I dare anyone to read Newsweek's Michael Isikoff's interview of Michael Leiter, Director of the National Counterrorism Center, as summarized in this link by Glenn Greenwald, and not despair at our collective stupidity.
For those who say that terrorism doesn't work, look what it has done to us as a nation. The attack of 9/11 accomplished its goal in spades - it provoked us into destroying our country. If you doubt this, ask yourself what pre 9/11 American would have acted in the ways we've acted – spending trillions of dollars on unnecessary and unwinnable wars and allowing our military and CIA to torture detainees with impunity. Who would have excused our government’s spying on American citizens without warrants, or allowed our government, a government that has made numerous erroneous terrorist designations as determined by the Federal Courts in Habeus proceedings, to detain people for life, without any judicial oversight, on their say so alone? What American would have acquiesced to the notion that an American President gains the authority to kill a fellow U.S. citizen (not present on any battlefield), without any formal charges or provision of due process, simply by declaring him a terrorist?
If you don’t think America is being destroyed by our acquiescence to these government acts and claims of executive power, you never understood what America was.
But all of this does confirm one old adage:
"None of us is as stupid as all of us."
Joe H.
Posts
The Years Of Writing Dangerously
9 years ago
2 comments:
Ok. So what do we do? The moment an American citizen successfully carries out an act of terrorism, and it's discovered that there was ample intelligence affirming the threat of that individual, but no action was taken because some agency was awaiting a warrant, all of the wrangling about civil liberties begin to ring of hollow idealism.
We're facing something "America" wasn't even poised to imagine for most of its existence. How does a nation engage an asymmetrical war inside its own borders, fought against its own citizens? (Yes, I grant the stunning illogic of the resources being poured down the drain for a few hundred enemy combatants and how gives further rise to the very thing we're trying to stop, but, don't isn't it true that 9/11 wasn't going to be a singular event? And I can't honestly believe that we wouldn't have faced domestic terrorists at some point even if we hadn't engaged Iraq and Afghanistan in the way we had. That isn't a conclusion based on fear. It's one based on obvious asymmetrical warfare.) Your charge about our collective stupidity has merit, but it also leaves a lot to be said for the fact that there are no easy answers, and certainly none that can make any promise of keeping civil liberties and national security in balance. Either innocent people die, or innocent people die. We just don't know how to deal with that fact.
To be honest, I'm one of the stupid. I have no idea how we're supposed to go on. No attempt at civics education was prepared to help the general public adequately handle the questions forced upon us today. That's because it's really about cold war hegemony and bloody-oppressive energy policy finally knocking on our front door. And how many of us are really poised to address those things?
Terrorism works, I definitely grant you that. It has achieved something far worse than instill fear--it has birthed utter paralysis between the proverbial rock and hard place.
Where am I going wrong?
Jeez. Sorry for the typos.
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