Contributed by B F Koch
ITITY Political Commentator
We responded to a criminal act committed by stateless actors by violating international law and invading a sovereign state, then another and yet another. Politicians, pundits and media personalities, all reading from the same page of the propaganda playbook, have been complicit in convincing us this somehow made us safer.
At some point the potential presented by a trillion dollar a year security industry made perpetuating the threat more profitable than actually making us more secure. As we repeatedly remind ourselves that we will never forget, we focus our attention on what they did to us, overlooking what we did to us.
We can take some small comfort from the possibility that the people who hate us for our freedoms probably hate us a little bit less after we passed the Patriot Act. Now, in order to protect them, we treat our own citizens as suspects. Our paranoia has made it possible that we may lose everything before we notice anything is missing.
In a country whose history has been completely confused by relentless revisionism, it is sometimes a challenge to recognize our failures. The bad news is that for the past ten years we have continued to double down on dumb decisions. We have failed, but it’s an American failure, so we love it.
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