By Katie Pease
Good thing we have Obama’s “Intelligence Czar,” Dennis Blair, to bring clarity to the debate of who the enemy actually is. The phrase “global war on terror” (GWOT), which probably makes the top ten phrases over-used by President George Bush, has been buried next to the soldiers who died in the name of the global war on terror. Now we are “countering violent extremism.”
Could the unelected Mr. Intelligence Czar please define “violent extremism”? Nancy Pelosi made it pretty clear that she thinks violent extremism could be when someone’s “language” might create a “climate in which “violence [takes] place.” She also suggests that they should be held accountable when any violence follows their speech, no matter how indirectly related the source of the violence is to the person who dared to exercise their first amendment rights. In other words, when you speak out about an administration’s policies and some quack who is hulled up in his basement all day sharpening knives and building bombs comes after the president, in Pelosi Land, you are responsible for that man’s actions. Would you then be labeled a “violent extremist” who needs to be “countered”?
The other question that remains is, why the change in terminology? The phrase “global war on terror” suggests the threat is on the outside. Somehow this new terminology brings it right into our own backyard. Considering the ambiguous language used in defining a “homegrown terrorist” in the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (H.R. 1955), it is disturbing to think just who might fall under this category, and for what purpose.
This could be a war on dissension, or it could just be an innocuous change in terminology; but I doubt the Founding Fathers would want us to wait around and take the chance that it might be the former.