that several
countries asked that their citizens be returned home for trial. But there
is something more in this degradation that calls
to be read. There is a reduction of these human beings to animal status , where the animal is
out of control,
figured as
in need of total restraint . It is important to remember that the bestialization of the human in this
way has little, if anything, to do with actual animals, since it is a figure of the animal against which the
human is defined. Even if, as seems most probable, some or all of these people have violent intentions, have been engaged in violent
acts, and murderous ones, there are ways to deal with murderers under both criminal and international law. The language with which
they are described by the US, however, suggests that these individuals are exceptional , that they may not
be individuals at all, that they must be constrained in order not to kill, that they are effectively
reducible to a desire to kill, and that regular criminal and international codes cannot apply to beings
such as these . The treatment of these prisoners is considered as an extension of war itself , not as a
postwar question of appropriate trial and punish- ment. Their detention stops the killing. If they were
not detained, and forcibly so when any movement is required, they would appar- ently start killing on
the spot; they are beings who are in a permanent and perpetual war.
It may be that al-Qaeda representatives
speak this way-some clearly do-but that does not mean that every individual detained embodies that position, or that those detained are
centrally concerned with the continuation of war. Indeed, recent reports, even from the investigative team in Guantanamo, suggest that some
of the detainees were only tangentially or transiently involved in the war effort." Other reports in the spring of 2003 made clear that some
detainees are minors, ranging from ages thirteen to sixteen. Even General Dunlavey, who admitted that not all the detainees were killers, still
claimed that the risk is too high to release such detainees. Rumsfeld cited in support of forcible detention the prison uprisings in Afghanistan in
which prisoners managed to get hold of weapons and stage a battle inside the prison. In
this sense, the war is not, and cannot
be, over; there is a chance of battle in the prison, and there is a warrant for physical restraint, such that the postwar prison
becomes the continuing site of war . It would seem that the rules that govern combat are in place, but not
the rules that govern the proper treatment of prisoners separated from the war itself. When General
Counsel Haynes was asked, "So you could in fact hold these people for years without charging them, simply to keep them off the street, even if
you don't charge them?" he replied, "We are within our rights, and I don't think anyone disputes it that we may hold enemy combatants for the
duration of the conflict. And the confiict is still going and we don 'z see an erm' in sig/zz right now" (my emphasis). | 1 If the war is against
terrorism, and the definition of terrorism expands to include every questionable instance of global difficulty, how can the war end? Is
it, by definition, a war without end, given the lability of the terms "terrorism"• and "war"•? Although the pictures were published as a sign of
US triumph, and so apparently indicating a conclusion to the war effort, it was clear at the time that bombing and armed confiict were
continuing in Afghanistan, the
war was not over, and even the photographs, the degradation, and the
indefinite detention were continuing acts of war. Indeed, war seems to have established a more or less
permanent condition of national emergency, and the sovereign right to self-protection outfianks any
and all recourse to law.
Chow K
1NC
The aff is engaged in a war of words when in reality they do nothing for the Muslims being
surveilled by the NSA- the starting point for advocacy should be to confront our own privilege
Chow ‘93. Rey Chow, Professor of English and Comp Lit, Writing Diaspora: tactics of intervention in
contemporary cultural studies, pg. 17
While the struggle for hegemony remains necessary for many reasons – especially in cases where
underprivileged groups seek privilege – I remain skeptical of the validity of hegemony over time,
especially if it is hegemony formed through intellectual power. The question for me is not how
intellectuals can obtain hegemony (a question that positions them in an oppositional light against
dominant power and neglects their share of that power through literacy, through the culture of words),
but how they can resist, as Michel Foucault said, the forms of power that transform them into its objects
and instrument in the sphere of knowledge, truth, consciousness and discourse. Putting it another way, how do
intellectuals struggle against a hegemony which already includes them and which can no longer be divided into the state and civil society in
Gramsci‘s terms, nor be clearly demarcated into national and transnational space? Because borders have so clearly meandered into so many
intellectual issues that the more stable and conventional relation between borders and the field no longer holds, intervention cannot simply be
thought as the creation of new fields. Instead, it is necessary to think primarily in terms of borders – of borders, that is, as para-sites that never
take over a field in its entirety but erode it slowly and tactically. The work of Michel de Certeau is a helpful for the formulation of this parasitical
intervention.De
Certeau distinguished between strategy and another practice – tactic – in the following
terms. A strategy has the ability to transform the uncertainties of history into readable spaces. . Strategy
therefore belongs to an economy of the proper place and to those who are committed to the building,
growth,, and fortification of a field. A text, for instance, would become in this economy ?a cultural
weapon, a private hunting preserve,? or ?a means of social stratification? in the order of the Great Wall
of China (de Certeau, p. 171). A tactic, by contrast, is a calculated action determined by the absence of a
proper locus (de Certeau, p. 37). Betting on time instead of space, a tactic concerns an operational logic
whose models may go as far back as the age-old rules of fishes and insects that disguise or transform
themselves in order to survive, and which has in any case ben concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in Western
culture (de Certeau. P. xi). Why are tactics useful at this moment? As discussions about multiculturalism, interdisiplinarity, the third world
intellectual, and other companion issue develop in the American academy and society today, and as rhetorical claims to political change and
difference are being put forth, many deep-rooted, politically reactionary forces return to haunt us. Essentialist
notions of culture
and history; conservative notions of territorial and linguistic propriety, and the otherness ensuring from
them; unattested claims of oppression and victimization that are used merely to guilt-trip and to
control; sexist and racist reaffirmations of sexual and racial diversities that are made merely in the name
of righteousness – all these forces creates new solidarities whose ideological premises remain
unquestioned. These new solidarities are often informed by a strategic attitude which repeats what
they seek to overthrow. The weight of old ideologies being reinforced over and over again is immense.
