Dealing with domestic terror is not going to be a simple thing that reduces down to or conforms to facile slogans, neither the paranoia encouraging racism and xenophbia of Donald Trump nor the idiotic paranoia about the Feds keeping track of us which would predictably issue from the likes of Glenn Greenwald and the lefty magazines.
The BBC has up a piece asking if the mass murder in Orlando will secure the election of Donald Trump. Which would only intensify the crime into a tragedy because if there is an issue which needs the most mature and experienced of people dealing with it, the campaigns of gun violence - which is as real as could be - and that of domestic terrorism - real as well, and the most exploited of foreign terrorism, real but blown up into an illusion masking the two far larger and real issues in the United States. Donald Trump is probably the worst, possible person to turn to now and the media is doing absolutely nothing to discourage that insanity, they are inviting it.
The police should have the ability to investigate Omar Mateen's past and his associates to see if there is any link to Islamic fundamentalism in the mass murder he committed. They should also be able to look into what media he was watching which informed any claims he made to have committed his murder in the name of ISIS or whatever he thought and if there were any actual links. I would say that even if he had an i-phone that he used to access such media or make such contacts which is locked and which they can't find a third party who can unlock it so they can access that information. The idea that the PR campaign of a corporation like Apple should trump national security should be ended definitively, modern electronic devices that are used to commit major crimes should be as searchable as they need to be to be - with the proper warrants obtained from real judges and with whatever protections for normal peoples' civil liberties. We trust judges to make those decisions when it's plain old physical records, it's stupid to suddenly enable terrorism and organized crime to use electronic media without that possibility. Stupid and unworkable and, sooner rather than later, unacceptable.
That is certainly true in the case of dead mass murderers shot in the act. They and those associated with them can't be treated like they didn't have anything to do with a major crime for the duration of the investigation. It is the business of the cops to figure out who is involved and to uncover those for whom there is no evidence of involvement. Since that is the case, if one of my associates or, please, God, never, relatives did what Mateen did, I'd want the cops most trained and competent and most restrained by oversight looking into it.
The political use of paranoia about the Feds is an unfortunate result of past wrongs committed by them. There is a less than gripping piece by David Corn up at Mother Jones, right now rehashing the matter of the the FBI file on the dear old folkie, the late Pete Seeger. His file began when a letter he wrote while a new recruit to the military, protesting the internment of Japanese citizens in the West was referred to them* I would imagine that his being a member of the military while he wrote the letter had more than a little to do with why they figured he might be a security risk of some kind. He was being trained to maintain airplanes and they were nothing if not nervous about saboteurs. There was a rather friggin' massive war on, at the time. Of course, they kept it up for a lot longer than war time emergency might have warranted. That the FBI has and, no doubt, still does waste time on surveillance on peaceful peace activists, civil rights activists, even the most pacific of groups and individuals has been what made people paranoid about them looking for the ability to gather information and evidence. As have other government agencies. However, letting that get in the way of effectively tacking probable or known terrorist groups and of fighting against their recruitment and incitement propaganda is not going to prove sustainable as they terrorize the population.
From how it looks right now Omar Mateen may well have been motivated by mental illness as much as any ISIS propaganda sites. I don't know if the rumors that Mateen went to the Pulse nightclub trying to pick up men is true but it may have been a factor, as well. But combining instability with the encouragement to violence could, in fact, be what drove him to do what he did. His involvement with Islamic fundamentalism might have been entirely in his own head, in which case the most important thing to figure out how to screen out dangerously mentally ill people from obtaining automatic weapons which any rational country would keep out of the hands of civilians for just the reason that they might use them to kill lots of people in a short time.
The paranoia of the left and the libertarians about the FBI is matched by the artificial and commercially incited paranoia on the right and the libertarians about the government confiscating guns. The National Rifle Association and other gun nut groups, with the promotion of the gun industry are the source of that paranoia. The Republicans have adopted it as a means of winning elections by motivating a small but effective group of zealots to vote for them - the entirely politicized Republican faction of the federal judiciary and the Supreme Court have been actively a part of that campaign strategy. Their part in producing the conditions that have made mass gun murder a nearly every-day occurrence in the United States, multiple 9-11s a slow moving rolling wave of domestic terror which, when someone has the right name, can also be made into a motivation to vote from paranoia instead of reason, which also benefits the Republican Party at its worst. These days that worst IS the Republican Party, the party of Donald Trump and the likes of Paul LePage**. Paul LePage, the governor of my state, is the proof that there is no bottom below which that party won't go. If Trump hadn't done his PR stunt run for president that got out of control and risks destroying out democracy, LePage would have been a fitting poster boy for the Republican Party.
The left came about its paranoia honestly, through being targeted by the Feds - though not entirely without reason in more cases than one is supposed to admit in polite company. The right's paranoia is a creation of advertising techniques to promote it by the gun industry and their allies, the Republican right. The extreme right that is the real danger to us, both from gun violence and through the destruction of our real rights and freedoms. And they will use everything they can, no matter how incoherent it is. You can make anything cohere through repetition through the media. That's how Trump was created.
Just to add, if there were any way to block web sites and other propaganda from terror incitement groups like ISIS from being read or heard or viewed in the United States, I would be entirely in favor of that being done. Their ability to influence the acts of people otherwise unconnected with them is too big a danger to allow those to continue. Of course that's a violation of free speech-free press absolutism in its pure form, which only shows how much more those who advocate that pose - an industry in itself - care more about their slogans than the lives of those who get killed when such incitements incite them to action. Absolutist positions carry their own form of insanity and those are often not without a financial motivation in the lawyers and political propagandists who make money through promoting them.
* His Communist connections, starting with his dad, the musicologist and husband of the very significant composer, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Charles Seeger, probably did nothing to discourage Edgar Hoover's FBI to keep up gathering gossip about young Pete, especially as he and his group, The Weavers, barely cracked into the pop music industry during the brief period when folkie music charted. The idea that communism was ever going to be more than a brief fad for a significant number of people is and always was ridiculous. Democracy, even the far from perfect form of it found in the United States, might not be a secure bulwark against fascism, as we could well find out this year, it is about as a reliable repellent to communism as anything ever invented. I know the old line Marxists figured their big competition was religion and that they had to knock that off before they could take over but their real competition is the possibility that people can make change through democratic means, nonviolently and fairly.
** Both of the "moderate" Republicans Senator from Maine, Susan Collins and former Senator Olympia Snowe have supported LePage, despite him being far worse than Donald Trump. LePage was a protogee of Olympia Snowe's first husband, the "moderate" Republican Peter Snowe. There are no moderate Republicans, no one who is a moderate would remain in that party today.
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