Part 3: The loss of the American soul

The genius of bin Laden: A story of an elephant and a mouse
Part 3: The loss of the American soul

The goal of every terrorist organization is to create fear in the target country, causing the leadership to enact policies and practices that alienate the population and reduce civil liberties - does any of this sound or feel familiar? America's power has always been our freedoms, our insistence on a rule of law based on innocence, not guilt. Our legitimacy around the world is dependent on the global perception of U.S. fairness, moral behavior, and our uncompromising practice of playing by the rules - even at our own detriment. Although this sounds counter intuitive, these characteristics made up America's moral authority in global politics for decades - they helped us win the Cold War and broker peace through out the world.

During my Special Forces training I was tutored by a retired CIA field agent with 30 years of operational experience. He concluded, after years in the field, that America's power and influence, even over our enemies, was based on our honesty, fairness, and humanity - not the body count we accumulated, or the intelligence we tortured from helpless victims. He would say, "The ends never justify the means, and inhumane means ensures you will never reach the end."

With bin Laden's help America has become that which we have condemned since our inception as a nation; a global tyrant no longer governed by law, humanity, or constraint. We are now the nation that locks people up without charges, a nation that condones and justifies torture from the highest levels of government all the way down to main street - we are the American generation that tortures, a debt of sin we will pay with interest, we traded our soul for a false sense of security.

As part of Special Forces training each candidate spends several days enduring numerous forms of torture in a classified mock prison camp in rural North Carolina. It is life transforming training that forever changes the candidate that endures it. The experience is designed to train the operator how to survive capture by an evil enemy that tortures. The experts that teach this course explain that torture diminishes the humanity of everyone involved. Torturer and tortured are never the same, the moral compass that guides both is forever altered. The experts also warn that information gained from torture is the most unreliable - so why do we do it? Do we now see torture as justifiable retribution, or have they become less than human in our eyes - the prerequisite for all human rights abuses. In our popular culture we have always vilified those that torture as evil soulless monsters - the vetoing, the Cold War era Soviets, the North Koreans. By all fairness we must now add the United States to the list of enemies of humanity.

Besides torturing the powerless, we are also the country that hides suspects in secret prisons around the world, playing a perverse version of the shell game with human lives. We hide these people because what we are doing is against our laws and the laws of the countries where we hide these pitiful souls.

Think about that for a minute - American agents snatch people from their beds in the middle of the night; in the process we take from them their freedom, identity, health, sanity, and hope. These damned souls cease to exist except as apparitions in the shadows of rendition, an American made hell. We have become state sponsored human traffickers of people who disagree with us.

For those who have been lucky enough to end up in U.S. prisons or Guantanamo (America's Hanoi Hilton), they may have no rights but at least they have a face and a name – well, they did. Recently a U.S. appeals court in Washington ruled the Gitmo retainers, or anyone for that matter, could be shipped to Afghanistan and held indefinitely in a military prison without charges or a lawyer because Afghanistan is considered a theater of war. Since this ruling, several foreigners have been brought to Afghanistan to be hidden in the shadows; nameless faceless, hopeless. In response to the ruling, the ACLU said it, "ratifies the dangerous principle that the U.S. government has unchecked power to capture people anywhere in the world, unilaterally declare them enemy combatants and subject them to indefinite military detention with no judicial review.”

Bin Laden has got us so afraid of our own shadows that American law enforcement has begun to resemble the Thought Police in the Tom Cruise movie, "Minority Report." Recently two young men were arrested while trying to board a plane to Egypt and were charged with conspiring to kill, maim and kidnap persons outside the United States. The two young men were investigated and encouraged by undercover police for two years prior to their arrest.

According to the U.S. Attorney, their actual crimes are: watching certain videos, interest in what certain people were saying, playing paint ball, lifting weights, buying military style pants, and playing violent video games." These crimes could apply to thousands of young adults all over suburbia in every U.S. city.

Where is the actual crime here? Court documents show the two men had no connection or contact with Somali terrorists they are accused of wanting to join - their only outside influence was a cop who encouraged the young men's actions for years prior to their arrest.

Bin Laden has succeeded in playing on our fears to destroy our nation's rule of law, making any thought or speech a possible criminal act - no actual crime need be committed. As the U.S. fills its prisons with nearly 25 percent of the world's total prison population, we have become one of the most repressive governments on the planet. The land of the free has become the home of the incarcerated. He must be laughing himself silly over the destruction of American rule of law and confounding all three branches of the most powerful government in the world.

Another sign we have lost the War on Terror is when the top justice official in the country says there is no way terror suspects will be found innocent in a U.S. court. This begs the question, what is a terrorist? Is the underwear bomber a terrorist? Is the l4-year-old boy who felt he was defending his country when he attacked U.S. troops in Afghanistan a terrorist? Are Predator attacks on civilian populations in Pakistan terrorism? Is assassination or kidnapping? Is the CIA a terrorist organization because they have done all of these things? The very foundation of our society and our moral standing around the globe is based on our rule of law and that everyone - king, peasant, and even t terrorist suspect is innocent in the eyes of the court until proven guilty. The scales of U.S. justice are no longer balanced or blind, the state holds all the cards, the accused has none.
The opponents of justice say that these innominates are prisoners of war and should be tried in military courts, not civilian courts. Fair enough, then when will we extend to these soldiers their rights under the Geneva Convention? As signatures of the Convention, we have pledged to treat all combatants in accordance with the articles whether our enemies are signatures or not. If we are going to hold these suspects/combatants under military law, when is the war crimes trial for U.S. interrogators, the generals that supervised them, and two American presidents that sponsored the biggest human rights abuses in our nation since slavery by authorizing the torture of thousands of souls in American captivity.

These acts under the Geneva Convention, and all human decency, are war crimes. Look what we have taken from ourselves and willingly given to bin Laden. Look what fear has done.

Since 9/11 the U.S. has created an alphabet soup of new Federal agencies to keep us ''safe.'' We have also supported the economies of dozens of Middle Eastern and Asian countries in the effort to halt the spread of terrorism. Next week we will look at the monetary cost of America's longest and most futile so-called war.