Current Spear Point

‘Spear’ Points

December 12, 2006

by Howard V. Hendrix

Nothing to Hide, Everything to Fear: Terror, Torture, Conscience, and Consciousness

(originally presented 12/10/06 as part of the Educational Forum on the Military Commissions Act of 2006, held at San Joaquin College of Law)

I do my best to read the Declaration of Independence, the US Constitution and first ten amendments to the latter at least once a year—usually on July Fourth—in order to remind myself of the foundational principles on which this nation is based. I'm not a legal professional, nor a constitutional scholar. I don't even play one on TV.

I am, however, in the odd position of being a writer of overly-researched center-left political science fiction thrillers dealing, most recently, with the military and intelligence communities. I also happen to have a brother-in-law who's a Special Agent in Counterterrorism with the FBI. (We don't agree on much, but he's a handy interview source for my books and he, like all of us, has his own piece of the truth.)

I have no doubt that terrorism is real and a real threat. I have no doubt that there are people in the world who don’t like US foreign, military, political, business, and cultural policies—and have their own very real reasons for not liking those policies.

Although I know there are many MIHOP (Made It Happen On Purpose) and LIHOP (Let It Happen On Purpose) folks out there when it comes to the US government and the events of 9/11/01, I do _not_ personally believe 9/11 was a US government-sponsored conspiracy—a sort of “Edifice Wrecks” Reichstag.

I also do not believe, however, that the so-called war on terror is being waged in a fashion neutral to American domestic politics and civil liberties. It has been framed to fit a particular political agenda. As the Amnesty International report issued in response to the signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 notes, one core policy choice made by the Bush administration "was to frame its response to the 9/11 attacks in terms of a global 'war' rather than as a criminal law-enforcement effort, which meant that the law [including law regarding torture] would have to be made to fit this 'new paradigm,' as President Bush characterized the situation in a 7 February 2002 memorandum on detentions."

What has happened in the the years since that framing decision illustrates perfectly what chaos and complexity theorists refer to as "sensitive dependence on initial conditions." I hope my fellow panelists will address the problems raised when we have such "new paradigm" policy like this driving the interpretation of the law, rather than the law driving the interpretation of policy.

I am also interested in whether my fellow panelists might agree or disagree with my assessment, from reading the documents, that the administration in its legal efforts seems more interested in protecting from lawsuits our government officials who have sponsored torture, than in protecting those who are arguably being tortured illegally. Perhaps they will also address the argument that the best studies by even the CIA itself reveal that information produced as a result of torture is dubious at best and very unreliable in the majority of instances.

For myself, however, I'd like to address the broader philosophical issues of privileging state or corporate power over individual liberties. I believe that if individual liberties are to have any reality or political force, they must be based in a recognition of the reality of individual consciousness itself.

The war to confine the open mind is far older than the war on terror, and much deeper than notions of political “left” and “right.” Since at least the Enlightenment, individual consciousness has periodically come under attack from what we now call both the far right and the far left.

Today it's not so much about the divine right of kings and the body politic as the king’s “other body.” Nonetheless, the far right still views individual consciousness as a socially-created space which ought to be filled with messages for the “good of the family and the social order”—messages which, unfortunately, usually turn out to be primarily for the good of both the megachurch-God and Wall Street-Dollar corporations.

Today it’s not so much about showing more respect for our commonwealth than for any prince or any one person. Nonetheless, the far left still views the individual person with suspicion and its theorists too often disparage consciousness as a "bourgeois fiction" occuring _a posteriori_ to a socially-created space which ought to be filled with messages for the "good of the people" but which, unfortunately, have usually turned out to be for the good of the new people in power and running the revolution.

Although the war against individual consciousness is much older than the war on terror, the war on terror has provided a convenient new front on which to wage that older struggle. Government-manipulated terror alerts, the erosion of the separation of church and state, the weakening of checks and balances, the president’s excessive use of signing statements and push for the principles of the unitary executive, and the general attack on privacy and on the notion of consenting adults, surveillance, torture—the whole "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, so just trust us" mantra—all this really constitutes another episode in the long siege against individual consciousness.

The frontal assault on habeas corpus, signed into American law with the signing of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, is most prominently a case of the radical privileging of state power over individual liberty. The deeper goal of such attacks is the ultimate destruction of that private, hidden space behind one's eyes and inside one's skull. If we have nothing to hide, we have nothing at all, for consciousness is fundamentally private and hidden.

Paradoxically, the tool most widely being used to get inside the private space of consciousness is fear—of which the fear machinery of the indefinitely prolongable "war on terror" is the best example. The more we have everything to fear (and increasingly fear everything) the easier it becomes to pry open the individual mind and wire it into some larger group-mind and its group-think.

