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The US is at war. Truth is war's first casualty, and civil liberties-- ultimately society's means to getting at truth-- are the second.

September 11th's horrific attacks on New York and Washington, with untold thousands dead, is an immense tragedy. But the attacks also dealt the US power elite perhaps its greatest humiliation, and so leave America's political landscape transformed and dangerous. "It was one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as 'before' and 'after,'" said the New York Times the day after the World Trade Center's twin towers, packed with workers, melted eerily from the city's skyline.

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But as unfamiliar as this new ground feels, we were bound to find ourselves here. A terror strike on US soil with mass casualties was sooner or later inevitable. The attackers were not lone fanatics, after all, but represented feelings of anger and revenge shared by perhaps tens of millions. The West, with America leading, will now leapfrog into a place toward which we were previously steadily creeping-- a tightly controlled surveillance state that criminalizes privacy. The impact on freedom from the September 11th attack? "The burning of the Reichstag" suggests free-speech activist and Wired.com reporter Declan McCullagh, referring to the Nazi-set fire that destroyed Germany's parliament and gave Hitler pretext to seize power.

The now decades-old wars on drugs and sex have already pointed the compass where we're headed.

For years the US has subjected other countries to the humiliation of annually "certifying" their "compliance" with our War on Drugs, while our domestic drug consumption never flagged. In the new War on Terrorism, Bush vows simply to "erase" nations that we decide don't make the grade. If some of the hijackers turn out to have slipped into the US from Quebec, does that mean missiles-away on Montreal?

Bush's coming War on Terrorism will be disastrous-- the "war" in that phrase is in no way metaphorical. The US military, its Pentagon smashed, is thirsty for blood. But scale aside-- by look, smell, and quack-- the wars on drugs, sex, and terrorism are interchangeable:

-- The enemy in each case is amorphous and potentially omnipresent. Your sixth-grader's friends, and your child himself, may be pushing drugs in your own home, insinuate the ads from Partnership for a Drug-Free America. Likewise, terrorists can be hiding anywhere, which is why the US now demands that nations either submit to its crusade or face "erasure"-- with all niceties of sovereignty and law out the window.

-- The target of each "war" is ideologically manufactured. Scotch whiskey is hawked from billboards, but selling pot gets you years in prison; it takes a theologian who's good at counting angels on pinheads to explain the difference. Likewise, we are to understand that the US's napalming of Vietnamese and Cambodian villages-- killing some 2 million noncombatants-- wasn't terrorism, nor its sponsorship of Central American death squads, nor its attempted and realized assassinations of heads of state-- a policy of liquidation suspended because it seemed too much like terrorism-- and which the Bush regime is now likely set to resume.

-- In each "war," a curious complicity develops between warriors and their chosen evil. The US government manufactured kiddie porn and fronted companies to sell it in the lead-up to this summer's nationwide raids-- without stings, the feds couldn't find enough porno crime. Likewise, Osama bin Laden, the supposed mastermind of the September attacks, was a CIA-trained "freedom-fighter" against Soviet invaders in Afghanistan. The thousands the US has now scheduled to die in the Middle East had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks; they will be victims of terrorism as surely as those crushed by the World Trade Centers.

But most important, the wars on drugs, sex, and terrorism are a spectacular exercise of state power as an end-in-itself. Totalitarian regimes discovered this technique. Stalin's show trials were not about punishing injustice, uncovering truth, or even advancing any particular policy. Rather, they were a purposeless vortex of state-generated fear that fed on its own spin and was its own end. The medium was the message.

Total control

America's spooks and cops have a wish-list of new powers. For years, they've predictably invoked the specters of drugs, sex, and terrorism. Anti-terrorism acts passed under Clinton eliminate in certain cases habeas corpus (the requirement that the government justify a person's imprisonment), allow secret evidence to be introduced at some trials, permit roving wiretaps that cover phones on which the government merely thinks their target is talking, and require that all telecommunications systems be secretly tappable at government whim. But the security establishment has not received everything it wanted. In the wake of September 11th, more of their wishes will come true.

