Ha, with all the cool books floating around on mainstream shelves, who
needs a conspiracy movie? I was just reading this cute little book,
about the tenth one like it.
How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President
Run Amok
by Glenn Greenwald
http://www.amazon.com/Patriot-Defending-American-Values-President/dp/097794400X
In an excerpt from his new book, Greenwald explores how fear-mongering
became the most potent political tool in Bush's arsenal;
In one sense, it is difficult to understand how the Bush
administration has been able to embrace such radical theories of
executive power, and to engage in such recognizably un-American
conduct -- first in the shadows and now quite openly -- without
prompting a far more intense backlash from the country than we have
seen
That is because the Bush administration has in its arsenal one very
potent weapon -- and one weapon only -- which it has repeatedly used:
fear. Ever since September 11, 2001, Americans have been bombarded
with warnings, with color-coded "alerts," with talk of mushroom clouds
and nefarious plots to blow up bridges and tall buildings, with
villains assigned cartoon names such as "dirty bomber," "Dr. Germ,"
and so on
We have to invade and occupy Iraq because the terrorists will kill us
all if we do not. We must allow the president to incarcerate American
citizens without due process, employ torture as a state-sanctioned
weapon, eavesdrop on our private conversations and even violate the
law, because the terrorists are so evil and so dangerous that we
cannot have any limits on the power of the president if we want him to
protect us from the dangers in the world.
Here is Dick Cheney in early January 2006, proudly defending the
administration's illegal eavesdropping program:
"As we get farther away from September 11th, some in Washington
are yielding to the temptation to downplay the ongoing threat to our
country, and to back away from the business at hand The enemy that
struck on 9/11 is weakened and fractured, yet it is still lethal and
trying to hit us again "
Cheney never once addresses the fact that the administration had full
leeway to eavesdrop on terrorists without breaking the law. He ignores
that fact because he is not making a rational argument. He is
attempting to play on the fears of Americans to justify their
violations of law.
President Bush has also been fueling the fires of fear in almost every
speech he has given since September 11, 2001. Here he is on October 6,
2005, attempting to whip up as much fear as possible in order to try
to prop up Americans' diminishing support for the country's ongoing
occupation of Iraq:
"The militants believe that controlling one country will rally the
Muslim masses, enabling them to overthrow all moderate governments in
the region, and establish a radical Islamic empire that spans from
Spain to Indonesia. With greater economic and military and political
power, the terrorists would be able to advance their stated agenda: to
develop weapons of mass destruction, to destroy Israel, to intimidate
Europe, to assault the American people, and to blackmail our
government into isolation.
Our enemy is utterly committed. As Zarqawi has vowed, "We will
either achieve victory over the human race, or we will pass to the
eternal life." And the civilized world knows very well that other
fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole
nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history
With the rise of a deadly enemy and the unfolding of a global
ideological struggle, our time in history will be remembered for new
challenges and unprecedented dangers."
Islamic terrorists are depicted as omnipotent villains with quite
attainable dreams of world domination, genocide, and the obliteration
of the United StatesFor four years, this is what Americans have heard
over and over and over from our government All of our plans for the
future, dreams for our children, career aspirations, life goals --
these are all subordinate unless we stand loyally behind George Bush
as he takes the extreme and unprecedented measures necessary to
protect us from these extreme and unprecedented threats.
It is that deeply irrational, fear-driven view of the world that has
been used to convince Americans to acquiesce to the administration's
excesses and abuses of power. And it is not difficult to understand
why it works.
After all, if it really were the case that terrorism constituted the
sort of imminent, civilization-ending threat the administration has
spent the last four years drumming into everyone's head, then it might
be extremely difficult to gin up much outrage over an eavesdropping
program -- warrants or not -- or over a few American citizens being
rounded up and put in military prisons without any charges
In fact, it has become unacceptable in polite company to even raise
the prospect that the threat of terrorism may be exaggerated. During
the 2004 election, John Kerry stumbled in his clumsy way towards
challenging this fear-mongering when he was quoted in The New York
Times Magazine as saying, "We have to get back to the place we were,
where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they're a
nuisance." This provoked predictable outrage from the Bush camp that
Kerry, along with Bush's other opponents, was not serious about
fighting terrorists and was too weak to protect our children from this
unparalleled menace
Despite the dire warnings of the Bush administration, people in rural
Kansas and Georgia are beginning to realize that on the list of
problems and threats that endanger their children, the potential of a
terrorist attack does not predominate.
