One of the most disheartening and disgusting displays of cover-your-ass flippancy has to be Vice President Cheney's assertions that torture helped keep us safe from post-9/11 terror attacks. That odious meme has been picked up, of course, by what former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls the FCM - Fawning Corporate Media - to help bolster the dodgy idea that at least the Bush Administration got something right in eight grueling years of corrupt incompetence.

Cheney probably is more interested in laying the groundwork for his defense against any future war-crimes and malfeasance warrants, and our shattered surrogates in London, Madrid and Mumbai may question just what we mean by "safe". But acceptance of this claim is testament to the still-virulent fear of terror attacks, magnified now since our Mideast incursions have spread Islamic radicalism, in the opinion of this country's top intellligence analysts. We don't have to worry only about the candidate martyrs who hated us on Sept. 10, 2001 - now, thanks to unfathomable missteps by the Decider, we must fret about blowback.

To anyone who's been living at the bottom of a coal mine during our long, demented War on Terror, blowback is the unintended - and breathtakingly violent - consequence of our own action. British commuters got a horrific taste of that in the summer of 2005, when that country's decision to be our empire-building helpmate blew up in the faces of stunned customers using London's transit system.

But when any nation goes forth seeking foreign dragons to destroy - and plant its flag on distant, bountiful shores - there's another kind of blowback. This is one is... homegrown. It trickles down to us from the rarified atmosphere of our own leadership, from the power locus of our own government.

From Rome to 19th-century Europe, every empire has discovered that to maintain international control of farflung possessions, certain troublesome liberties must be curtailed at home. We've seen that development in our own nation, our own era, with the FISA domestic surveillance program and the establishment of restricted "free-speech zones" when our lords deign to appear incarnate before us - and face likely protests. At the beginning of the Iraq War, there were mutterings from some editorial pages that even questioning the war was commensurate to "aid and comfort" for our enemies. Here's Sen. Orin Hatch from a year ago:

We have heard some individuals claim that the government could use the power of the Protect America Act to spy on innocent Americans. We've heard the fear mongering: the government can spy on innocent Americans when they travel overseas. We've heard all about American Families on vacation overseas in the Caribbean or in Europe. We've even heard that our government could spy on American Military Members who are overseas defending our country!

I find these scare tactics not only ridiculous but extremely offensive. They walk a fine line in seemingly questioning the integrity and judgment of the fine men and women who have dedicated their professional lives to prevent catastrophic attacks on Americans.

And maybe we should check with Jose Padilla whether citizenship status protects us from disappearing into the savage shadows of our new American gulag.

Our siege mentality is casting ever wider nets: Last month, two men pled guilty to... airing the wrong kind of TV broadcasts.

Saleh Elahwal, who lives in New Jersey, admitted that between about September 2005 and August 2006 he provided satellite transmission services through Brooklyn-based HDTV Ltd to Al Manar, in exchange for thousands of dollars payment. His co-defendant Javed Iqbal... pleaded guilty to the same charge on December 23. Hezbollah, an Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shi'ite Muslim group with a powerful guerrilla army, was designated by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization in 1997.

Hezbollah's one attack against America came in 1983, when suicide bombs in trucks killed 241 servicemen, mostly Marines, stationed in Beirut. As tragic as that was, the case could be made that this was an understandable militant action against a foreign invader. And, wisely, President Reagan subsequently called off his Lebanon incursion and withdrew American personnel.

Since then, nothing - no attacks against the United States. But if the name "Hezbollah" seems familiar, you may remember it's the Shiite group that emerged during Israel's occupation of Lebanon in the early '80s; it's become a major political and social force in that Levantine country, and successfully repulsed an Israeli assault two years ago, singlehandedly making "asymmetrical warfare" a household term. 

Hezbollah isn't a terror group threatening us. It's a political enemy of Israel's. But it seems, these days there's no difference. So Messrs. Elahwal and Iqbal find themselves in hot legal water - like, possibly 15 years hard time hot. A decade ago, their case - a creepy exercise in jerkwater oppression - would have been splattered on the sidewalk outside the courthouse. But things have changed. Are we getting the message? 

Now that Israel's Gaza assault has put us back on Crisis Watch, there have been reports of spikes in "hate speech" attacking Israel, with the Internet as the weapon.

"The number of comments has exploded since the start of the conflict in Gaza," said Alberto Piccinini, an editor at the left-wing Il Manifesto in Italy. "The debate is very lively, often virulent," he said, adding that most comments were pro-Palestinian and that some were bordered anti-Semitic.

Stumbling from tragedy to crisis and back again, we seem to find ourselves on that slippery slope of "It's favorable speech - or the Hate Speech Highway" - where anything this or that ruling elite dislikes is outlawed. European countries and Canada have already taken the leap, approving some of the most draconian "hate speech" limits in the world.

Up to now, "hate speech" draws official disavowal only in the unreal environs of college campuses, where relentless postmodernist distortions convince credulous students that up is down, night day... and, shorn of the patriarchical reductionism of post-imperialism, vice really is versa.

