The phantoms of lost liberty

Terrorism and Tyranny:
Trampling Freedom, Justice, and Peace to rid the world of evil
James Bovard
New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003
353 pages

A quote from the book jacket tells us what we’re up against:

To those who scare peaceloving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this, your tactics only aid terrorists for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve.  They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends.

— Attorney General, John Ashcroft, December 6, 2001

James Bovard is probably the leading advocate for civil liberties writing today.  Other books on the threats to liberty include Freedom in Chains (1999), Lost Rights (2000), Feeling Your Pain (2001), and The Bush Betrayal (2004).

As the book jacket tells us, "His work has been publicly denounced by the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, as well as the chiefs of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the US International Trade Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency."  What a journalistic honor roll!  Bovard is an equal opportunity skewer, condemning Democrats and Republicans alike.

I use the above quoted Ashcroft post-911 warning to show the ultimate motive for our government’s staging the 911 attacks (with radical Islam terrorist cooperation): empire abroad, tyranny at home.  Anyone questioning The Patriot Act or its successors or any homegrown goon squads working for the government is "against America."  The subtext is doublespeak: "Those who clamor for liberty are against a country that stands for liberty."

What Bovard catalogs, distressingly, is the extent to which the government has used 911 to turn America down the road to a complete police state.  He starts with a historical analysis of the development of terrorism as a pretense for increased state power during the Reagan/Bush-1 years.

Consider the hundreds of US Marines (and others) killed in Lebanon, April 18, 1983, in several bombings by radical Muslim terrorists.  These acts were a consequence of US Middle East interventions—particularly the US okaying Israel’s helping Christian Phalangists massacre a thousand Palestinian unarmed civilians in refugee camps in Lebanon in the 1982 civil war.  Interventions were followed by criminally negligent US intelligence.

How many people remember the USS Vincennes?  On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes, the most advanced missile frigate in the US Navy, shot down a commercial Iranian Airbus A-300 flying from Iran to Dubai, killing all 290 passengers and crew on board.

The US government never explained "the accident."  Indeed, Bush-1, running for president, declared, "I will never apologize for the United States of America, I don’t care what the facts are."  (And they say the apple never falls far from the tree.)  Iranian officials continue to denounce the shootdown as "an act of state terrorism."  Two years later, the US Navy decorated two of the vessel’s commanders.

These three incidents show terrorists reside inside and outside our state.

The state lies about its own acts of terror and emphasizes the need for more government after each terrorist act committed by others.  Bovard describes the incipient (soon to arrive) tyranny rising from the new terrorism, particularly after 911.  After first identifying "criminally negligent US intelligence" that orchestrated or enabled 911, he catalogs what the state is doing as a consequence:

• Spending more money on the drug war and consensual crimes than on apprehending terrorist mass murderers, their puppeteers, or investigating the crimes they’ve committed
• The Patriot Act
• Every sort of surveillance without warrants
• Arrest and incarceration without charges
• Decreased susceptibility of prosecutors and federales to criminal prosecution
• Lowered authority for judges to thwart executive branch excesses
• Arbitrary seizure of bank accounts and financial resources
• TSA: Sexual harassment, incompetent brutality, and rudeness for air travelers
• Spreading oppressive "antiterrorist" laws to the states of other countries
• Exemption of states for acts of terror, such as bombing civilians
• Implementing the Israeli model for fighting terrorism: Israeli state success is measured by the number of Palestinians killed, homes razed, and lives crushed
• The fraud-based war on Iraq
• Government bureaucracy… on steroids, e.g. the Homeland Security Department, as the new cure to terrorism

Mr. Bovard makes the point, in this book and others, that the most unfortunate aftermath of 911 has been greater "trust in government" as the patriotic duty of every citizen—despite the fact the government failed abysmally and lied.  Too many citizens have blindly accepted, that now more than ever, the government is worthy of unquestioned obedience and trust.  Bush-Cheney and the NSS rabidly encourage it.

As we know and as Bovard concludes, "It is possible to crush the terrorist enemy without putting the federal government on a pedestal."  In any book like this, which identifies and catalogs a large number of evils, there is a great value.

But readers want to have something to do to resolve the enormity of the problems.  Reason to Freedom regularly features a "What Can You Do?" sidebar on our commentary columns to help with making things better.  Bovard isn’t the best at that sort of advice; what he suggests is basically we collectively get smarter, hold our representatives to task, and argue our case in public.

Broadly, to respond to books that catalog evil, I’m going to suggest people join the generic, international RLM (reason-liberty movement).  If you take action in any of the areas suggested in the grand strategy toward a civilization based on reason and freedom, you will be adding your weight on the cosmic moral scale to the side of good.  Please refer to the Strategy pillar in the Freedom 101 column and to our friendly links page.