Sort of What We're After in Class

From Mark Danner's article on George W. Bush-era torture in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books (an earlier one reported on the leaked Red Cross report on the same topic): "The issue could not be more important, for it cuts to the basic question of who we are as Americans, and whether our laws and ideals truly guide us in our actions or serve, instead, as a kind of national decoration to be discarded in times of danger." I say, sort of, because what we're primarily trying to find out is how laws and ideals go by the wayside to a greater or lesser extent in times of crisis. Is it, as Philip Zelikow said a few years ago about America's post 9/11 scare, that "fear and anxiety were exploited by zealots and fools" (individuals in powerful places implementing wrongheaded policies), or is it that, as Walter Lippmann remarked in the wake of World War I, "at the present time a nation acts too much like a mob" (major pressure generated from below in society, leading to vigilantism, wrongheaded policies, or both). It's usually a combination, and the process differs in every case. The Palmer Raids of 1919 certainly were the result of deliberate actions by people like J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, but the country at that time had also gone a little Bolshevik and immigrant crazy. Japanese internment after Pearl Harbor was pushed through by a relatively small number of people in the army (with approval of President Roosevelt), but it was made easier, to say the least, by widespread anti-Japanese sentiments which in early 1942 suddenly intensified greatly (thanks, in part, to some deliberate misinformation from up high). Persecution of people suspected of communist sympathies after Word War II usually was a mixed bag also. Another vital element in virtually every crisis is that the "fear and anxiety" had some real basis in reality, so it's not as if there's never anything to worry about. But how does a country that likes to think of itself as law-abiding and generally decent do the right thing when it's under threat? By their own account, Dick Cheney and company deliberately decided to go to "the dark side" to deal with our current crisis; in other situations the decision to stretch laws and ideals beyond breaking point may be more opportunistic, or fatalistic. That this kind of dynamic is hard to avoid, however, the series of crises we've looked at makes abundantly clear.