American Patrol

"If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some.”
--Cesare Beccaria

"I don't care about the Constitution."
--Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, 11/17/09

The Republicans are scared again. Last week's announcement by the Justice Department that five of the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks would be tried in Federal District Court in New York City has inspired a torrent of hysterical protest from the right. "...(Extremely dangerous," said House minority leader John Boehner (R-OH), further speculating that an actual trial for the five could result in their release on the sort of "legal technicality" that used to get Charles Bronson, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the like packing their pistols and hitting the vigilante trail in the movies. "Political correctness run amok," said Rep. John "Prop Baby" Shadegg (R-AZ), in the course of since apologized for remarks asking how New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (who had said that New Yorkers were not afraid of hosting terror trials) would feel if his daughter were kidnapped by terrorists. "An unnecessary risk," said former New York Mayor and self-styled terrorism expert Rudy Giuliani, further accusing the Administration of returning to a "pre-9/11" mindset. The trial will be “an intelligence bonanza for Al Qaeda…Prosecutors…forced to reveal …the methods and sources,” says former Bush Administration attorney and torture enabler John Yoo in the Wall Street Journal, despite a long record of terrorism cases tried with no such jeopardy occurring. It will give “the terrorists a forum from which to spout their propaganda,” says Annemarie McAvoy of Fox News, whose knowledge of courtroom protocol obviously stems from Law and Order reruns.

Why the fuss? Because terrorists, apparently, are possessed of malevolent magical powers, capable of presenting a clear and present danger to the populace at large even when held in high-security Federal custody. They are far more dangerous than, say, Charles Manson, Tim McVeigh, or the scores of high security violent inmates currently or formerly held in Federal custody nationwide. The mere possibility of the presence of these men, and other Guantanamo detainees, on US soil has had right wing commentators and politicians publicly wetting themselves for months.

Ridiculous? Absolutely. So what’s the real reason? Hard to say, but a various factors certainly come into play. First, a salient feature of the post-9/11 mindset advocated by Giuliani and others here seems to be a complete and utter lack of faith in our nation’s public institutions and the Constitution of the United States. 9/11 itself happened, this mindset implies, because we weren’t good enough to stop it— we made ourselves sitting ducks due to our devotion to such now outmoded concepts as due process, habeas corpus, and the Bill of Rights. Then Everything Changed. The Constitution and multiple international agreements suddenly became, to quote former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, “quaint.” It was completely necessary to abandon them lest we be killed in our beds by Evil Magic Muslims, and, incidentally, completely necessary to give broad extraconstitutional powers to the Executive.

Ridiculous? Yeah. 9/11 was hardly the first terrorist attack in the history of the world, and no other government, including our own before 2001, saw the complete abandonment of the basic tenets of their legal system as necessary to national survival. It was the government's response, not the attack itself, which was unprecedented, and the government, not the terrorists, who did damage to civil liberties and the rule of law—to what we poor naïve pre-9/11 mindset types think of as the American Way of Life.

The most likely reason? Politics. It should be noted that the objections to this trial are being raised by a minority opposition whose battle plan has been to gainsay every statement and action of the current Administration without regard to common sense or common weal. The exploitation of threats of violence for political purposes—that is to say, terrorism (look it up)—has been a feature of the Republican playbook since Nixon ’68, and there is an obvious hope here that enough fear mongering in this case will revive terrorism as an issue and drive enough members of a frightened populace back into the Republican fold to mitigate their current bid for electoral insignificance.

Ridiculous? I wish it was. The reason scaring people has been part of the Republican electoral agenda for so long is that it has worked time and time again. To consider falling for this kind of cynical manipulation as a feature of some kind of “pre-Obama mindset” is to grossly overestimate an electorate that ratified George W. Bush’s appointment as President in 2004.