Leonard Pitts: Imagine The Worst - It Can Happen Here

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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.pitts06jan06,0,4694690.story?track=rss

Imagine the worst: It can happen here

Leonard Pitts Jr.
January 6, 2008

The authorities would just come into your home, grab your mother, your brother, your dad, and take them away. No warning, no warrant, no appeal.

Thirty thousand people were disappeared that way, she told me. This was in an interview three years ago, and Ruth Cox was describing her childhood in Argentina under military dictatorship. Ms. Cox, a teacher in Charleston, S.C., said families never learned what happened to their loved ones. Or why. People were taken, and that was it. The government was not accountable.

My first response was a vague pride that those kinds of things can't happen here.

My second response was to realize that my first response was naive. These last years have provided a jolting education in the sorts of things that can, indeed, happen here. Mass surveillance; detention without access to courts; no right to confront, or even know, the evidence against you; torture. And a government that is not accountable.

So last week's news that the Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes said to depict the harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects is welcome but also belated - the very embodiment of the old saw about locking the garage after the car's been stolen.

Though we have lost a lot more than a car.

And here, a line from a Bruce Springsteen song seems apropos: "The flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone. Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't." Sadly, the list of what we won't do has narrowed drastically since 2001.

It's telling that a number of politicians have lately cited as their model on terrorism issues Jack Bauer, the counterterrorism agent on the TV hit 24, who routinely tortures the truth out of bad guys as the clock ticks toward catastrophe. It's not hard to understand the appeal. There's a certain atavistic attraction to the Jack Bauer method, an attraction that bypasses the head en route to the gut.

Too bad, because had the head been asked, it might have pointed out that Jack Bauer is a fictional character on a TV show not noted for its realism. Using him as a guide to terrorism makes about as much sense as using Barney Fife as a guide to law enforcement.

And the very fact that Jack Bauer is invoked in the most crucial policy debate of our time tells you something about the state of the union more than six years after the 9/11 attacks.

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