By now, you’d think we’d be entering the end of the 9/11 era. One war over in the Greater Middle East, another hurtling disastrously to its end, and the threat of al-Qaeda so diminished that it should hardly move the needle on the national worry meter. You might think, in fact, that the moment had arrived to turn the American gaze back to first principles: the Constitution and its protections of rights and liberties.
Yet warning signs abound that 2012 will be another year in which, in the name of national security, those rights and liberties are only further Guantanamo-ized and abridged. Most notably, for example, despite the fact that genuinely dangerous enemies continue to exist abroad, there is now a new enemy in our sights: namely, American oppositional types and whistleblowers who are charged as little short of traitors for revealing the workings of our government to journalists and others.
Here and elsewhere, it looks like we can expect the Obama administration to continue to barrel down the path that has already taken us far from the country we used to be. And by next year, if a different president is in the Oval Office, expect him to lead us even further astray. With that in mind, here are five categories in the sphere of national security where 2012 is likely to prove even grimmer than 2011.
1. Ever More Punitive (Ever Less Fair-minded).
2. Ever More Legal Limbo (Ever Less Confidence in the Constitution).
3. Ever More Secrecy (Ever Less Transparency).
4. Ever More Distrust (Ever Less Privacy).
5. Ever More Killing (Ever Less Peace).
To sum up, the legal gray zone Washington has, over the course of a decade, plunged us into — and everything that goes with it, including punitive measures, attempts to bypass constitutional guarantees, the spread of secrecy and surveillance, a growing distrust of American citizens, and straightforward killing — isn’t something we will soon put behind us. The move away from the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution and the law is very clearly the way of the American future in our new age of enemies.
