The Terrorists Have Already Won

Dear Mr. President,
Michael Ventura’s latest Letters at 3AM column: “An Arbitrary Nation: Part 2” (http://www.austinchronicle.com/columns/2013-05-03/letters-at-3am-an-arbitrary-nation-part-2/) asks this thought-provoking question: “If the Constitution is no longer the law of the land, what is?” In a series of columns, he shows how the Constitution has been gutted, violated and ignored. In Part 1 he demonstrates how the 1^st Amendment has been eviscerated; in Part 2, the 4^th Amendment. As I read his columns, it occurred to me that this is collateral damage from the War on Terror. Secrecy in the name of national security trumps everything. The Patriot Act, FISA, the ballooning web of security agencies (along with their ballooning budgets), the NDAA of 2012 and 2013, the secret justifications for targeted assassinations, for killing American citizens without legal recourse, the silencing of whistle-blowers, the suppression of information, all this secrecy makes an informed citizenry impossible, and transparency is the life blood of a democracy. The laws of the land are no longer public but locked away in the basement safe of the Justice Department; they are no longer consistently enforced but applied arbitrarily at the whim of authority—you and your administration. Victims of government injustice can no longer find redress in the courts because the government deems evidence and testimony too secret to be revealed. Citizens are no longer guaranteed a speedy trial or even a jury of their peers. Whistleblowers are jailed while torturers, assassins and violators of human rights are neither held accountable nor investigated. War crimes are ignored—but only if they’re committed by Americans—and covert wars and political assassination is now acceptable foreign policy. Our communications and electronic trails are captured (without a warrant) and sifted for evidence of terrorism and we are subject to indefinite detention by order of the president. We live in a police state that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago (e.g., a thousand heavily armored and armed men searching for a 19-year old boy in locked-down Boston or the deliberate incineration of Chris Dorner in a cabin near Big Bear a few months ago). All this indicates that the terrorists have already won. But the terrorists we should fear most are not in Afghanistan or Pakistan, Yemen or Syria, Libya or Mali; the terrorists most dangerous to America are those right here in Washington, D.C., our own government.