We need to remember as intellectuals that the battles we fight are battles of words. Those who argue
the oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and are most certainly
not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival in metropolitan and
nonmetropolitan space alike. What academic intellectuals must confront is thus not their victimization
by society at large (or their victimization-in-solidarity-with-the-oppressed), but the power, wealth, and
privilege that ironically accumulate from their oppositional viewpoint,and the widening gap between
the professed contents of their words and the upward mobility they gain from such words. (When
Foucault saidintellectuals need to struggle against becoming the object and instrument of power, he
spoke precisely to this kind of situation.) The predicament we face in the West, where intellectual
freedom shares a history with economic enterprise, is that if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of
big business,. . . he will be wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen.28 Why should
we believe in those who continue to speak a language of alterity-as-lack while their salaries and
honoraria keep rising?How do we resist the turning-into-propriety of oppositional discourses, when the
intention of such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the proper? How do we prevent
what begin as tactics – that which is without any base where it could stockpile its winnings? (deCerteau,
p.37)–from turning into a solidly fenced-off field, in the military no less than in the academic sense?
The aff’s victimization of Arab Americans projects more surveillance onto these communities
Spivak and Barlow ’04. GayatriChakravortySpivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Human- ities and
Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, Tani E. Barlow,
T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of History and director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice
University,“Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response: An Interview with GayatriSpivak,” positions: east
asia cultures critique, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2004, pg. 140
GayatriChakravortySpivak: My problem is that I am unable to give a general response. It is a pity in all of
this postnational talk that this cruel nationalism—taking pleasure in the death of others—begins with
the shock of the death of one’s own. It is a cause for great sorrow that this event brings out the worst
kind of “herd mentality”—to quote Nietzsche—in human beings, and it falls under nationalism. Bush’s
spin doctors have told him to say that Islam is a wonderful religion and the hijackers hijacked it. Therefore one must now endlessly be nice to Arab Americans even as there is relentless racial profiling and
undercover incarceration. Feminism is show- ing its problems too. Why are members of the
Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan suddenly taken to be prophets? We don’t know
much about their values. They are a good group. They haven’t appeared all of a sudden, but they have
only now been picked up because the Taliban hate their women. But people know little about their
specific problems. They also cannot give them real informed sympathy because they are taken as a
kind of fetish that will justify support for the war, although they themselves oppose it. On the other
side, you have the picture that CNN showed of U.S. women on aircraft carriers who are actually chief
programmers, wielding sextants and so on. And the guy even said that there can be no more sexist jokes
about women drivers. There is this wonderful blond girl. Midwestern-looking, freckled cheeks, saying, “If
I can drive an aircraft carrier, I can drive a truck.” These are issues I wrote about in “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” twenty years ago. Who could question that these are terrible things? You would be foolish to
say there was any justification for burning widows or stoning adulter- esses. On the other hand, this
sudden exposure of visible violence by people, justifying war, killing Afghans, does nothing to
guarantee that the subaltern women’s epistemic production will be one iota altered. I am interested
not only in the fact that men do harm to women, but the fact that when it comes to the subaltern
woman, nobody is interested in the patience that is required, in order to make her not acquiesce
when they arrive at the point of visible violence.
