Now America reacts

May 16, 2006

In October of 2001, the United Nations warned that due to a brutal combination of poverty, drought, dislocation, and long years of warfare, up to seven and a half million people were at risk of dying from starvation during Afghanistan’s coming months -- at precisely the time that the United States launched a post-9-11 war to displace the ruling Taliban. As the snows of late November approached, and with them a guaranteed death sentence for millions living in areas made impassable to aid trucks by winter snows, Washington refused to halt its bombing runs and Northern Alliance proxy war long enough for aid to resume. It was only through the serendipitous decision of the Taliban to withdraw to the mountains before winter’s onset that mass famine -- in effect, a genocidal invasion -- was averted.

Virtually nobody in America noticed the narrowly avoided holocaust.

On October 29, 2004, the British medical journal Lancet published a peer-reviewed article that made a compelling case that to date the U.S. invasion of Iraq had caused some 100,000 deaths over and above the civilian mortality that Iraq would have experienced in peacetime. Given that more time has passed since then than between the original U.S. invasion and the writing of the study, and that the insurgency has only intensified in that time, and that civil war has begun on top of it, and given the additional cumulative effects of war on public health and mortality, that number undoubtedly now exceeds 200,000 Iraqi deaths. The number continues to climb daily.

You can find the details each day, a few of them, in small type, on page A27, under "World: In Other News."

And now, America erupts because… the Bush administration has been secretly trying to build a database of every single phone call in the country, and it probably already includes your calls.

Over the weekend, both Newsweek and USA Today/Gallup released polls showing that a majority of Americans think the secret NSA database program "goes too far," as they say. I guess 200,000 dead, or seven and a half million, wouldn’t have been quite far enough.

The Newsweek poll has Bush at his lowest approval rating in that poll’s history; the USA Today poll claims that nearly two in three Americans favor Congressional hearings on the NSA matter. So do most Congressional Democrats, and more than a few Republicans that want to distance themselves from a plummeting presidency. Here in Blue America, a local Seattle daily devoted three separate stories Friday to how much D.C. politicians, local politicians, and ordinary citizens (respectively) were alarmed by last Thursday’s USA Today story.

Why was anyone shocked? A 12-23-05 Boston Globe story -- nearly five months ago -- reported that the NSA was not simply monitoring the international phone calls of Americans, as the White House claimed, but using data mining operations to survey millions of Americans’ calls. A story in the following day’s New York Times confirmed it, and over the following month the Los Angeles Times added more details. The revelation that the NSA is not only doing data mining but building a permanent database from call records is just one more onion layer peeled back from a secretive program that’s smelled (and made any sensible, Constitution-abiding folks cry) from the beginning. Appalling? You bet. A surprise? Only if your head has been buried in the sand.

The inexorable erosion of constitutional rights in this country is deeply alarming. With the NSA database, we’re now keeping track of the phone calls of (in the Bush ideal) every single American regardless of whether the callers are even relevant to an investigation, much less suspected of a crime, much less are approved for investigative attention through the oversight of a judge. (And yes, the Fourth Amendment does include the phrase "probable cause.") The degree to which Bush and his cabal are consistently arguing these days that they are above the law is beyond worrisome; it is grounds for impeachment, because Bush and his senior officials have all taken oaths to protect and defend (and, oh, yes, implement) the Constitution.

To the degree the NSA database flap rises above the usual short life cycle of most Bush scandals (by now, far too numerous to count, let alone recount), it can only be a good thing. The controversy reinforces, for any conservatives who might be having doubts, the reality that these guys are just about the apex of the evils of Big Government. (Can you imagine the uproar if this database had been launched by Clinton?) Given that this is a White House that politicizes every piece of information it can get its hand on, hard science included, it’s pretty difficult to avoid the conclusion that some of these records being reviewed more closely and referred to the FBI involve political opponents and administration critics.

So, yeah, this is a big deal. With luck, it might even help bring the Republicans down in November. It might even help bring Bush himself down.

All these radical erosions in America’s civil liberties are being justified by a unilaterally declared "war" on a tactic, a war its authors proudly proclaim will last generations. If we don’t fight to regain these rights now, and to not only remove Bush from power but reframe the so-called "war on terror" as an effort that must involve crime investigation, diplomatic reforms, and poverty alleviation as more important components than raw military power, these rights aren’t coming back in our lifetimes. Somehow, the American political scene has completely buried the "irony" that the same administration that, through incompetence and sloth, allowed 9-11 to happen in the first place, has been building up its own power by citing its presumed competence on national security.

But although it will clearly require regime change, civil liberties now being lost in this country can be restored. The lives of the nearly 3,000 people who died when Bush ignored warnings about 9-11 cannot be restored. They aren’t coming back. Neither are over 2,400 American soldiers. Neither are all those people who drowned during and after Katrina, many of whom are still "missing" and whose bodies will never be found.

But even the cost of this cabal in American lives is a drop in the bucket compared to what they are willing to spill in other peoples’ blood -- societies whose members, it ought to go without saying (but can’t), value life just as much as you or I. The lives of over 200,000 Iraqis, lost in a war launched illegally and sold by lies, can never be restored. Millions of Afghans narrowly avoided the same fate. And now these zealots are seriously considering nuking Iran, an action which could not only directly result in untold additional numbers of deaths, but which would spark a conflagration that would make Iraq’s dead look like loners.

So: why do we care about someone knowing who we called, but not about the obliteration of whole cities or countries? Don’t we need a little, like, perspective here? Aren’t we talking not about not just criminal actions and civil liberty violations here, but war crimes?

And if Saddam Hussein is on trial for crimes against humanity, why isn’t George W. Bush?


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