The Anti-Defamation League, which has emerged as the premier enemy of free speech everywhere, intones darkly about the Internet as conduit for all kinds of hateful propaganda. An Op-Ed piece published in November, which irresponsibly makes reference to the Holocaust, Kristallnacht and genocide, notes:

"(Human rights experts) observed that the most numerous attacks on Jews and other minorities are now coming in the form of Internet hate speech broadcast worldwide."

Whoa! Wait! That's it? Most of the "attacks" are - not the sticks and stones that break bones - but words? OK... For me, that bulletin leaves this "crisis" seriously mitigated. Plus, there's a political element to the ADL's accusations: Criticism of Israel, and its sometimes bloody policies, fall under the rubric of "hate speech":

Certainly, the foreign policy of the United States was and is violent, lamentably and frequently. It has been particularly warlike during the present Administration, and a Washington/media culture has sprung up to tout the advantages of pre-emptive military assault on our enemies du jour. But if critics of this faction or its policies ever were accused of "hate speech" and "spreading condemnation", the accuser would be laughed from the Beltway. 

Campaigns against hate are encumbered with a target so amorphous, and chase goals so unattainable, that I suspect they, like John Kenneth Galbraith's famous disposal of committee meetings, are instruments meant to give the appearance of taking action when, in reality, no action is taken. In this case, the brave, solitary stance against something as indefinite as bigotry or "hate speech" allows self-defined (and self-congratulatory) identity as progressive champion, while overlooking both individual, everyday atrocity and contradictions in the dogma (i.e., leftist government's oppressive control of speech and press).

That is, I suspect, the motivations for Canadians to launch their Human Rights Commission, a severe Star Chamber, seemingly from a long-ago, backward century, that seeks out internet crimes hither and thither. This appointed panel is law unto itself, and when it summons evildoers - exclusively right-wing, of course - truth is barred as a mitigating factor, and defense attorneys are not allowed. Increasingly, Canadians - sensible people, mostly - have begun to chafe at this nonsense. 

Lately, these Borealis Cotton Mathers have turned their attention to a white supremacist in the lower 48 named Bill White; apparently he'd advocated assassinating a self-appointed internet gangbuster and published the man's address. White was arrested in Virginia and indicted amid florid headlines of "neo-Nazi nabbed" and the like. Jesus, you'd think Jack the Ripper had turned up.

But what's disquieting is the cooperation coming from American authorities:

Apparently anticipating the case could draw fire from free-speech advocates, the Acting U. S. Attorney, Julia Dudley, told reporters "this case will not serve as a referendum on freedom of speech. "The case is about innocent people being threatened, intimidated and extorted by a man that in most cases, they don't know and have never met," she said.

She said Mr. White has the right to express himself but "he does not have the right to threaten to injure, intimidate and extort innocent people. He must now face justice for confusing criminal activity with freedom of speech."

 

White, who looks like he whiled away a lot of his childhood pulling wings off flies, is the small-fry leader of something called the American National Socialist Workers Party. Neo-Nazis, Klansmen and the like are the favorite bugaboos of social crusaders; these ineffectual dastards give self-reverential social campaigns a reason to exist, after all. But like most fringe fuhrers, White probably has at his behest no more than a few dozen would-be storm troopers, each with the IQ of a junebug.

It's difficult to defend such a bozo, but how much of a prize capture is he? Can he or his group be classified, in any way, as a critical threat? This is overheated headline stuff in the same way hapless pool-room gasbags and shoeless rehab patients wind up in FBI "terrorist" sweeps. White should be prosecuted for making threats and publishing an address, but it looks like he's getting more than one book thrown at him for his politics - not his crime. 

But once anyone - or any onetime "right" - is distorted and villified by our information industry, what public integrity can it retain? How can we be sure the partisan editorialists aren't right? ...That there are enemies afoot who must be isolated and tormented?

The media has proven itself the primary handmaiden of our emergent autocracy, so we can't look to that corner for help. Telling the truth - or, at least, not stenographically reproducing lies and propaganda - would scrub invitations to tony cocktail parties and get-togethers out Georgetown way. 

Since politics and the media are active proponents of a more secure, less-free nation-state, from where would any resistance spring against this glacial, gradual defunctioning of our basic civil rights? Don't look to academia - our laboratories of learning. American "higher education" has become a stagnant enterprise to process and standardize students according to rote dogma. Liberal arts majors can debate endlessly about how issues of race, imperialism and gender affect the lifespan of fruit flies, but are incapable of practical responses to any real crises around them. The past, with its hindsight answers to thorny questions - applying rickety postmodern analyses, of course - is their insular refuge.

As Terry Eagleton wrote of British universities, American education is no more than "intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries".

Maybe we've become uncertain about how much freedom can be tolerated; certainly, we seem comfortable with the idea that security trumps liberty, forgetting that those who make that stumble deserve neither. Maybe civil rights - including our own - are becoming less and less important to us, in the larger scheme of things.

Maybe we're seeing the recessive evolution of past, long-dead democracies play itself out. Maybe this is how the Bill of Rights ends.