We are all enemy combatants now

The road from Guantanamo to Americans' front doors continues to be built out in stages. The Washington Post reports on a section laid in 2005 and 2006:

The Maryland State Police classified 53 nonviolent activists as terrorists and entered their names and personal information into state and federal databases that track terrorism suspects, the state police chief acknowledged yesterday.

Police Superintendent Terrence B. Sheridan revealed at a legislative hearing that the surveillance operation, which targeted opponents of the death penalty and the Iraq war, was far more extensive than was known when its existence was disclosed in July....

Sheridan said that he did not think the names were circulated to other agencies in the federal system and that they are not on the federal government's terrorist watch list. Hutchins said some names might have been shared with the National Security Agency.

An aggressive or sloppy police force classifies peaceful demonstrators as "terrorists." Terrorists in the U.S. can be deemed, at the Administration's pleasure, enemy combatants. Enemy combatants can be held indefinitely without trial and tortured at will. U.S. citizens are not exempt:

WASHINGTON (AP) _ A U.S. military officer warned Pentagon officials that an American detainee was being driven nearly insane by months of punishing isolation and sensory deprivation in a U.S. military brig, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

While the treatment of prisoners at detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in Afghanistan and Iraq have long been the subject of human rights complaints and court scrutiny, the documents shed new light on how two American citizens and a legal U.S. resident were treated in military jails inside the United States.

The Bush administration ordered the men to be held in military jails as "enemy combatants" for years of interrogations without criminal charges, which would not have been allowed in civilian jails.

The men were interrogated by the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, repeatedly denied access to attorneys and mail from home and contact with anyone other than guards and their interrogators. They were deprived of natural light for months and for years were forbidden even minor distractions such as a soccer ball or a dictionary.

Even scarier than changes in law is the desensitizing of the American citizenry. A recent global survey of global attitudes toward torture found, as Andrew Sullivan put it,

Americans are now among the people on earth most supportive of government's torturing prisoners. The United States is in the same public opinion ballpark as some of the most disgusting regimes on the planet....America's peers in the fight against torture, in terms of public opinion are Azerbaijan, Egypt, Russia, and Iran.

Just 53% of Americans supported a global ban on torture - fewer than in China, Indonesia, or the Palestinian territories. Many Americans have been schooled by the Bush Administrations and the producers of 24 to believe that torturing (suspected) terrorists is essential to our security -- and that it's what "the worst of the worst" deserve in any case.

If the U.S. doesn't change course in this election, those who thought that torture was just for Middle Eastern terrorists may find their sons and daughters Guantanamoed one not-so-distant day -- some time after the next major terror attack. If they dare to protest any government action, that is. President Palin would not blink.

Audacity of The New Yorker: Comparing Obama and Lincoln

The editors of the New Yorker, in the best retrospective of this endless campaign and the Bush Administration that I've read anywhere, have expressed in a couple of sentences what I've been trying to get across about Obama for the better part of a year (e..g., here and here):

Obama has returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama’s “mere” speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins, his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

As Obama himself put it in the January 5 ABC debate:

And, you know, so the truth is actually words do inspire. Words do help people get involved. Words do help members of Congress get into power so that they can be part of a coalition to deliver health care reform, to deliver a bold energy policy. Don't discount that power, because when the American people are determined that something is going to happen, then it happens. And if they are disaffected and cynical and fearful and told that it can't be done, then it doesn't. I'm running for president because I want to tell them, yes, we can. And that's why I think they're responding in such large numbers.

Do we still have that democratic capacity to sell-correct? Arguably, people always do.In his inaugural address to the (then) Czechoslovakian nation on Jan. 1, 1990, Vaclav Havel told his people that after 40-plus years of Communism

we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore one another, to care only about ourselves.

Later in the same speech, though, he acknowledged the miracle of the velvet revolution:

Where did the young people who never knew another system get their desire for truth, their love of free thought, their political ideas, their civic courage and civic prudence? How did it happen that their parents -- the very generation that had been considered lost -- joined them?

The U.S. moral environment has been tainted by an eight-year binge of preemptive war, relentless lying on the part of leaders, the shredding of civil liberties, the institutionalization of torture, not say by a binge of deregulation, tax cutting and credit run wild. Just 53% of Americans now think that torture is never justified -- the lowest percentage among developed nations, lower than that of the Chinese, who live under an authoritarian regime. A people can be corrupted from above, by their leaders and by media controlled by their leaders, e.g. Fox and its beloved torture-glorifying "24."

But democracy in America ain't dead yet. It may seem ridiculously starry-eyed to hope that Obama, like Lincoln before him, can win over the electorate by sheer force of ideas, by articulation of American ideals and of policies designed to give them new life -- and to hope further that he can execute those policies with some success if elected. Maybe those of us who buy in are Charlie Brown running for another kick of the football. But that's -- oh, the fear of looking foolish by quoting a politician's keynote! -- the audacity of hope.

