Terrorists Of The Soul

By Achal Mehra | December 12, 2005

For four interminable years, the Bush administration has held America hostage to a bogus war on terror, decimating the country’s lofty traditions of civil and political liberties and time-honored ideals of equality, individual liberty and personal dignity.

Whatever temporary powers a state may need to fight terrorism, holding suspects without charges, trial, access to lawyers or courts, for four years and counting, fails to meet even rudimentary standards of fairness and decency in a democratic society. One can understand the occasional need to detain suspects for a few days or weeks for investigation, but placing them incommunicado in indefinite detention is draconian and has all the hallmarks of a Soviet-style gulag. At the very least, the government is obligated to identify its prisoners and the grounds for holding them.

Likewise, the Bush administration has dodged around the Geneva Convention’s prohibitions on the abuse of prisoners of war by drawing facile distinctions between soldiers and enemy combatants. To evade the constraints of international treaties and domestic law, it has transferred terror suspects to countries with an abysmal history of human rights abuse for torture to extract information.

The Bush administration has violated international law, falsified and fabricated intelligence and lied to the world and the American people in its headlong rush to war in Iraq for which the country and the world is paying a heavy price.

No liberty is too precious, no cost too excessive and no life too innocent in Bush’s war without end, time or place on terror.

The indictment of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, for exposing a covert CIA agent lays bare the extent to which this administration will go in its vindictive campaign to hound, vilify and intimidate its critics, even at the expense of its own vaunted national security interests.

Bush’s pit bull Dick Cheney and his reactionary right junta seek to browbeat earnest critics by questioning their patriotism. But it is patriotic in the grandest American tradition to challenge arbitrary governmental authority and abuse of power. What is decidedly un-American and unpatriotic is for the Bush administration to abuse state power to systematically intimidate, harass and persecute critics.

The celebrated French philosopher Jean Baudrillard recently remarked, “Even if there were no Americans living in the United States, there would still be America. France is just a country; America is a concept.”

Whatever invective the pretenders on the right might spew, a true American is American not by nationality, but by deed.

For far too long, the Bush administration has used the bogey of terrorism to undermine this country’s most cherished values and to intimidate those who raised a lonely voice in protest.

It is time for Americans to rise up to rescue the country from the terrorists of the American soul who are holding the country hostage to their self-serving and imagined nightmares.