Never forget! Never remember!
"When the president does it that means that it is not illegal. [...] If the president, for example, approves something because of the national security, or in this case because of a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude, then the president's decision in that instance is one that enables those who carry it out, to carry it out without violating a law."
In an interview with David Frost in 1977, former president Richard Nixon attempted to justify his years of abusing government power with the argument that the government is always acting in the best interests of the people; therefore, it may need to break the law sometimes in order to help the people. For the argument to work, of course, the initial assumption must be beyond question: the government always acts in the best interest of the people.
This essay is about September 11. It is about how the government was allowed to break the law under the assumption that the government is right. It is about how September 11 allowed the government to break the law.
Fear is a powerful ally of tyrants. It allows them to rule with near-impunity, as every action made by a tyrant can be justified by the needs of security. The events of seven years ago created a tremendous amount of fear in the United States. A nation that is afraid will accept restrictions on its liberties, as long as those restrictions are made in the name of security. In the months following the September 11 attacks, our national slogan became, "If have nothing to hide, then what's the problem?" Our Constitution is based on an explicit respect for privacy for its own sake. Privacy never has to be justified; privacy is, and it is up to the people who want to take it away to explain themselves. After September 11, the dynamic changed completely: the onus was now on us, the private citizens, to justify why we need privacy. If a person were to exercise his or her constitutional right to privacy, the assumption was immediately that such a person had something to hide.
After all, it's entirely patriotic to acquiesce to authority. This is what we learned after September 11. The phrase "In a post-9/11 world ..." became a ubiquitous, omnibus assertion that, somehow, the rules of law, order, and liberty had fundamentally changed that morning. Everyone was under suspicion, and anyone who appeared outside the norm was especially suspect.
And most of us didn't question our leaders. The New York Times happily published Judith Miller's stories of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, even though her only sources were government officials ... who later turned out to be lying. The Fourth Estate, whose job it usually is to criticize the government, accepted what the government said. Voices of dissent -- like Phil Donahue's -- were silenced. Donahue's 2003 MSNBC show was the network's highest-rated program, but it was pulled, anyway. Donahue was extremely critical of a war in Iraq at a time when being critical of the government was passé. The Dixie Chicks were booed and assailed in 2003 for daring to criticize George W. Bush. And let's not forget that every critic of the Iraq policy was lambasted for not being patriotic, or for wanting to help the terrorists, or both.
Remember that? That's the 9/11 legacy.
Remember also that Our Government initially fought tooth and nail against a commission to investigate the causes of the September 11 attacks. Know also that the USA PATRIOT Act was not written and passed in a mere month. The legislation was already extant, just waiting for the right time to come out of the closet. Nothing gets written in under a month, especially not legislation as voluminous as the USA PATRIOT Act. Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig tells this story:
The Patriot Act is huge and I remember someone asking a Justice Department official how did they write such a large statute so quickly, and of course the answer was that it has been sitting in the drawers of the Justice Department for the last 20 years waiting for the event where they would pull it out.
Imagine that: someone, somewhere within the Justice Department had written a daringly authoritarian piece of legislation and was waiting eagerly for just the right time to pull it out. The public wouldn't accept such a gross abuse of power and trampling of its rights during peacetime. But once a war started and the public was scared ... ah! That's just the time to start being authoritarian! Hitler used fear in the same way. His own people burned down the Reichstag, Hitler blamed the communists, then used the resultant fear to not only get himself elected chancellor, but be granted new powers.
George W. Bush's Justice Department has repeatedly argued that the president has additional war-time powers not to be found in the Constitution. Alberto Gonzales even went so far as to suggest that federal judges should not have oversight over wiretapping, since "a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country."
The troubling thing is, we've been here before. Our nation's resolve is tested every time there is a crisis. It is then, and only then, when we will be fully able to see how well our Constitution holds up to stress, and whether or not all our talk about liberty means something. History shows that, by and large, we consider the Bill of Rights to be a bunch of empty platitudes. Every time this country has faced a crisis, we have limited the rights of our people, and those limitations have been wholeheartedly accepted. There was widespread censorship during World War I and World War II, and everyone was okay with that. Japanese internment? Let's do it! COINTELPRO? CREEP? Why not!
September 11 put us once again face to face with a crisis. Either we could continue to exercise our liberty and approach the problem rationally, or we could, as a nation, freak out, get scared, and let our leaders do whatever they wanted in the name of protecting us from another attack.
Guess which one happened.
We let our constitution get torn to pieces. We let our government hold people -- even U.S. citizens -- indefinitely, without a trial. Those people had to go to court to fight for rights that they already had. We let our government torture people then say that it wasn't torture. George W. Bush gave it a fuzzy name; he called it "enhanced interrogation techniques." We let our leaders pretend that they cared a whit about the soldiers they sent to die in their war, but based on the extreme lengths this administration has gone to deny medical care to veterans, it doesn't look like this administration cares. It wants disposable meat.
September 11 was the day that we surrendered control of our country to a bunch of used-car salesmen. On September 11, Rudolph Giuliani and Dick Cheney had dildos made in the shape of one of the World Trade Center towers. They masturbated with them -- sometimes together, sometimes separately -- every night since then, always with smiles on their faces.
Never forget!