In a provocative yet sensible thought experiment, David Foster Wallace asks if the American idea(l) is still considered worth the price of innocent lives, if “ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life” as is frequently heralded in our history for past generations. While it is always easier to consider any sacrifice in the abstract, the quick rejoinder to Wallace’s notion - that the Americans who died on 9/11 could be considered a fair trade, the martyrs for our freedoms - is to dismiss it as tasteless and disrespectful. Yet how else can we penetrate the shroud of rhetoric that surrounds the War On Terror in the inviolable tones of righteousness? With the very meaning of ‘freedom’ diluted with its repetition as the basis for exchanging civil liberties (freedoms to) in return for the promise of protection from further attacks (freedom from), Wallace invokes the Benjamin Franklin caution that, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

(Curiously, the attribution of that quotation is in dispute, with Franklin possibly only involved in publishing the book that bore it. Another diplomat named Richard Jackson is now the presumptive author. However, Franklin’s 1738 Poor Richard’s Almanack has another maxim with similarly sage advice - “Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.”)

Progressively, as Wallace continues in more detail, the suggestion becomes less of a Swiftian Modest Proposal and something more ominous than a partisan snipe. While the proposed trade may be in itself monstrous to consider, the current conflict being so far removed from our borders makes it difficult to even consider what level of sacrifice is acceptable to maintain our full identity as a nation. Without a draft to more equally distribute the communities affected by active military service, or tax hikes or war bonds to spread the cost (not to mention the seeming paradox of maintaining a tax cut while continually asking for emergency war deficit spending), the American public is able to contribute in large part only by passively asserting we ’support our troops’ and gradually ceding our civil liberties and governmental checks and balances. The collective steps that Wallace mentions plus others, taken together, raise frightening prospects:

• “Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib” - apart from their probable propaganda effect among terrorist factions, both have demonstrably undermined the US commitment to the Geneva Conventions, and presented the US as a supporter of torture.
• Military Commissions Act - actively suspends some of the Geneva Conventions and the basic legal principle of habeas corpus for detainees, and creates the quasi-legal status of “unlawful enemy combatant”
• “Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance” - whereas detentions, extraordinary rendition, etc. have largely affected non-US citizens, the expanded police powers under the Patriot Act(s) and the implementation of widespread electronic surveillance on US soil without Congressional or Judicial oversight all speak to an unchecked Executive enforcement arm.
• Executive Order 13233 - restricts access to past Presidential records. Along with the explosion of document classification under the current administration, repeated imposition of executive privilege, resistance to Freedom of Information Act requests, shifting of White House email to GOP servers to avoid retention rules, and even the latest tale of Karl Rove’s investigator having drives ‘disinfected’ of malware by 7-pass wipes all serve to restrict oversight of Executive functions even by historians.
• NSPD 51, or “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive” - specifies how in an emergency situation, the President will take precedence over the other branches in an ‘Enduring Constitutional Government’; this however puts it in conflict with the National Emergencies Act, a law which preserves Congressional oversight of the President during an emergency. The directive also designates several classified “Continuity Annexes” which have yet to been made accessible to members of the Homeland Security Committee.
• Posse Comitatus Act - Originally set limits on the use of US military forces in the role of a domestic police force. Was granted an exception when directed by the President or act of Congress under the Insurrection Act, has now been further suspended by the John Warner Defense Appropriation Act for Fiscal Year 2007 which allows the military to enforce order in any emergency declared by the President. An eerily prescient fictionalization of this was 1998’s The Siege, where “the secret US abduction of a suspected terrorist leads to a wave of terrorist attacks in New York that lead to the declaration of martial law.” Rendition, sanctioned torture, intervention in Iraq politics, suicide bombings by Islamic extremists, and the revocation of Posse Comitatus by the President are all depicted in New York at a time when the worst domestic terrorist incident was the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
• Office of Legal Counsel - the legal office within the Department of Justice which provides guidance on what the President can do. The current administration has used the Office to push through a number of the justifications for Executive expansion, including the memos authorizing torture, detention, and surveillance. A former head of the agency, Jack Goldsmith, resigned and has written a book (The Terror Presidency) and given a Fresh Air interview about the experience. A similar interview was with reporter Charlie Savage whose book Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy covers the frequent use of ’signing statements’ to allow the President to bypass limitations of signed laws.

While individually these can be attributed to committed attempts to combat the unconventional, ‘asymmetric’ threat of terrorism - or in the case of NSPD51, simple emergency preparedness - the aggregate effect (read: system impact) is a vastly empowered Executive branch with at least some legal cover to seize governmental control in the event of a widely-worded emergency. Those conspiracy-minded of the Left would be quick to make those associations, of course, but a surprising warning comes from former Assistant Treasury Secretary (aka “Father of Reaganomics”) under Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, who has baldly called for the impeachment of both Bush and Cheney or else “a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.” Taken in concert with President Bush’s latest stay-on-message reaction to the recent intelligence report on Iran’s absent nuclear program (and leaving aside perhaps Roberts’ assertion that any movement on Iran is ultimately about securing Palestine for Israel), where he responded with trademark rhetoric by repeated use of the words ‘danger’ and ‘dangerous’ in reference to Iran gaining nuclear weapons even given the officially-less-likely scenario presented by US intelligence, the message remains solely that we must treat Iran as an enemy, no matter the evidence for or against their being a valid threat.

While Roberts’ scenario of Tom Clancy-esque ‘false flag‘ attacks deserves the same skepticism as similar claims surrounding 9/11, it need not even require an actual attack to set the stage for a coup d’etat as recently demonstrated in Pakistan. Anyone who has watched the events unfold in that country - a President at risk of losing office uses his role as Commander-in-Chief to declare a general emergency and uses sweeping police powers to imprison or muzzle political rivals and restrict the media, all while speaking of unsubstantiated ‘extremist’ threats - may wonder whether that was something that could only happen abroad, or was it just a dry run for next year? At the risk of evoking Von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods breathless gullibility, are there still concerted efforts to effect a “Pax Americana” according to the Project for the New American Century? To echo the adage that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you,” it bears noting that “just because it sounds like a conspiracy doesn’t mean it can’t actually happen.”