The aff acts as the maoist – criticizing civil society while also benefiting from their own
privilege
Chow ‘93. Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown Writing Diaspora: Tactics of
Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, pg. 10-11
The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kind of
representational agency, call the Maoist. ArifDirlik, who has written extensively on the history of political movements in
twentieth-century China, sums up the interpretation of Mao Zedong commonly found in Western Marxist analyses in terms of a "Third Worldist
fantasy"—"a fantasy of Mao as a Chinese reincarnation of Marx who fulfilled the Marxist premise that had been betrayed in the West."16 The
Maoist was the phoenix which arose from the ashes of the great disillusionment with Western culture in the 1960s and which found hope in the
Chinese Communist Revolution.17 In the 1970s, when it became possible for Westerners to visit China as guided and pampered guests of the
Beijing establishment, Maoists came back with reports of Chinese society's absolute, positive difference from Western society and of the
Cultural Revolution as "the most important and innovative example of Mao's concern with the pursuit of egalitarian, populist, and
communitarian ideals in the course of economic modernization" (Harding, p. 939). At that time, even poverty in China was regarded as
"spiritually ennobling, since it meant that [the] Chinese were not possessed by the wasteful and acquisitive consumerism of the United States"
(Harding, p. 941). Although the excessive admiration of the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of
China,the
Maoist is very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and East Asian
fields. Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society hut who is fed up with
capitalism—a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to the one that is
supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the way desire works: What
she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an identification with and valorization of that which
she is not/does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other's deprivation—"having" poverty or
"having" nothing—the Maoist's strategy becomes in the main a rhetorical renunciation of the material
power that enables her rhetoric. In terms of intellectual lineage, one of the Maoist’s most important
ancestors is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Like Jane, the Maoist’s means to moral power is a specific
representational position—the position of powerlessness. In their reading of Jane Eyre, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard
Tennenhouse argue that the novel exemplifies the paradigm of violence that expresses its dominance through a representation of the self as
powerless: Until the very end of the novel,Janeis always excluded from every available form of social power. Her survival seems to depend on
renouncing what power might come to her as a teacher, mistress, cousin, heiress, or missionary’s wife. She repeatedly flees
from such
forms of inclusion in the field of power, as if her status as an exemplary subject, like her authority as narrator,
depends entirely on her claim to a kind of truth which can only be made from a position of powerlessness. By
creating such an unlovely heroine and subjecting her to one form of harassment after another, Bronte
demonstrates the power of words alone.This reading of Jane Eyre highlights her not simply as the female
underdog who is often identified by feminist and Marxist critics, but as the intellectual who acquires power
through a moral rectitude that was to become the flip side of Western imperialism’s ruthlessness. Lying at
the core of Anglo-American liberalism, this moral rectitude would accompany many territorial and economic conquests overseas with a firm
sense of social mission. When Jane Eyre went to the colonies in the nineteenth century, she turned into the Christian missionary. It is this
understanding—that Bronte’s depiction of a socially marginalized English woman is, in terms of ideological production, fully complicit with
England’s empire building ambition rather than opposed to it—that prompted GayatriSpivak to read Jane Eyre as a text in the service of
imperialism. Referring to Bronte’s treatment of the “madwoman,” Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole character, Spivak charges Jane
Eyre for, precisely, its humanism, in which the “native subject” is not created as an animal but as the object of what might be termed the
terrorism of the categorical imperative.This
kind of creation is imperialism’s use/travesty of the Kantian
metaphysical demand to “make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end
himself.”In the twentieth century, as Europe’s former colonies became independent, Jane Eyre became the Maoist. Michel de Certeau
describes the affinity between her two major reincarnations, one religious and the other political, this way: The place that was formerly
occupied by the Church or Churches vis-à-vis established powers remains recognizable, over the past two centuries, in the functioning of the
opposition known as leftist…There
is a vis-à-vis the established order, a relationship between the Churches that
defended an other world and the parties of the left, which since the nineteenth century, have promoted
a different future. In both cases, similar functional characteristics can be discerned. The Maoist retains many of
Jane’s awesome features, chief of which are a protestant passion to turn powerlessness into “truth” and an idealist
intolerance of those who may think differently from her. Whereas the great Orientalist blames the living “third
world” natives for the loss of the ancient non-Western civilization, his loved object, the Maoist applauds the same
natives for personifying and fulfilling her ideals. For the Maoist in the 1970s, the mainland Chinese were, in
spite of their “backwardness,” a puritanical alternative to the West in human form—a dream come true.
Their project amounts to a politics of self-subalternization, where the judge is encouraged to
find solidarity with the other of the 1ac - their rhetorical strategy amounts to nothing more
than a sham renunciation authorized by the same structures of power that produce alterity in
the first place
Spivak ’88.GayatriChakravortySpivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Human- ities and Director of
the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in
Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Carl Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, pg. 24-25
SOME OF THE most radical criticism coming out of the West today is the result of an interested desire
to conserve the subject of the West, or the West as Subject. The theory of pluralized ‘subject-effects’
gives an illusion of undermining subjective sovereignty while often providing a cover for this ' subject
of knowledge. Although the history of Europe as Subject is narrativized by the law, political economy,
and ideology of the West, this concealed Subject pretends it has ‘no geo—political
determinations.’The much publicized critique of the sovereign subject thus actually inaugurates a
Subject. . . . This S/subject, curiously sewn together into a transparency by denegations, belongs to the
exploiters’ side of the international division of labor. 5 It is impossible for contemporary French
intellectuals to imagine the kind ' of Power and Desire that would inhabit the unnamed subject of the
Other of Europe. It is not only that everything they read, critical or uncritical, is caught within the
debate of the production of that Other,supporting or critiquing the constitution of the Subject as
Europe. It is also that, in the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate
the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could ‘ occupy (invest?) its itinerary not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law. . . . In the face of
the possibility that the intellectual is complicit in the persistent constitution of Other as the Self’s
shadow, a possibility of political practice for the intellectual would be to put the economic ‘under
erasure,’ to see the economic ' factor as irreducible as it reinscribes the social text, even as it is erased,
however imperfectly, when it claims to be the final determinant or the transcendental signified. The
clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and
heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other. This project is also the asymetrical
obliteration of the trace of that Other in its precarious Subjectivity. It is well known that Foucault
locates epistemic violence, a complete overhaul of the episteme, in the redefinition of sanity at the end
of the European eighteenth century. But what if that particular redefinition was only a part of the
narrative of history in Europe as well as in the colonies? What if the two projects of epistemic overhaul
worked as dislocated and unacknowledged parts of a vast two-handed engine? Perhaps it is no more
than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated
knowledge,’ ‘a whole set of "knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or
insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required
level of cognition or scientificity’ (Foucault 1980: 82). This is not to describe ‘the way things really were’
or to privilege the narrative of history as imperialism as the best version of history. It is, rather, to
offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality' - was established as the normative
one. . . . Let us now move to consider the margins (one can just as well say the silent, silenced center)
of the circuit marked out by this epistemic violence, men and women among the illiterate peasantry,
the tribals, the lowest strata of the urban subproletariat. According to Foucault and Deleuze (in the
First World, under the standardization and tegimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem
to recognize this) the oppressed, if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be bypassed
here), and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist thematic is at work here) can
speak and know their conditions. We must now confront the following question: On the other side of
the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside the circuit of the
epistemic violence of imperialist law and education supplementing an earlier economic text, can the
subaltern speak?. . .
