At our worst.

If you had any doubt that the heart is just pump and muscle, consider Dick Cheney whose new heart has had no impact on his twisted view of morality.  Of course, it might just be that, in finding the replacement, his doctors were able to locate a perfect match, a donor who had also thought torture was both okay and justified.  In any event, the former Vice President has invented his own definition of torture. “Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11”, he declared on Meet the Press.  “There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation.” Cheney is at total peace with himself, totally self-satisfied, convinced he holds The Truth.  And so, he went on, “I would do it again in a minute”.  I was thinking he probably meant in a heartbeat, but maybe that’s too close to the chest.

The long delayed release of the Senate committee’s executive summary came with a spirited floor speech by the outgoing Intelligence Chair Diane Feinstein followed by a passionate endorsement by John McCain.  For all his hawkishness — never a war he doesn’t want to enter — the senator from Arizona, unlike Cheney, knows something about torture and has always been a vocal opponent.  With that notable exception, like everything in Washington these days, the reaction to the report has been mostly along partisan lines.   Republicans denounce it while Democrats support it.  Of course, the torture carried out in dark places, however disturbing, is just a part of a more far reaching problem that began with those 3,000 plus tragic deaths in 2011.   We are a different place, as codified in the regressive Patriot Act.  Remember it had bipartisan support at both its inception and renewal.  The legislation gives broad license to excess from detaining people and assuming their guilt before being charged (often holding them in that limbo for years on end) to the NIA’s aggressive Orwellian eavesdropping.  And then there are the drones that reign their terror on as many or more innocents as they do combatants, “antiseptic” weapons that leave no powder marks on our fingers.

All of it makes us angry, but not so angry that we have done very much, if anything, about it.  Aside from paying lip service, if that, to our repulsion, we are shockingly disengaged.  With a voluntary military, we have no loved one on the front line, no real skin in the game.  We tell ourselves that this has nothing to do with us, but everything to do with the Cheney’s of our world.  Not everything and certainly not solely.  The post 9/11 hysteria used to justify our country’s “patriotic” actions was shared by the public.  Just fix it, we said, and don’t bother us with the gory details.  Do whatever you have to do.  And we say amen to claims of American exceptionalism never measuring them against our less than exceptional and inconsistent actions.  Our leaders insisted on donning American flag pins, and we never called them out on their obviously cheap patriotic theater.   

The Senate report added some new details to the torture story but let’s not pretend we were unaware of what was afoot.   The facts of waterboarding et al were widely know and sanctimoniously denounced during Bush’s first term.  No one, not the president, vice president, CIA director or countless legal counsels, ever paid any price for what clearly was beyond the legal.  More to the point, it is so contrary to what we claim to be American ethics and tradition.  Everyone, except the Cheney cohort, knows it is terribly wrong, but even the president who ended the practice has effectually swept these bad deeds under the rug.  And again, let’s be honest, that’s exactly where we wanted them, hoped they would stay.  “Pardon us and remember your manners.  We’re having dinner now — no talk of politics, religion and certainly not the morality of torture.”  Any way, we didn’t do that; it was the government, the Blue Meanies outside our snug little submarine.  Yes, and I have a bridge to sell you.

We justify what we’ve done, or what others have done in our name, because we largely buy into the idea that every threat to us, especially of Muslim origin, is existential, when its not.  This is not to diminish the challenges of an ISIS, but despite whatever rhetoric and actions are directed against us, we are not their primary targets. Their fight is within Islam and for its domination.  We are, as I wrote in an earlier post, a convenient foil masking their singular agenda, to rule not the world but Islam.  Can we avoid doing the self-destructive by imposing ourselves where we don’t belong?  Apparently not, because the train on which our policies ride has long left the station.  We’re pulled along, including the president who promised and wanted out, because it’s far easier to start hostilities than to stop them.  War and conflict has a life of it’s own, like that giant Space Odyssey computer Hal who was intent on taking control, and almost did.   Apparently no one has the courage to stop this Hal, and no one — that’s all of us — is honestly supporting such action.  We were scared of the consequences, imagined or real, just as we have been since Dick Cheney et al warned us of terror and mushroom clouds.

