al-Kidd and We, the People

How would it feel to be snatched from an airport check-in desk and imprisoned without charges? It happened to Abdullah al-Kidd, and there’s absolutely nothing stopping the U.S. government of Geroge W. Bush and Barack Obama from doing it to you.

Nor do you need a hyphenated, Arab-sounding name. Al-Kidd is a U.S. citizen who used to play football for the University of Kansas. When arrested, he was on his way to Saudi Arabia, but then again so were hundreds of Exxon and Chevron employees.

Al-Kidd’s case against former Attorney General John Ashcroft advanced this week, another chink removed from the wall of denial and obfuscation about the prompt and insouciant abandonment of our civil protections on September 12, 2001. The court ruling, written by two conservative judges appointed by Republican presidents, is an amazing document.

As is extremely common in such cases, the ‘facts’ that generated al-Kidd’s arrest turned out to be inaccurate. The judges’ review of the facts shows shoddy police work and gee-whiz conclusions pulled from half truths. In essence, they had nothing on the guy as anyone who has had a look at his own FBI file will understand. Police agents, like newspaper reporters, often get things wrong.

Al-Kidd spent two weeks in a ‘Guantámano-lite’-type dungeon, was harassed by the feds for a year afterward, lost his job, was divorced by his wife and undoubtedly is looked upon suspiciously by whatever neighbors he still might have—in Idaho, no less. He has never been charged with an illegal act.

Obama continues to defend these actions, which can only mean he wants to retain the power to repeat them. When will the inhabitants of the furious, post 9/11 wackosphere start to realize that while they jump up and down about protecting little Nancy from terrorists, the suspension of habeas corpus rights means little Nancy’s daddy can land in the soup, too?

I spent several years in a country where people could be picked up and tortured at will and often were, and there’s something depressingly predictable about how bipeds will react to that. A substantial minority applaud because they think the bad guys are getting in the neck.

But most unconsciously say to themselves, If I keep my nose clean, nothing will happen to ME. Homo sapiens, not a particularly noble race, is a particularly undistinguished species when danger lurks.

But reading the chilling account of the persecution of an innocent African-American Muslim—aside from the hints of legal lynching throughout—suggests another dynamic at work: revenge.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that the inhabitants of our police apparatus set out to find someone—anyone—to blame for the carnage of September 11th and were getting their rocks off on punishing him, whether or not he was guilty.

This mindset was actively encouraged by the torrent of hysteria drummed up for weeks afterward in which it seemed that we could neither think nor feel anything about what had happened in lower Manhattan without authorization from the news anchors, who generated hurricane-force winds of facile sentiment and bathos.

I suspect that this phenomenon underpins some of the apparent public indifference to the steady drip of revelations about the 9/11 crimes—as revenge was in many hearts, carelessness about protecting the innocent morphed quickly into a collective sin.