From [HERE] and [HERE] Despite its ostensible “victory,” (the announced killing of Emanuel Goldstein — er, Osama Bin Laden ) the United States has experienced a moral defeat by abandoning everything it stood for and becoming what it hated.
The World Since 9/11:
- The U.S. has engaged in 2 wars. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably top 6,000 dead U.S. troops in those two wars, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans. The cost for both wars is also now well over $1 trillion.
- The U.S. has detained people without trial and tortured them at “black sites” overseas, rendered them to other countries to be tortured,
- claimed a right to detain American citizens without trial,
- barred those who turned out to be innocent from legal redress in the American courts for their detention and torture,
- refused compensation to hundreds of innocent people detained at Gitmo, prohibited detainees from talking about their detention and torture,
- turned the Fourth Amendment’s “search and seizure” provisions into toilet paper with USA PATRIOT and illegal wiretaps,
- The current president has also claimed the power to execute U.S. citizens, off the battlefield, without a trial, and to prevent anyone from knowing about it after the fact.
- The Congress approved, the president signed, and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a broadly written law making it a crime to advocate for any organization the government deems sympathetic to terrorism. This includes challenging the “terrorist” designation in the first place.
- American Muslims, a heartening story of success and assimilation, are now harassed and denigrated for merely trying to build houses of worship.
- Without a warrant, the government can search and seize indefinitely the laptops and other personal electronic devices of anyone entering the country.
- further militarized local police forces, and set up what amounts to a system of internal passport checkpoints in the airports. [HERE] and [HERE]