Close your eyes to the 1ac—any knowledge or political productivity they can generate will be
redeployed to destroy the very subjects they hope to help.
Spanos ’00.William V. Spanos, distinguished professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton
University, Binghamton, New York; he is a founder and editor of the critical journal boundary 2, PhD, 1964, University of
Wisconsin, Madison: Literary theory, literature and philosophy, “America’s Shadow: An Anatomy of Empire” 2000.
p. 48-50
To restore a region from its present barbarism to its former classical greatness; to instruct (for its own
benefit) the Orient in the ways of the modern West; to subordinate or underplay military power in
order to aggrandize the project of glorious knowledge acquired in the process of political domination
of the Orient; to formulate the Orient, to give it shape, identity, definition with full recognition of its
place in memory, its importance to imperial strategy, and its "natural" role as an appendage to
Europe; to dignify all the knowledge collected during colonial occupation with the title "contribution to modern learning" when the natives
had neither been consulted nor treated as anything except as pre-texts for a text whose usefulness was not to the natives; to feel oneself as a
European in command, almost at will, of Oriental history, time, and geography; to institute new areas of specialization; to establish new
disciplines; to
divide, deploy, schematize, tabulate, index, and record everything in sight(and out of sight); to
make out of every observable detail a generalization and out of every generalization an immutable
law about the Oriental nature, temperament, mentality, custom, or type; and, above all, to transmute living reality into the stuff of
texts, to possess (or think one possesses) actuality mainly because nothing in the Orient seems to resist one's powers: these are the features of
Orien- talist projection entirely realized in the Description de l'£gypte, itself enabled
and reinforced by Napoleon's wholly Orientalist
en- gulfment of Egypt by the instruments of Western knowledge and power.89 Nor, finally, is it an accident that the
emergent Linnaean system of classification — of identifying, naming, and classifying the flora and fauna of nature — inaugurated the global
taxonomic projects, most no- tably that of his student Anders Sparrman,90 that became the essential European means of producing a modern
orneoimperialist
discourse, a discourse that,in the name of the truth of empirical science, invents or
constructs the Other in the image of the First World. I am referring to what Mary Louise Pratt, in her Foucauldian study of
the relation- ship between scientific travel writing and colonialism in South Africa and Latin America, has calledthe "anti-conquest
narrative." This is the narrative "in which the naturalist naturalizes the bourgeois European'sown
global presence and authority" to differentiate its "benign" truth- producing motive from an earlier,
overtly violent imperial narrative. In a way that recalls Foucault's and Said's differentiation of the visible and "inefficient"
deployment of power in the ancien regime from the more invisible and materially and politically economical version of the Enlightenment, Pratt
observes: Natural history asserted an urban, lettered, male authority over the whole of the planet;it
elaborated a rationalizing,
extractive, dissociative understanding which overlaid functional, experiential relations among people, plants, and animals. In
these respects,it figures a certain kind of global hegemony, notably one based on possession of land and
resources rather than control over routes. At the same time, in and of itself, the system of nature as a descriptive paradigm
was an utterly benign and abstract appropriation of the planet. Claiming no transformative potential whatsoever, it differed sharply from overly
imperial articulations of conquest, conversion, territorial appropriation, and enslavement. The
system created... a Utopian,
innocent vision of European global authority, which I refer to as an anti-conquest. The term is intended to
emphasize the relational meaning of natural history, the extent to which it became meaningful specifically in contrast with an earlier imperial,
and prebourgeois, European expansionist presence.91The
difference between an earlier, pre-Enlightenment, and a
later, post-Enlightenment, configuration of the internal space of the imperial circle is, of course,
crucial to any understanding of the essence of imperial practice. But my purpose in thus invoking Foucault's analysis
of the complicity of the classificatory table of the Enlightenment with the domination of the Other in the disciplinary
society, and Said's and Pratt's extension of Foucault's genealogical insight to includethe modern European imperial project, is
not to bring a story about the development of the technology of European colonialism to its fulfillment
and narrative closure, one that renders prior technologies of power anachronistic. It is, rather, to
retrieve a fundamental dimension of this story that has been obliterated from memory even as it