In a rational world, risk is equal to impact multiplied by
probability. As the Linguasphere Dictionary puts it: "In professional
risk assessment, risk combines the probability of a negative event
occurring with how harmful that event would be." But the
administration has spent four years urging Americans to ignore that
way of thinking
But one can protect against the threat of terrorism with courage, calm
and resolve -- the attributes that have always defined our nation as
it has confronted other threats. Hysteria and fear-mongering are the
opposite of strength.
Most people know individuals in their lives who live in this type of
irrational, all-consuming fear -- people who are scared,
pathologically risk-averse, always hiding and exerting excess caution
lest something go wrong. In its more extreme version, that sort of
fear manifests as a life-destroying mental disorder
The Bush administration has been trying to reduce this country to a
collective version of that affliction. And it is hard to imagine what
a nation fueled by such fear can accomplish.
The administration has managed to get away with the Orwellian idea
that fear is the hallmark of courage, and a rational and calm approach
is a mark of cowardice. They have been aided in this effort by a
frightened national media and political elite that lives in Washington
and New York -- two "target-rich" cities -- and that has been so
petrified of further attacks that they were easily pushed into a state
of passive, uncritical compliance in exchange for promises of
protection
Freedom fighters
For a different vision of our nation, we need only look to the
founders, who embodied courage and resolve. Most of them were wealthy
and educated, and enjoyed the privileges of a gentrified upbringing in
the British Empire
But mere comfort and safety were not enough for them. What they lacked
were the basic liberties that have now come to define America and that
we now take for granted. Under the Bush administration, we have
traveled as a nation from the towering heights defined by the courage
of Patrick Henry (and other founding fathers) to a fearful basement
where we are ready to give up our liberties and grant the government
power without limits.
Senator John Cornyn is a Texas Republican and, as such, one of the
most loyal defenders of George Bush. On December 20, 2005 -- five days
after the New York Times first revealed the president's lawless
eavesdropping -- the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reported on the
debates that had arisen in Congress over these issues:
"Senators launched new salvos in the battle over national security
and civil liberties yesterday as recent revelations of domestic spying
continued to color the chamber's stalemate on an extension of the
antiterrorism law known as the PATRIOT Act.
"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead," said
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a former judge and close ally of the
president who sits on the Judiciary Committee."
Contrast the American ethos as embodied by Patrick Henry and the other
founders -- an insistence that our system of government adhere to the
rule of law and preserve individual liberty -- with the fear-driven
mentality peddled by the president's defenders in order to justify his
conduct.
We are told that we must give up our liberties and allow the president
the power to break the law, because none of that really matters. Where
would America be if, throughout our history, we had succumbed to the
paralyzed, weak-willed fear being hawked by the likes of Cornyn and
Roberts? We would not have risked our lives to win our freedom from
the British monarchy. We would have acquiesced to the evils of slavery
and the division of our country rather than risk our lives in the
Civil War. After Pearl Harbor, we would have gone to war against Japan
but not Nazi Germany
On January 28, 2006, history professor and best-selling author Joseph
J. Ellis published an op-ed in the New York Times in which he pointed
out one of the most important and under-recognized truths about the
way in which we view the threat of terrorism:
"My first question: Where does Sept. 11 rank in the grand sweep of
American history as a threat to national security? By my calculations
it does not make the top tier of the list, which requires the threat
to pose a serious challenge to the survival of the American republic.
Sept. 11 does not rise to that level of threat because, while it
places lives and lifestyles at risk, it does not threaten the survival
of the American republic, even though the terrorists would like us to
believe so."(Emphasis added.)
