After September 11: Our State of Exception
Mark Danner
New York Review of Books, October 13, 2011
EXTRACT
Call it, then, the state of exception: these years during which, in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside, the years during which we live in a different time. This different time of ours has now extended ten years—the longest by far in American history—with little sense of an ending. Indeed, the very endlessness of this state of exception—a quality emphasized even as it was imposed—and the broad acceptance of that endlessness, the state of exception’s increasing normalization, are among its distinguishing marks.
. . . . .
Before the War on Terror, official torture was illegal and anathema; today it is a policy choice.
. . . . . .
Ten years later, what was the exceptional has become the normal. The improvisations of panic are the reality of our daily lives.
Read full article.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very thoughtful article that cuts to the heart of the matter, i.e. the U.S. Government's divorce from both reality and principle–the immorality and insanity of all that the U.S. Government does “in our name” and at our expense.
