Andrew Sullivan in this week's London Times:
Pre-Cog America
The weird tension of summer 2002
I wonder what historians will one day say about the American mood in the summer of 2002. It's a weird, strained, emotionally unstable time. The war is not over, but it seems in a lull. Americans have victories but no victory. Al Qaeda lives. Saddam's race for weapons of mass destruction continues. The shock of September 11 has become a kind of intermittent anxiety rather than emotional catharsis. And it hasn't been supplanted in the public consciousness by anything else. The political and bureaucratic finger-pointing of the last couple of months about how 9/11 could have happened merely added to jitters. The infighting seemed both comforting in that it represented a return to normality and yet unnerving since it revealed just how vulnerable America still is. While president Bush's ratings remain amazingly robust, the wave of faith in government that followed last September has waned. Americans now seem to hover between fear of terror and skepticism of government - a particularly queasy combination.
You can see this tension in the movies. A couple of weeks ago, one of the first summer blockbusters opened. Called "The Sum Of All Fears," it starred Ben Affleck in a classic Tom Clancy drama. But it differed from previous war-and-spy dramas in one simple respect. In most previous movies, nuclear catastrophe is what looms over the entire scenario, and is averted at the film's climax by our hero. The formulaic ticking bomb defused at the last moment is such a Hollywood cliche, it almost comforts. But in this movie, nuclear horror actually begins the movie. The bomb goes off as soon as the action starts - in a sports stadium in Baltimore, wiping out most of the city. It didn't help the national mood that when the film opened, the papers were full of the capture of a wannabe al Qaeda dirty bomber, Jose Padilla, an American convert to Islam. The fact that the toughest immigration controls could do nothing against a home-grown Islamist didn't exactly reassure. Although Americans now know that a dirty bomb is not the end of civilization as we know it, they also know that such an event would not only change their country in ways as profound as the World Trade Center atrocity, but that it is almost certainly going to happen some day. This thought hovers at the periphery of the national psyche like the rims of sunglasses on a clear summer day.
The anxiety creeps up on you at surprising moments. When I left Washington a fortnight ago for my usual summer cottage on Cape Cod, it occurred to me that I might never return. What if D.C. were a cancer-inducing dirty-bombed disaster area by the autumn? As stocks keep sliding, real estate prices, especially in non-urban areas, keep escalating. This isn't panic. It's anxiety. And then last week, the White House was evacuated briefly as an unidentified plane came within protected airspace. In that context, the squabbles over who did what at the CIA last summer almost reassured. If the Democrats were still squabbling with the Republicans in Congress, if the New York Times was still harrumphing about every tiny policy initiative the Bush White House introduced, maybe we weren't on the brink of calamity.
But then another lesser anxiety surfaces: what if the government is actually over-successful in preventing terror? Last Friday, as if to raise this question, another movie opened. It's a Spielberg-Cruise production, and it too resonated uneasily in the unconscious. Set in the year 2053, "Minority Report" is a film adaptation of a classic Philip K. Dick sci-fi fantasy. In Dick's chilling future, it has become possible to foresee which individuals are likely to commit crime in the future. These people are analyzed and selected by "pre-cogs," creatures who can see the future, ferretted out by hideous spider-creatures and then cryogenically frozen to keep them out of society's way. The result is a crime- and terror-free world - but a chillingly authoritarian one.
Is this where the war on terrorism will lead? Jose Padilla, after all, was detained not for any criminal activity he had done, but for plotting somewhat implausibly to detonate a dirty bomb in the distant future. His incarceration was not a violation of habeas corpus because he was designated an enemy combatant in a military conflict. Even liberal constitutional scholar, Laurence Tribe, conceded in the New York Times "that detention by military authorities may indeed be constitutional Ñ but only if review by a federal court confirms the executive's assertions that people detained are in fact enemy combatants." This is exactly what the Bush administration asserted. And it fit a discernible pattern. The White House has found itself having to reverse certain assumptions about foreign and domestic policy under the penumbra of terrorist war. State Department and Pentagon policy before last September was basically defensive - against crime and terror. Now the doctrine is clearly designed to pre-empt attacks before they occur. Similarly, FBI policy before September 11 was to follow potential terrorists for long periods of time to gain intelligence and information. These days, the premium is on immediate capture, taking such potential mass murderers off the streets before they can do any damage. This is Philip K. Dick's nightmare made real - except it has been deployed to prevent an even worse nightmare.
No one likes to choose between these two unpalatable options - the erosion of civil liberties or the possibility of nuclear, biological or chemical holocaust on American soil. But, thanks to al Qaeda, that's where we are. Even when we think we have an easy domestic issue, darker clouds intrude. Last week, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that police acted constitutionally when they boarded a bus to search passengers for drugs, without informing such passengers that they could opt not to be searched. The New York Times reflecting, as usual, liberal conventional wisdom, took issue with the Court. Instinctively, I agreed with the Times. I'm a civil libertarian too.
And then later that day, the news came through that another Islamist homicidal maniac had detonated a bomb on a bus in Israel, killing 19 innocents. Suddenly, the bus-search issue seemed placed in a whole new light. What if that happens here, you could hear people asking themselves. What would we say then? And then we got on with our summer.
June 23, 2002, The Sunday Times of London
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