I just wrote about racism and protests that probably and sadly will run their course in an America that is attention span poor.  The Sunday talk show a news focus on torture will abate.  After all, important things like a new and sure to be unproductive Congress will be taking hold in but a few weeks.  Then there will be an endless presidential race, who’s up and who is down, to distract us further, but probably not induce us to vote.   Ah vote.  What a bother.  Who wants to go on record in taking responsibility for our actions, for what OUR country is doing, and for the moral lapse that is our own.  Yes, we may get the best government that money can buy, but in our enabling silence and failure to vote we also are getting the kind of government that we sadly deserve.

Osama lives.

Osama bin Laden was killed two years ago, but he lives on in having a profound impact on our lives.  It's no accident that Osama focused on the World Trade Center (twice) and seemingly only secondarily on the Pentagon and (assumably) the Capital.  The Twin Towers lay at the epicenter of the money machine that fuels our and other economies.  Its destruction, he was confident, would have a devastating and far-reaching effect.  It did.  Al Qaeda’s leader may have hung out (we thought) in rustic caves, but he clearly had a deep and sophisticated understanding of how the world functions and, most important, of the American psyche.  He assuredly knew of our tendency to overreact to dramatic events, hyped by a compliant press and ginned up opportunistically by people in power.  George W. Bush was in command on 9/11, a time when his leadership was in question.  He badly needed and got a boost.  It's hard to know what another president, including Barak Obama, might have done in the same circumstance.

Osama wanted to change the very nature of America, a society that he saw as overly powerful, self-satisfied, complacent and ungodly — perhaps mostly ungodly.  His success, particularly in laying low the West's most emblematic city proved that his kind of war-waging had legs.   It had legs and, because it had no locatable fixed center or national vulnerability, it was extremely difficult to combat.  America, and for that matter any other nation, had experience fighting organized State armies in hot and cold wars.  It had none with the kind of forces under bin Laden's command.  Moreover, its two most recent wars — Korea and Viet Nam — had proved both wildly unpopular and unwinnable.  Americans elected Eisenhower in 1952 on the promise of exiting Korea and Nixon sixteen years later in the hopes (unrealistic) of quickly ending Viet Nam, the most hated war in modern US history.

Bin Laden was right about overreaction.  Afghanistan, Iraq and perhaps even more so the Patriot Act were all facilitated by post 9/11 hysteria.  I will return to that legislation.  Given his prime target, it's clear that Osama wanted to disrupt our, and probably Western, economies.  An added bonus for him of course would be the possible impact on his nemesis, the Saudi monarchy, which might sustain losses and be weakened by any downturn.  Whether he knew that Bush would actually invade Afghanistan — Clinton had limited retaliation to selective bombing — is unclear.  It probably would be far fetched to think he expected that we would quickly turn our attention to and expend huge resources against Iraq, which had no skin in the 9/11 game.  Whatever his calculation, he was right in thinking a direct hit on our financial center would have negative (direct or indirect) economic consequences.  That America would devote so much treasure and sacrifice, so many lives, must have given him more pleasure than he could ever have anticipated.

On the other hand, if he was looking at Korea and most especially Viet Nam as examples of how our national will would collapse in the face of inevitable protests, he was dead wrong.  Despite the unpopularity of the Iraq conflict in particular, there were no comparable challenges in Washington or on the streets of our cities.  And, despite tepid support, we have stayed the course (misguided or not) in Afghanistan longer than in any other war.  Our national inertia is a mystery, but maybe not completely.  Looking back at the tumultuous 1960s, many Americans now regret one of the terrible unintended consequences of protest.  It wasn't enough to vent our frustration on the leaders who got us into that quagmire, we ended up disrespecting the troops who followed them, this despite most of them having been drafted into service.  Viet Nam Vets came home to an ungrateful nation, many of them effectually cast into a dustbin of neglect.  It took a long time for the military and its top brass to get over the defeat of Viet Nam.  So, too, did we endure a long national depression, compounded by guilt for our misguided poor treatment of the warriors.  What bin Laden didn't know is that we had learned a bitter lesson and are unlikely to ever again diss those who stood in harms way.  Quite the contrary, we admire our troops and the military is one of the few institutions that have our trust.  Guilt is a powerful thing.

