Books: America's Terror War on America

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Books: America's Terror War on America
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2007-10-01 23:38. Media

The War on Terror didn't start as an attack on Americans' rights, but several new books argue that's exactly what happened.
By Christopher Dickey, Newsweek

Oct. 8, 2007 issue - A slew of recent books about the Bush administration's wars (at home as well as abroad) might leave you wondering if President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney are their own Axis of Evil. In excruciating detail, these tomes tell of torture and warrantless wiretaps; they show a relentless arrogation of power and abrogation of what were thought to be solid constitutional principles. In these books, apocalyptic delusions got us into Iraq and misjudgments have helped keep us there. The picture that emerges is so bleak that even serious journalists and scholars sometimes veer toward conspiracy theories.

Consider, for instance, the lurid title of an otherwise scrupulously researched book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage: "Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy."

The administration's impassioned defenders, meanwhile, grow strident. Norman Podhoretz, the dean of neoconservatives, writes in "World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism" that the Bush administration is up against "a domestic insurgency" led by "journalistic devotees of the Vietnam syndrome," isolationists, "liberal internationalists" and (heaven forbid) "realists."

In fact, the situation is far from a "civil war," as Podhoretz (an adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani) would have us believe. But this is a good moment to take stock of the more subtle narrative in these books: stories of score-settling at home, a new kind of enemy abroad, righteous intentions, grand visions and bad information. And if there is a recurrent theme, it's that this administration set out to create its own reality, whether approaching the Bill of Rights like a classified document to be redacted or girding itself for war in Iraq with a steady diet of dubious intelligence.

The Bush and Cheney who emerge from these pages cherish secrecy, they deplore constraint and they sneer at dissent, so nothing and nobody can dissuade them from their chosen course. Reality checks are not allowed. "Democracies die behind closed doors," federal appeals court Judge Damon Keith said in 2002. "The Framers of the First Amendment did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us. They protected the people against secret government."

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