resonates unthought in the very contemporary language these postcolonial critics use to indict the
truth discourse of the West as "imperial." I want to suggest that the classificatory table, as microcosm
of a larger spatial totality and as the model for wider "imperial" practices (the mass production process, the panoptic penal system, the medical and psychiatric hospital, the family, the classroom, the nation-state, the colonial administration, and so on), is
grounded in and enabled by the metaphysical principle of principles or, as Enrique Dussel puts it, "the ideology of ideologies":92 that Identity is
the condition for the possibility of difference and not the other way around.Unlike its predecessor in the ancien regime, metaphysical inquiry at
this advanced Enlightenment stage does not obliterate the contradictory, amorphous, unimproved, and "ahistorical" Other from the vantage
point of a visible "center elsewhere."It
"acknowledges" this Other's claims as contributive to(the knowledge of)the
larger self-identical Whole. In other words, it "classifies" the amorphous Others from the vantage point of an invisible "center
elsewhere." It differentiates these Others into discrete phenomena — attributes distinguishing identities
to them— within and in behalf of a prior encompassing self-present total Identity. This individuation of the amorphous
Other conveys a sense of the sovereign integrity of the differentiated entities, but it obscures the fact
that their uniqueness is entirely dependent on a dominant synchronic Totality, the always present and
determining center of which is always out of sight.To acquire validity the differentiated entity must accommodate its
differential partiality to the prior Totality, must, that is, objectify and subordinate itself to — take its
proper place within — the gridded structure of the dominant Identity. To become a subject it must heed the call —
the hailing — of the Subject. As his invocation of the ontological metaphorics of the center and the circle should suggest, what the Lacanian
Marxist Louis Althusser says about "the interpel- lation of the individual as subject" — the (subjected) subject invented by the bourgeois
capitalist Enlightenment — applies by extension to the spatial economy of the (neo)imperial project as such:
Islam Link
The 1AC victims of discrimination based on their “Islamic” nature and defining the West
based on its Islamophobia recreates the violent categorical differences –only the alternative
can solve the case by charting a course between America and Islam
Spivak and Barlow ’04. GayatriChakravortySpivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Human- ities
and Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, Tani E.
Barlow, T.T. and W.F. Chao Professor of History and director of the Chao Center for Asian Studies at Rice
University, “Not Really a Properly Intellectual Response: An Interview with GayatriSpivak,” positions:
east asia cultures critique, Volume 12, Number 1, Spring 2004, pg 160
GCS: Yes, we do not tend to notice that Euro-U.S. globality, which is tac- itly offered as the unmarked
global as such, with endless invocations of the transnational subject and satellite dishes in Nepalese
villages, is the one that conjures with nation-state alliances. It is in that other globality called “Islamic” that archaic and residual, moving, globalizing frontiers are in conflict with the idea of the
nation-states. As in the case of the Gulf War, it is the case of people one way, the state another. We
must complicate the global in order to get a grip upon this fast-evolving situation. In the last quarter of
the nineteenth century, Amir Abd-ur-Rahman of Afghanistan tried to think through such explanations
between the provisional globality of something called “Islam” and the urgent need for the emergence of
a practical nation- state. I do not have access to his autobiography in Farsi, but I have carefully studied
its English translation, attempting to read as much as possible be- tween its lines. Not all of it is by his
hand of course; one is not gullible about the evidentiary strength of autobiography, just as one is aware
of the linea- ments of the autobiographical in the most “objective organization of facts.” This
characteristic of devising and charting a course between the existing solidarity of “Islam” and the
consolidation of the frontiers and boundaries of the nation-states, loosely established as Afghanistan
by Ahmad Shah Durani in 1747, is so pervasive in this text that it is hard to isolate a quotation. In 1876
he drew up agreements to create peace between all of the various groups in that area: Hindus, Muslims,
tribals, gypsies, you name it. There were over two hundred Firmans of this sort in existence in Farsi. It
could have consol- idated a nation-state negotiating between “Islam” and the commonality of religions
and ways of life, interchangeable at this time, accessing the larger dimensions of this other word, haq,
which is translated into English rather misleadingly as “right,” and so on. So again, an unmarked
centrality was not allowed to emerge in Afghanistan, and no one knows anything about this now as they
are talking and talking about what’s going on.