And the terrorists appear to be joined in that desire by President
Bush. His administration continuously -- and irrationally -- depicts
terrorism as the overarching threat around which we are constructing
our entire foreign policy, changing the basic principles of our
government, and fundamentally altering both our behavior in the world
and the way we are perceived.
As a result, one rarely hears anyone arguing that the terrorism
threat, like any other threat, should be viewed in perspective and
subjected to rational risk-benefit assessments
In his op-ed, Professor Ellis makes another critically important
point: Even with regard to the genuinely existential threats in our
nation's history, we have at times allowed our fears to be exploited.
But when we have done so, we have adopted excessive measures which
have led to some of the most shameful episodes in our past. Among the
examples he cites are the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798, "which
allowed the federal government to close newspapers and deport
foreigners during the 'quasi-war' with France," and the internment of
Japanese Americans during World War II," which was justified on the
grounds that their ancestry made them potential threats to national
security."
Life during wartime
Supporters of the president often defend his lawless expansion of
executive power by equating it to Abraham Lincoln's suspension of
habeas corpus and other emergency measures taken to save the Union
during the Civil War. [But] during Lincoln's presidency, the entire
nation was engulfed in an internal, all-out war. Half of the country
was fully devoted to the destruction of the other half. The existence
of the nation was very much in doubt. Americans were dying violent
deaths every day at a staggering rate. One million Americans were
wounded and a half million others -- a full 5 percent of the
population -- died, making it the deadliest war America has ever
faced. …
… The word "war" has become an all-purpose political tool, to the
point where it is virtually impoverished of meaning. War is something
we wage on cancer, on poverty, on drugs, and now on "terror "
But whatever else one can say about our conflict with terrorists, it
is nothing even remotely like the Civil War.
More safe, less free
In March 2006, researchers in the social psychology program at Rutgers
University-New Brunswick offered some empirical evidence to
demonstrate the critical role fear plays in driving people to support
George Bush. Their study (more than 130 registered voters) sought to
measure the impact fear had on voting choices in the 2004 election. As
the summary issued by Rutgers recounted:
"Their findings demonstrated that registered voters in a
psychologically benign state of mind preferred Senator Kerry to
President Bush, but Bush was more popular than Kerry after voters
received a subtle reminder of death. Citing an Osama bin Laden tape
that surfaced a few days before the election, among other factors, the
authors state, "The present study adds convergent support to the idea
that George W. Bush's victory in the 2004 presidential election was
facilitated by Americans' nonconscious concerns about death " The
authors believe that people were scared into voting for Bush.
The Bush administration did not, of course, invent the use of fear as
a weapon to justify its wrongful conduct and enhance its own power Nor
is Al Qaeda the first enemy the United States has had. …
On April 24, 1950, President Harry S. Truman gave a speech to the
nation regarding the threat posed by domestic communism -- a threat at
least as real as Islamic terrorism. Part of what he said:
"Now I am going to tell you how we are not going to fight
communism. We are not going to transform our fine FBI into a Gestapo
secret police. That is what some people would like to do. We are not
going to try to control what our people read and say and think. We are
not going to turn the United States into a right-wing totalitarian
country in order to deal with a left-wing totalitarian threat."
And the founders repeatedly warned of the danger, and the likelihood,
that governments would attempt to exploit fear of external threats in
order to justify abridgments of core liberties. …
The apex of fear-wallowing came during the exceptionally well-staged
Republican National Convention of 2004 … Here is Zell Miller, the
former Democratic senator from Georgia, explaining how his fears drove
him to support George Bush:
"And like you, I ask which leader is it today that has the vision,
the willpower, and, yes, the backbone to best protect my family? There
is but one man to whom I am willing to entrust their future and that
man's name is George W. Bush
We do not have a government where the president can break the law in
secret and then tell us not to worry about it because it is being done
to "protect" us. We have never had a system of government operate on
such paternalistic and blindly loyal sentiments. And we have never
before been a nation living in such fear that, in exchange for
promises of protection and safety, we are told that we must allow the
president to seize those very powers which the Constitution prohibits.
Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at
Unclaimed Territory.
http://www.alternet.org/story/36070/?page=entire
