From Substack
From the Cold War to the War on Terror: the harms from authoritarian "solutions" are often greater than the threats they are ostensibly designed to combat.
2021 storming of the United States Capitol
(Image by Wikipedia (commons.wikimedia.org), Author: Tyler Merbler) Details Source DMCA
In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack, Americans were largely united in emotional horror at what had been done to their country as well as in their willingness to endorse repression and violence in response. As a result, there was little room to raise concerns about the possible excesses or dangers of the American reaction, let alone to dissent from what political leaders were proposing in the name of vengeance and security. The psychological trauma from the carnage and the wreckage at the country's most cherished symbols swamped rational faculties and thus rendered futile any attempts to urge restraint or caution.
Nonetheless, a few tried. Scorn and sometimes worse were universally heaped upon them.
On September 14 while bodies were still buried under burning rubble in downtown Manhattan Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast a lone vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). "Some of us must urge the use of restraint," she said 72 hours after the attack, adding: "our country is in a state of mourning" and thus "some of us must say: let's step back for a moment, let's pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control."
For simply urging caution and casting a single "no" vote against war, Lee's Congressional office was deluged with threats of violence. Armed security was deployed to protect her, largely as a result of media attacks -- suggesting that she was anti-American and sympathetic to terrorists. Yet 20 years later -- with U.S. troops still fighting in Afghanistan under that same AUMF, with Iraq destroyed, ISIS spawned, and U.S. civil liberties and privacy rights permanently crippled -- her solitary admonitions look far more like courage, prescience and wisdom than sedition or a desire to downplay the threat of Al Qaeda.
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