Alt Solves
Alternative solves—results in individual methods of revolt against violence such as
Islamophobia like self-immolation—creates a better method of resolving problems
Spivak ’11 GayatriChakravortySpivak, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Human- ities and Director of
the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
Frontier Vol. 43, No. 25, May 22-28, 2011, http://www.frontierweekly.com/pdf-files/vol-4345/subaltern-43-45.pdf
The subaltern is a position without identity. If you think you can claim to be specifically a subaltern,
the only thing to do with it is to lead in the name of the subaltern, a grounding error in the same
category as tracing Bach, only reversed, from above, not from below.7 Jonathan Chauveau, a French
journalist (like many politically correct folk in that part of the world, anxious to have me endorse a
speaking subaltern), e-mailed me as follows : the popular revolts in Africa and their political
consequences were neither anticipated nor envisaged by the countries concerned and even less by
international diplomacy. Can one explain this blindness by the fact that leadership came from young
people and women not belonging to recognized circles of the "official opposition." It would thus be their
subaltern position —a population not recognized as a "classically" constituted political force— which
would explain that no one anticipated these events definitively, because no one had, at their disposal,
the means for hearing them, listening to them, or yet understanding them. Do you agree with this
analysis? Is it not a case of the subaltern grabbing the right to speak? ...Given that these popular
uprisings seem identical. Can one envisage a regional political alliance in future? I replied :I am of course
tremendously impressed by what's happening in North Africa, but it's not necessarily "the subaltern
speaking." It is rather the awe-inspiring spectacle of citizens claiming citizenship. It is possible that the
urban subproletariat mingled with the largely metropolitan, class-mixed, gender-mixed crowd we saw in
Tahrir Square. There was also a phenomenon of "prendre la parole" by the private sector, by civil
society, by the citizen. Unfortunately, if the term "subaltern" has to remain useful, it cannot be
identified with varieties of national liberation movements. It must, however, be said, that the young
man who burnt himself to death in despair in Tunisia might be thought of as a subaltern bringing
himself to crisis, "speaking," and there being an infrastructure of political will, created, paradoxically,
by the predatory state, able to "hear" him and complete his speech act.8
AT: Framework
Rather than attempting to know the Truth of Islamophobia, we should refuse attempts to
locate our politics in the reality of the present and FIRST AND FOREMOST seek to interrogate
our subject positions in academia to allow others to speak for themselves.
Owen ‘97. David Owen, professor of social sciences at Southampton University, 1997, “Maturity and
Modernity: Nietszche, Weber, Foucault and the ambivalence of reason,” Routledge publishers,
published July 22, 1997
In our reflections on Foucault’s methodology, it was noted that, like Nietszche and Weber, he commits
himself to a stance of value-freedom as an engaged refusal to legislate for others. Foucault’s critical
activity is oriented to human autonomy yet his formal account of the idea of autonomy as the activity
of self-transformation entails that the content of this activity is specific to the struggles of particular
groups and individuals. Thus, while the struggle against humanist forms of power/knowledge relations
denotes the formal archiectonic interest of genealogy as critique, the determination of the ‘main
danger’ which denotes the ‘filling in’ of this interest is contingent upon the dominant systems of
constraint confronted by specific groups and individuals. For example, the constitution of women as
‘hysterical,’ of blacks as ‘criminal,’ of homosexuals as ‘perverted’ all operate through humanist forms
of power/knowledge relations, yet the specificity of the social practices and discourses engaged in
producing these ‘identities’ entails that while these struggles share a general formal interest in
resisting the biopolitics of humanism, their substantive interests are distinct. It is against this context
that Foucault’s stance of value-freedom can be read as embodying a respect for alterity. The
implications of this stance for intellectual practice became apparent in Foucault’s distinction between
the figures of the ‘universal’ and ‘specific’ intellectual. Consider the following comments: In a general
way, I think that intellectuals-if this category exists, which is not certain or perhaps even desirable- are
abandoning their old prophetic function. And by that I don’t mean only their claim to predict what will
happen, but also the legislative function that they so long aspired for: ‘See what must be done, see what
is good, follow me. In the turmoil that engulfs you all, here is the pivotal point, here is where I am.’ The
greek wise man, the jewish prophet, the roman legislators are still models that haunt those who, today,
practice the profession of speaking and writing. The universal intellectual, on Foucault’s account, is that
figure who maintains a commitment to critique as a legislative activity in which the pivotal positing of
universal norms (or universal procedures for generating norms) grounds politics in the ‘truth; of our
being (e.g. our ‘real’ interests). The problematic form of this type of intellectual practice is a central
concern of Foucault’s critique of humanist politics in so far as humanism simultaneously asserts and
undermines autonomy. If, however, this is the case, what alternative conceptions of the role of the
intellectual and the activity of critique can Foucault present to us? Foucault’s elaboration of the figure of
the ‘specific’ inellectual provides the beginnings of an answer to this question: I dream of the
intellectual who destroys evidence and generalities, the one who, in the inertias and constraints of
the present time, locates and marks the weak points, the openings, the lines of force, who is
incessantly on the move, doesn’t know exactly where he is heading nor what he will think tomorrow
for he is too attentive to the present. The historicity of thought, the impossibility of locating an
Archimedean point outside of time, leads Foucault to locate intellectual activity as an ongoing
attentiveness to the present in terms of what is singular and arbitrary in what we take to be universal
