Had USA not constantly been so unwilling to “lock back” and learn from history, instead of repeatedly declaring that a “new era” changed everything, people might have found that the quite extensive historical record of similar preventive measures based on suspicion made a return to such measures unlikely to be successful.
I can mention here the McCarthy era of persecution of suspected communists, the rounding up of Japanese immigrants in US following the Pearl Harbor attack and the fact that preventive attacks was one of the justifications evoked – and rejected - at the Nurnberg trials in defense of Nazi Germany’s aggressions.
Now we have a situation in which huge resources are spent to cast and recast a wide net of surveillance, detention, interrogation and use of force at home and abroad– sacrificing precision by acting only when there is reasonable certainty, and instead acting when there is “actionable suspicion” (i.e “If there's a 1% chance…we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response”)[iii].
The budget deficit of the USA is largely directly and indirectly the result of such imprecise and sweeping actions, and it is in effect an unequally distributed mortgage of present and future generations of both Americans and – indirectly – people of other countries.
The sweeping and imprecise “actionable suspicion”- driven actions to prove and counter intended actions, has led to campaigns in which people were rounded up for detention, had their communication secretly monitored, or were subjected to counter-measures because of suspicions of bad intent. The lack of precision led to huge numbers of errors in which innocent people were swept up .
These people have very little ability to seek legal remedy, or even have their freedoms and rights restored.
The most extreme case is the US invasion of Iraq, which was an act of aggression not justified by international law since no pre-emption of imminent threat or retaliation for suffered attack motivated it.
Because of this, there has been an immense and growing legal uncertainty about what protections exists for domestic and foreign individuals and groups against such measures. The moral standing of the USA in the world amounts to a bankruptcy equal to the one of the national budget. This in turn makes acts of aggression against Americans and US infrastructure, both within and outside the national territory, more likely as frustration and anger grows.
This is especially serious if the measures to prevent attacks on the security of the US people is not just leading to increase in likelihood of such attack being attempted, but are not effective prevention methods either.
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