The New Yorker laughs off torture

In February 2007, Jane Mayer, writing in The New Yorker, did us all a service by documenting the extent to which Fox's 24 had inured Americans to torture -- making it seem necessary and thrilling and heroic. How sad, then, that the same publication this week should publish an obscene little attempt at humor by Geroge Saunders that replays the old RosannaDanna op-ed in favor of "violins on TV" by coming out in favor of "washboarding" terrorists. That is, playing a washboard as a percussion instrument. Catch the hilarity:

I honestly don’t understand the mind-set here. Are these people terrorists or not? Or, I should say, is it possible that these people might be terrorists? Or, rather, has someone (possibly us, possibly someone other than us, such as, for example, someone they knew back in their home country, with whom they have possibly been having, say, a blood feud) alleged that they were possible terrorists? Keep in mind that we’ve never washboarded anyone who has not been, by someone or other, accused, more or less, of being a suspected, pending, or eventual possible terrorist. So why do we want to coddle these people? I say washboard the bastards 24/7, then supplement the washboarding with a circle of Peruvian wood flautists, then reinforce the flautists with a circle of acne-faced, oblivious fifteen-year-old boys with Fender guitars and distortion boxes, and let the war on terror begin.

Gilda Radner waxing enthusiastic about "violins on TV" was funny. Pretending to enthusiasm about "washboarding" terrorists is disgusting. What's the difference? First of all, RosannaDanna had no inkling what violence on TV was. Second, the evils of violence on TV, such as they are, are a matter of degree, part of the furniture of everyday life, fair game for humor. On the other hand, to mix the rhetoric of enthusiasm for torturing terrorists with depictions of ridiculous un-pleasantries is to trivialize the intense evil that we have collectively consented to. An extended joke about waterboarding in The New Yorker is perhaps stronger evidence of the coarsening of our culture than the popularity of 24.

It Takes a Leader: the Creativity of Evil

In Questioning the Banality of Evil, The Psychologist Jan. 2008, S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher bring into sharp relief the danger posed by current American leaders and would-be leaders whose chief appeal lies in fear-mongering and demonizing of real and perceived enemies. Those who execute tyrants' orders (and enemies) are not affectless functionaries but enthusiastic believers:

A spate of books...suggest that very few Nazis could be seen as ‘simply following orders’ – not least because the orders issued by the Nazi hierarchy were typically very vague. As a result, individuals needed to display imagination and initiative in order to interpret the commands they were given and to act upon them. As Ian Kershaw notes, Nazis didn’t obey Hitler, they worked towards him, seeking to surpass each other in their efforts. But by the same token, they also had a large degree of discretion. Indeed, as Laurence Rees (2005) notes in his recent book on Auschwitz and the ‘final solution’, it was this that made the Nazi system so dynamic. Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups.

How do conditions arise in which such self-selected executors - and executioners - are free to fulfill their potential? When enough people feel threatened enough, demagogues pick up the charge:

we do not interpret the world on our own, as many social psychological models tend to imply. Rather, people are surrounded by would-be leaders who tell them what to make of the world around them...Indeed, tyrannical leaders only thrive by convincing us that we are in crisis, that we face threat and that we need their strong decisive action to surmount it. In the BBC study, participants as a whole may have become relatively more authoritarian, but it still needed active leadership to exploit this and to make the case for a new tough regime. The role of leaders becomes particularly pernicious when they suggest that ‘our’ problems come about because of the threats posed by a pernicious outgroup. In this way they can begin to take the groups with which we already identify and develop norms of hostility against outsiders. Their role becomes even more dangerous when they tell us that ‘we’ are the sum of all virtues so that the defence of virtue requires the destruction of the outgroup that threatens us. These are the conditions which allow groups to make genocide normative and to represent mass murder as something honourable (Reicher et al., 2006).

While Andrew Sullivan finds insight here into jihadist ideological commitment, I'm more concerned about the implications for the U.S. Can you hear the crowds chanting Rudy, Rudy, Rudy? Americans have been badly frightened in the past six years, and the Rovian message machine has kept the fire stoked. Worse, the Bush Adminstration has laid bare the fact that the tissue of statutory and common law in which our vaunted civil liberties are embodied is kept intact not so much by "the consent of the governed" as by the consent of the governing. Our leaders before 43 have for the most part adhered to norms and taboos that have restrained their power. Now, for six years, the executive has imprisoned whom it wishes indefinitely without trial, tortured at will, spied on Americans in violation of the law, and asserted the president's right to disregard laws passed by Congress when he deems doing so essential to national security.

Americans are resilient and seem to be rejecting Bushian fear-mongering at last. If nothing else, we're used to the media skewering our leaders to the point where few of us take their pronouncements at full face value, and Bush at least has not meddled much with freedom of the press. But we've been subject to six years of of intermittent code orange. My fear is that some electoral accident - e.g., a Bloomberg 3rd party run - will throw the election to a dictator-in-waiting like Giuliani or possibly Romney. Romney doesn't seem a thug by nature, just a chameleon. But in his vocal support of torture and absolute executive power we would do well to take him at his word. We need a President who will roll back the executive power grab. Otherwise, dictatorial power is there for the taking.