and necessary. Following from this, the intellectual does not seek to offer grand theories but specific
analyses, not global but local criticism. We should be clear on the latter point for it is necessary to
acknowledge that Foucault’s position does not entail the impossibility of ‘acceding to a point of view
that could give us access to any complete and definitive knowledge of what may constitute our
historical limits’ and, consequently, ‘ we are always in the position of beginning again’ (FR p. 47). The
upshot of this recognition of the partial character of criticism is not, however, to produce an ethos of
fatal resignation but, in far as it involves a recognition that everything is dangerous, ‘a hyper-and
pessimistic activism’ (FR p. 343). In other words, it is the very historicity and partiality of criticism which
bestows on the activity of critique its dignity and urgency. What of this activity then? We can sketch the
Foucault account of the activity of critique by coming to grips with the opposition he draws between
‘ideal’ critique and ‘real’ transformation. Foucault suggests that the activity of critique ‘is not a matter
of saying that things are not right as they are’ but rather ‘of pointing out what kinds of assumptions,
what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, uncontested modes of thought and practices we accept rest’
(PPC p. 154). This distinction is perhaps slightly disingenuous, yet Foucault’s point is unintelligible if we
recognize his concern to disclose the epistemological grammar which informs our social practices as the
starting point of critique. This emerges in his recognition that ‘criticism (and radical criticism) is
absolutely indispensable for any transformation’: A transformation that remains within the same
mode of thought, a transformation that is only a way of adjusting the same thought more closely to
the reality of things can merely be a superficial transformation. (PPC p. 155) The genealogical thrust of
this critical activity is ‘to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that what is
accepted as self-evident is no longer accepted as such’ for ‘as soon as one can no longer think things as
one formerly thought them, transformation becomes both very urgent, very difficult, and quite possible’
(PPC p. 155). The urgency of transformation derives from the contestation of thought (and the social
practices in which it is embedded) as the form of our autonomy, although this urgency is given its
specific character for modern culture by the recognition that the humanist grammar of this thought ties
us into the technical matrix of biopolitics. The ‘specificity’ of intellectual practice and this account of
the activity of critique come together in the refusal to legislate a universal determination of ‘what is
right’ in favour of the perpetual problematisation of the present. It is not a question, for Foucault, of
invoking a determination of who we are as a basis for critique but of locating what we are now as the
basis for a reposing of the question, “who are we?” the role of the intellectual is thus not to speak on
behalf of others (the dispossessed, the downtrodden) but to create the space within which their
struggles become visible such that these others can speak for themselves. The question remains,
however, as to the capacity of Foucault’s work to perform this critical activity through an entrenchment
of the ethics of creativity as the structures of recognition through which we recognize our autonomy in
the contestation of determinations of who we are.
Our framework accesses the best internal link to intellectual activism—star this argument
because it’s the only thing that makes this debate matter outside of the ballot
Constable ’95 (Elizabeth L. Constable, professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine,
Review of: Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, South
Central Review, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Spring, 1995), pg. 74, jstor)
Rey Chow's collection of eight essays provides a vigorous, insightful analysis of the political,
pedagogic, and institutional challenges facing intellectuals in a world where, for Chow,diasporic
consciousness defines "the reality of being intellectual"(15). Atatime when cultural studies has
become increasingly accepted in educational institutions, the field has also inevitably become, not
only critical, but in its turn, constitutive of our institutions. Chow's sharp observations and energetic
inquiries intend to restore the critical, self-questioning edge to intellectuals' work in cultural studies. As
the title iindicates, her interest lies in "tactics of in to triggering intervention," finding ways to rresist
the "turning-into-propriety of oppositional discourses” (17).
AT: Perm
The perm is a standard imperialist strategy that marginalizes and interprets criticism rather
than listening to it.
Briggs and Sharp ’04 John Briggs and Joanne Sharp, professors at the Department of Geography and
Geomatics University of Glasgow, “Indigenous knowledges and development: a postcolonial caution,”
Third World Quarterly, 25 (4). pg. 661-676
Yet to receive much critical attention in development theory and practice is the nature of the inclusion
of indigenous knowledges in development thinking. A central tenet of postcolonial theory is its concern
with the ontological and epistemological status of the voices of subaltern peoples in Western knowledge
systems, and a postcolonial interrogation of the inclusion of indigenous knowledges in development
suggests caution. Indeed, Spivak(1988)has questioned whether “the subaltern” can ever speak; even
when apparently expressing her own views, the subaltern is not able to express her true self.Writing
about attempts to recover the voices and experiences of the subaltern in South Asian historiography, Spivak has
argued that the subaltern cannot speak, so imbued must she be with the words, phrases and cadences of Western
thought in order for her to be heard. In order to be taken seriously – to be seen as offering knowledge and not
opinion or folklore – the lifeworld of the subaltern has to be translated into the language of science, development
or philosophy, dominated by Western concepts and Western languages. For Spivak (1988), the implications of
this “epistemic violence” mean that the ways of knowing the world and knowing the self in non-Western
culture are trivialised and invalidated by Western scientists and experts. Hence, the subaltern must
always be caught in translation, never truly expressing herself, but always already interpreted.