To those who would argue that the terror threat is so real, powerful, and pervasive that it merits a shredding of the Bill of Rights, I suggest we look at Benjamin Franklin’s idea that those who would sacrifice individual liberty for temporary security deserve neither. To those who would say, “Well, we’re just doing it to foreigners,” I’d suggest we consider Mark Twain’s idea that a nation cannot function as a tyranny abroad and hope to remain a democratic republic at home.

Let’s not be naive. This nation was born in the blood of revolution. Its national power, which gives us, besides many more material luxuries, the luxury of having this discussion—that power has been sustained at many times, for better and worse, through force and blood. Yet in our own groping way, we as a nation have tried to remain true to this country’s founding ideals—our own national version of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions"—and have expanded liberties beyond those specifically enumerated in the foundational documents.

To my mind, true patriotism is not “love it or leave” but rather, "If you love this country, then work to hold it up to its own highest stated ideals"—and expand the wave-front of liberty through conscientious means. I think we have gone seriously astray when the action by our founders during the Boston Tea Party would today be prosecutable as terrorism under the PATRIOT Act and its reauthorization.

The state cannot create citizens, the church cannot create believers, the corporations cannot create consumers out of nothing. Individual consciousness is prior to all of those social forms, and was so, long before politicians and philosophers recognized or tried to describe or circumscribe that consciousness. One of the most important of American ideals is the recognition of the dynamic tension between individual freedom and social responsibility—including the right of the individual consciousness to dissent and the right to express that dissent conscientiously as a corrective to the social order.

I believe in a dynamic tension of forces, so I must oppose that long list above—government-manipulated terror alerts, the erosion of the separation of church and state, the weakening of checks and balances, the president’s excessive use of signing statements and his push for the principles of the unitary executive, and the general attack on privacy and on the notion of consenting adults, surveillance, torture—because all of them are attempts to break that dynamic tension, to put too much control into the hands of one or another of those powerful social forces. I oppose all attempts that lead to the final subsuming of individual conscience and consciousness into some larger group-mind, some social order, whether that order be state or corporation, secular or religious, right or left.

To those who still insist that someone else must be tortured to protect my freedom, to those for whom waterboarding sounds like something one does while towed behind the back of a skiboat on a lake over the Fourth of July weekend (and not the very convincing simulation of drowning that it actually is)—if we are so keen on protecting national security at the expense of individual liberty, then let’s really ski that slippery slope.

Let’s cut out the middleman, replacing ideology with technology as the means of social control. If we think individual consciousness truly has no paramount value, then as soon as such technology becomes available we need to make sure all of us who want to be ruled as unconscious citizens, unconscious believers, and unconscious consumers—we all need to get our mind-control implants immediately.

Each of us who is tired of choice and consciousness should have a command, control, communications, and intelligence-gathering chip planted inside our skulls to tell us what and how to think, where to go, what to do, why to do it, even when to be thirsty or have any other will or desire.

If you’re willing to make that choice to have no other choices, then by your own lights you’re a better consumer, believer, and citizen than I am. If individual consciousness is only a fiction, an illusion, then it’s one I choose to grab onto by its last and tiniest tentacle. I choose to keep making choices, because I know that the more we give over our right to make choices, the fewer choices we will be given.

Our nation has at various times and in various emergencies flirted with fascism, but I trust and hope that that flirtation will never become a marriage. Thank you.

—END—

Some Observations on Left and Right as Two Sides of the Same Mirror:

To make a fortune out of someone else’s misfortune was the duty of the twentieth century capitalist; the duty of the twentieth century socialist was to make a misfortune out of someone else’s fortune. As a result, twentieth century capitalism was a fine system for turning luxuries into necessities, while twentieth century socialism was a fine system for turning necessities into luxuries.

It can be argued, however, that as the twentieth century went on what occurred in many nations was less "capitalism" than "state corporatism," in which the apparatus of the state was made to serve the interests of the corporations—of "corporate persons" before human persons. Similarly, as the twentieth century continued, what occurred in other nations was less "socialism" than "corporate statism," in which the apparatus of the corporations served the state—of "the national interest" before individual human interests.

One might even go so far as to suggest that what was developing by the end of the twentieth century was a variety of transnational feudalism, though the left preferred to call it "internationalism" and the right preferred to call it "globalization." Neither of these approaches is sufficient to address the challenges the human species faces during the twenty first century, however—precisely because both squander too much of the creative and imaginative potential inherent in individual human consciousness, in order to maintain their power.

Other Mirrors:

The less the separation between church and state, the more government becomes tyranny and faith becomes cult.

No matter what the creed, fundamentalism is fascist religion—as surely as fascism is fundamentalist politics, no matter what the nation.

Those who make a mockery of justice cannot forever silence those who make a justice of mockery.

Best,
Howard V. Hendrix

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