THE SANTAYANA COMPLEX OF NATIONAL SECURITY

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“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

George Santayana

The embarrassment of being caught with their pants down was more than any democratic government could possibly accept as their own making; and in the aftermath of destruction, there was more buck-passing than anyone could imagine, culminating in the propaganda take-down of the Clinton Administration, encapsulated in ABC's prime time broadcast of “The Path to 9/11” (September 10-11, 2006). That we had gone soft was without question; and the American people readily ate up the prevailing assumption, that the false sense of security created by the naivety of multiculturalism had left us so forgone the 9/11 attacks were unpreventable by the time the Bush administration took office. Conveniently, such views ignore the hundreds to thousands of warning flags and opportunities that the government had to stop the attacks with the pre-9/11 national security-state. Despite our vulnerabilities, it's quite clear, in hindsight, that the government possessed the tools to stop the attacks, under the laws of the land written before 9/11. Instead of accepting responsibility for the failure to enforce the law, as it was written, policy makers were largely successful in convincing the American people that Civil Liberty roadblocks were largely responsible for the government's inept response to the threat posed by the crafty death-cult of al-Qaeda. America's civil liberties became the scapegoat for the basic problem of restoring the government's credibility following its failure to prevent 9/11; and in the new “Kingdom of Fear” (Thompson, 2001), where one more measly car bomb could have had revolutionary consequences, the American people were all too willing to trade-in fundamental rights and liberties in order to protect the Homeland from further attacks.

By pumping-up the threat posed by al-Qaeda, the government inexorably prompted even greater suspicion and anger towards all Muslim people. While indecency to the whole of Islam is widely condemned, most Americans still support aggressive means to seek-out the bad from the good in our Muslim community. Consequently, in the decade-long dragnet that has followed 9/11, innocent, law-abiding Muslims have faced unequal intrusion on their rights as American citizens and as guests in our country. No doubt, many have wrongly faced prolonged domestic detentions in abusive conditions, where the presumption of their innocence was thrown out the window.

Contrary to numerous international treaty commitments―as well as contemporary interpretation of the Constitution’s prohibition on “cruel and usual punishment” (U.S. Constitution, amend. 8, cl. 3)―, a vast array of government officials, elected representatives, and public intellectuals loudly championed the right of the Executive Branch to employ the use of torture to gain intelligence on terror plots. While it is known, that detainees on foreign battlefields were subjected to torture, just how far the government has gone to extract information from its own citizens, on American soil, is an unknown that is a cause for great alarm.

Given the power asserted by the former president to make unilateral judgment calls about the entitlement of individual American citizens on American soil to the most basic level of due process known to the civil body of man―the writ of habeus corpus―, the only thing the American people would have to go by, in regards to justifying the compelling state interest of the government in denying basic liberties to American citizens, would be the word of our government. In a nation-state based on the rule of law, 'trust us' is simply not good enough.

Today, many Americans might claim, that the wholesale militarized internment of anyone of Japanese descent along the Western Coast of the United States, during WWII, pales in comparison to anything our modern government has done to our Muslim community in the post-9/11 world. At best, that argument is treading on thin ice, and people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. The Bush Administration's zeal for protecting the Homeland, clearly outstripped its concern for Civil Liberties and Human Rights, and many innocent people ended up on the short end of a very big stick.

The similarities between Japanese internment and the Bush Administration's denial of the writ of habeus corpus to “unlawful enemy combatants” is absolutely striking. While our modern government has not gone about ordering the forced evacuation and relocation of all Muslims, like they did to the Japanese during WWII, the metrics of the unchecked power assumed by the Bush Administration in the War on Terror, included the wholesale legal right of the government to pursue indefinite detentions of U.S. citizens on U.S soil, outside the purvey or review of the justice system, based on the judgment of the Executive alone. While sweeping orders to intern all Muslims were not issued, in its post-9/11 global dragnet, the Bush Administration denied the writ of habeus corpus to those it classified as 'unlawful enemy combatants,' allowing the government to detain these individuals without charge, without any presentation of evidence in a courtroom for cause, and for as long as the global terrorist threat remains real.