Furthermore, postcolonial theorists(for example, Spivak 1988; hooks 1990; Goss 1996)have questioned the
degree to which academics and experts in the West really want to engage with people elsewhere, an
engagement which requires a de-centring of themselves as experts.Some postcolonial theorists have
already bemoaned the lack of true engagement with the knowledges and voices of the West’s “others”,
and, despite claims to be interested in others, suggest that the West is only interested in hearing its own
voice (hooks 1990; Spivak 1988; Mohanty 1988). Hooks’ (1990) autobiographical approach tells a similar tale to
Spivak in her attempt to be heard from the margins. For her,the margins are a site of “radical possibility”
which reject the politics of inside and outside, because “to be on the margins is to be part of the whole
but outside the main body”(hooks 1990:341). It is a hybridised indigenous knowledge which she believes
offers a unique and important perspective which is not distorted by the power and prejudices of the
centre. However, hooks has felt silenced by those who seek the experience, but not the wisdom, of the
other. She argues that“I was made ‘other’ there in that space...they did not meet me there in that space.
They met me at the center”(hooks 1990:342). The experiences of the marginalised are used in the West,
but without opening up the process to their knowledges, theories and explanations. When there is a
meeting, it is at the metropolitan centre, in the(predominantly)Western institutions of
power/knowledge(aid agencies, universities, the pages of journals)and in the languages of the west(science,
philosophy, social science and so on, expressed in English, French, Spanish and so on). So by approaching the
institutions of knowledge, she has been forced to the centre, a location both metaphorical in its control
of authority and geographical in its physical presence. For local knowledge and narratives to be heard at
all, they have to move to this central terrain, where they may be “accepted” and subsequently
appropriated.She claims to have met a reluctance to abandon the mark of authority, experiencing instead only a
desire for material from which explanations can be made. Western researchers want to know about her
experiences, but not her own explanations.
T
1NC
1. “Curtail” means to restrict
Webster’s 15 – Webster's New World College Dictionary, 4th Ed., “curtail”,
http://www.yourdictionary.com/curtail
verb
To curtail is defined as to restrict something , stop something or deprive of something.
An example of curtail is when a town wants to stop drunk driving.
2. Violation - “Restrictions” are direct governmental limitations –
Viterbo 12 (Annamaria, Assistant Professor in International Law – University of Torino, PhD in
International Economic Law – Bocconi University and Jean Monnet Fellow – European University
Institute, International Economic Law and Monetary Measures: Limitations to States' Sovereignty and
Dispute, p. 166)
In order to distinguish an exchange restriction from a trade measure, the Fund chose not to give relevance to the
purposes or the effects of the measure and to adopt, instead, a technical criterion that focuses on the
method followed to design said measure.
An interpretation that considered the economic effects and purposes of the measures (taking into
account the fact that the measure was introduced for balance of payments reasons or to preserve
foreign currency reserves) would have inevitably extended the Fund's jurisdiction to trade restrictions,
blurring the boundaries between the IMF and the GATT. The result of such a choice would have been
that a quantitative restriction on imports imposed for balance of payments reasons would have fallen
within the competence of the Fund.
After lengthy discussions, in 1960 the IMF Executive Board adopted Decision No. 1034-(60/27).46 This
Decision clarified that the distinctive feature of a restriction on payments and transfers for current
international transactions is "whether it involves a direct governmental limitation on the availability or
use of exchange as such*.47 This is a limitation imposed directly on the use of currency in itself, for all
purposes.
3. The plan does not curtail - enacting Strict Scrutiny Standards may have an effect of
possibly curtailing surveillance in the distant future, but it does not have a direct
effect as of the 1ac plantext of curtailing surveillance much less restricting it.
Assess whether the means themselves are a limit---allowing actions that effect a reduction
ruins precision
Randall 7 (Judge – Court of Appeals of the State of Minnesota, “Dee Marie Duckwall, Petitioner,
Respondent, vs. Adam Andrew Duckwall, Appellant”, 3-13,
http://law.justia.com/cases/minnesota/court-of-appeals/2007/opa0606 95-0313.html#_ftnref2)
[2] When referring to parenting time, the term "restriction[,]" is a term of art that is not the equivalent
of "reduction" of parenting time. "A modification of visitation that results in a reduction of total
visitation time, is not necessarily a restriction' of visitation.' Danielson v. Danielson, 393 N.W.2d 405, 407
(Minn. App. 1986). When determining whether a reduction constitutes a restriction , the court should
consider the reasons for the change as well as the amount of the reduction." Anderson v. Archer, 510
N.W.2d 1, 4 (Minn. App. 1993).
4. Voting issue--a. Limits---allowing effectual reductions explodes the topic. Any action can potentially result
in less surveillance. Limits are key to depth of preparation and clash. They get more ground to
weigh as offense against counterplans or to link turn DAs like politics, at the expense of
negative preparation, because it’s impossible to research every single non-topical trick the aff
could deploy. That crushes competitive equity which comes first because debate is a game.
It’s very unlikely that a direct effect of the plan is a curtailment of surveillance, hold them to a
very high standard.
b. Ground---our interpretation is key to establish a stable mechanism of legal prohibition that
guarantees core ground based on topic direction. They allow the Aff to defend completely
different processes like “oversight” that dodge core DAs and rob the best counterplan
ground. The aff must be a decrease in surveillance, not an increase in policies that might lead
to a decrease in surveillance – we lose ground on generics like the terror disad or any
surveillance bad argument or link – the aff can potentially spike out of any 1nc offense,
creating an extreme amount of aff ground.