As long as the war on terror persists at home and abroad, democracy itself is at risk. onesarahjones writes
Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images Capitol Police officer Michael Fanone sounds as if he’s suffering a crisis of faith. He joined the force after 9/11. He voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Then on January 6, he battled the former president’s most zealous defenders in hand-to-hand combat, a conflict that gave him a heart attack and a traumatic brain injury. Now he finds himself alone.
Ackerman depicts a conflict shaped by endemic xenophobia and knee-jerk jingoism. To question either the military response to 9/11 or the pervasive conviction that America was a thoroughly innocent party was to assume the role of a heretic. “People in uniform, from the military to police to firefighters, were valorized to the point of civic worship,” Ackerman writes, “an impulse most conspicuous in those whose lives intersected with such people rarely.
Many of the more extreme transgressions of the war on terror occurred in areas beyond the reach of the law. Gul Rahman froze to death in a CIA black site in 2002, Ackerman reminds us. Was he a necessary casualty of war? Or was he something else, a human being who was tortured to death without trial, a person whose demise shows a deep rot in the American heart?
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