That brings me back to the Patriot Act, perhaps more damaging to our society and way of life than the economic or human losses that followed 9/11.   In some ways the America will never be the same phenomenon begins with Osama's audacious attack.  Beyond the shock that our mainland, always considered invulnerable, was successfully violated, the idea that it was done by stateless terrorists threw us off balance.  It instilled in us a national unease, one that was recently reinforced by the Boston bombing carried out by individuals in broad daylight with a heavy police presence in place.  We were, the government told us, in a Global War on Terrorism.  Since the weapons used in destroying the Twin Towers and damaging the Pentagon were commercial aircraft, the way in which we approach air travel was immediately changed.  To put is simply, travel is not what it used to be and perhaps never will be.  Osama lives. 

To be sure, while many of us travel by air many of us don't.  On the other hand try to visit a museum in New York or Washington, be sure that you will have to go through security.  If you're carrying a bag, in the case of women that means virtually everyone, expect it to be inspected.  And speaking of New York, most large office buildings require ID before stepping on to an elevator.  Osama lives. 

But these inconveniences are minor compared to what the Patriot Act, passed in a moment of national hysteria, wrought.  The Act gave the government a wide range of powers, ones that could turn the ordinary citizen into a criminal with little or no rights in an instant.  And it allowed a broad array of surveillance, albeit authorized and monitored by a (secret) court.  After Patriot, any idea of privacy was nothing more than a naive elusion.  Osama lives.

Part of that illusion was broken wide open by the revelation that the government was monitoring each and every one of our telephone calls, even if we accept that this did not include (without specific court approval) listing to the conversations.  The idea that big brother was aware that my son called me today or that I called my sister last week seemed, and is, a gross invasion of assumed privacy.  It's not necessary to draw out these examples; you get the point.  Nor am I telling you something you don't already know or have thought about.  The broader question here, and the immediate reason for all the fuss, is whether we in fact did know or could have known that such a program was, or was likely to be, in place.  Perhaps equally important is whether we wanted to know.

Apparently member of Congress in both houses were informed of this program and given access to fairly broad information about its nature and scope.  Leaders and one would assume members of the Intelligence committees certainly knew what has been going on, or have no excuse for not knowing.  It appears that many rank and file members had access but didn't bother to make use of it.  In a sense one could say they were derelict in duty, but the truth probably is that they really didn't want to know.  The Patriot Act was not merely passed by our elected officials but it was renewed.  In each case, while the bills were certainly pushed by conservatives, all members knowing the national mood and fears, had to think hard about their individual votes.  Let's be honest, our opinions and any lack of real protest, made them do it.  We too are culpable.  Osama lives.

We need to be honest in admitting that fighting an asymmetric "war" with stateless and often individual adversaries requires navigating in still somewhat uncharted or at least uncomfortable waters.  When you are unsure, it's not unexpected to throw out a wide net, a net that is likely to ensnare as many or more innocents than guilty.  It's a fact that we Americans have a very low tolerance for the kind of thing that happened in Boston.  As a one-off, we may show some resilience, but not if it were to happen more frequently.  Remember bombings of this kind are the every day in the Near East, something that surely none of us would want here.  So what is being done under the Patriot Act reflects what perhaps most of us want.  No violence, regardless of the cost.  That desire of course conflicts with what we have always seen as our national character.  And it is our national character that is currently being threatened — we seemingly have lost our bearings.  Osama lives.

America is not the same since 9/11 and the Snowden leaks are not so much a revelation of what we already knew or should have assumed, as they are a wakeup call.  Our character is changing and we have had no serious discussion about what that means, how far we want to go and what price we are willing to pay.  The digital age has facilitated actions that security people could only have dreamed of in years past.  We embrace what it has done for us, but often without much thought.  It's all happening so fast, and we have yet to adjust, to know that along with everything else our age of innocence is long gone.  Special forces killed Osama bin Laden, only we can prevent him from living on.  It's time we took on that task.