Let them Eat Cake Moments: Hypocrisy in plain sight

During an interview with Clinton broadcast live in Pakistan with several prominent female TV anchors, before a predominantly female audience of several hundred, one member of the audience said the Predator attacks amount to ''executions without trial'' for those killed.

Another asked Clinton how she would define terrorism.

''Is it the killing of people in drone attacks?'' she asked. That woman then asked if Clinton considers drone attacks and bombings like the one that killed more than 100 civilians in the city of Peshawar earlier this week to both be acts of terrorism.
''No, I do not,'' Clinton replied.

Clinton Faces Pakistani Anger at Drone Attacks
ASSOCIATED PRESS,October 30, 2009

An anarchist social worker raided by the feds wants his computers, manuscripts and pick axes back...

In a guns-drawn raid on October 1, FBI agents and police seized boxes of dubious "evidence" from the Queens, New York, home of Elliott Madison. A U.S. District Judge in Brooklyn has set a Monday deadline to rule on the legality of the search, and in the meantime has ordered the government to refrain from examining the material taken in the 6 a.m. search.

Madison, who counsels more than 100 severely mentally ill patients in New York, seems to have first drawn attention from the authorities at September's G-20 gathering of world leaders in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. There he was arrested on September 24 at a motel room for allegedly listening to a police scanner and relaying information on Twitter to help protesters avoid heavily-armed cops -- an activity the State Department lauded when it happened in Iran.

A week later, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, armed with a search warrant and backed by a federal grand jury investigation, raided Madison's house, which he shares with his wife of 13 years and several roommates. The squad seized … Steampunk magazine, for one. Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs. Anarchist political-theory books. A needlepoint depiction of Lenin that belonged to Madison's wife's grandmother.

Twitter anarchist raided under 'riot' laws
CNN, October 24, 2009

When the US government sends missiles into an urban area from a remote controlled predator drone thousands of feet in the sky, like Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mount Olympus, killing many innocents than targets by several orders of magnitude, that is not terrorism – by definition. When a dissident in Iran protests the government via Twitter, that is a high tech revolutionary. When a dissident in the U.S. helps people protest the G-20 from a hotel room via Twitter, time to call in the Terrorism task force.

Make no mistake, any time the government decides to create a label for some crime, a label that implies some motive a priori, it is a license to assert greater authority, the attendant force and violence that come with it, and trample civil rights. Don’t be surprised if the Hate Crime Bill that just passed turns out to be something along these lines.