Privacy on the Internet is an expectation Americans will have to give up, former President Bush declared. The day after the attack, Wired.com reported that the FBI visited numerous Internet Service Providers (ISPs) asking to install its snooping Carnivore on their networks. Hotmail was also asked to turn over records. ISPs didn't have to comply, but the FBI said that it could-- and would-- bypass them and install Carnivore on the T1 lines of the supercarriers from whom ISPs generally get their service.

As tracks in cyberspace become harder to erase, the real world-- increasingly intermingled with the cyber-- follows suit. The creation of a scheme of national ID cards with biometric identifiers-- retinal scans, for instance-- would allow people's movements to be tracked over the ever-growing network of security cameras as readily as if they were data packets on the digital superhighway.

Last time around, the FBI lost its bid to criminalize encryption that the government couldn't crack. This time, it will likely be a different story. The media report that bin Laden uses encryption, steganography (hiding data inside other data, like a picture), and even-- dear reader, please sit down-- Zip compression software (found on nearly every PC on earth). If this is the word authorities are putting out, they're clearly plumping to cast the September 11th attack as another worm in the Internet apple. Criminalizing privacy won't stop terrorism. Encryption algorithms are widely published, and steganography program can be written by a sophomore computer science major. But such laws will provide a new weapon for the state against activists, journalists, and the sexually marginal.

Deadly deflection

Whoever was responsible for the mass killing on September 11th had no need to reinvent ballistic missiles from scratch in some Kabul bicycle repair shop. Instead they invoked a principle of jujitsu-- deflect the opponent's own force back against himself. Historians will note that the first guided missiles of mass destruction used against the US were emblazoned with America's own brand names and corporate logos. Which is why the War on Terrorism, like its sister wars, cannot achieve their stated aims-- and are not meant to. Western economies depend on the routine harnessing of immense forces-- jet planes, genetic engineering, nuclear fission, and concentrations of people and capital-- not to mention a ceaseless global stream of products and people. These forces and flows can always be turned against those who deploy them.

"When we know more about this," declared French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine after hearing of the attacks, "we will have to think about ways to eradicate the causes of terrorism around the world." His was the rare official response that saw what happened on September 11th as having a cause, and not just a pure manifestation of demonic evil. It's prudent for the US to reduce risks of hijackings, bombings, and other attacks, and to punish those responsible for particular atrocities. But justice requires that the US holds itself to the same standards of regard for innocent life as it expects of others, and this the US cannot do, because it has been among world's foremost purveyors of terrorism. We still hold that starting a nuclear war that would decimate most of human existence is a question only of our national interest. Had the US acted differently, it would not be the target that it has become.

"Ask an Arab how he responds to the thousands of innocent deaths [in the US], and he or she will respond as decent people should, that it is an unspeakable crime," Writes Robert Fisk in The Nation. "But they will ask why we did not use such words about the sanctions that have destroyed the lives of perhaps half a million children in Iraq, why we did not rage about the 17,500 civilians killed in Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon. And those basic reasons why the Middle East caught fire last September--the Israeli occupation of Arab land, the dispossession of Palestinians, the bombardments and state-sponsored executions--all these must be obscured lest they provide the smallest fractional reason for the mass savagery on September 11th."

But America shows no sign of taking the wise or just path in response to the attacks, any more than it has taken the high path with sex and drugs. Instead, we have lately almost always deliberately chosen to maximize harm. The war on terrorism, like the others, are protection rackets in which terrible dragons are conjured by the same systems that make a show of slaying them. The system gives the corporate media their daily bread of scandal and demonization-- Sadam, sex predators, and drug kingpins. But as the countries wasted by the drug wars and America's bulging prisons prove, it's a costly diversion. As America prepares for battles that will expose it as an utterly lawless hyperpower, indifferent from the attackers who just struck, freedom at home will be among the terrible losses.