The Siege
America Post-9/11
Stranger Than Fiction
Three years before 9/11 the film The Siege came out, a
great movie featuring Denzel Washington sparring with the
delightful and mesmerizing Annette Bening in an FBI vs. CIA
catfight over a hunt for (of course) Islamic terrorists. This is
old hat, now, but the hat was fairly fresh at the time, coming
on the heels of President Clinton’s failed attempt to nail bin
Laden. Bruce Willis’s Major General William Devereaux was their
foil, Willis’s stunt casting being one of two major flaws in
this otherwise tense thriller. The Willis role called for
somebody who could act. Willis either can’t act or is certainly
not in the weight class of Washington and Bening who simply
vaporize the screen whenever they’re on. It’s also possible the
sheer inertia of Willis’ oversized cartoon heroics from previous
films simply distracted from what might have been a credible
performance. The conceit is the U.S. Army (I suppose the
National Guard were busy) invades Brooklyn after NYC suffers a
series of devastating terrorist attacks. The story becomes about
the conflict between our need for national security versus our
rights as individuals, an incredibly prescient theme considering
this film was written and shot many years before 9/11. There are
no platoons of soldiers in the streets (yet), but beyond that,
the movie-FBI’s frustrating efforts to find the terrorists
engender rounds of discussions in the film on the restrictive
nature of search warrants, the right of habeas corpus and
illegal surveillance. The brilliant Tony Shaloub (Monk)
co-stars as Washington’s (conveniently Lebanese) partner, who
complains bitterly throughout that the FBI can use video footage
but not sound without a search warrant.
The other thing that ruined the film was the rudimentary state
of CGI effects in those days. Director Edward Zwick didn’t have
nearly enough troops. I mean, he had a bunch, but I know people
who live in Brooklyn. You need way more guys than they could
afford for the film. There needed to be ten, fifteen thousand
guys. Looked like they rounded up maybe twelve hundred, and only
for the wide shots. The rest of the film, you saw, like, three
guys.
I remember shaking my head at the film at the time thinking,
this film, likely intended to draw attention to the security-vs.-rights
issue, could actually inspire terrorists to hit us here, if they
weren’t planning that already. I consider it a matter of
inevitability that a bus in NYC will someday be blown up, as it
was in The Siege. That something unfortunate will, inevitably,
happen in the subway. Or a bridge or tunnel. We have been
remarkably and thankfully blessed to have escaped that
inevitability so far, but if these things go on in London, in
Spain, in Tel Aviv of all places where they’re not clowning
around with security, it is certainly likely to happen here. All
it will take is one bus, one subway, to send this nation
spiraling into chaos.
To my ongoing grief, Zwick didn’t think nearly big enough in his
set pieces for the movie. Had he crafted a scenario where
terrorist flew planes into the World Trade towers and collapsed
them, Zwick likely would have been mocked and ridiculed for how
ridiculous a notion that would have been. The real thing, when
it happened, was much worse, much more devastating to the
American psyche and global economy, than I or Zwick could have
imagined. And, yes, we have been under siege ever since.
The
Bush administration demonstrably and provably raised the
useless, color-coded “Threat Level” to
coincide with political opportunity. While the Obama
administration has seemed to go out of its way to make America
feel safe and reassured (and, as a side effect, the president
look weak), the Bush administrations routine practice was to
keep paranoia high. The higher our paranoia, the more we would
rally behind whatever idiotic thing the president chose to do,
like squander the budget surplus on tax cuts for the rich before
starting two unfunded wars back to back—all of it in the face of
an economic recession which loomed at the end of Clinton's term
and sent stocks plummeting at the beginning of Bush’s. Whenever
America would begin to question the president’s leadership, he’d
send Tom Ridge out there with that ridiculous color chart and
scare the pants off everybody. New York City has spent
millions—with an “M”—because of these stupid alerts, many of
which were conveniently timed to upstage political rival John
Kerry or distract from other things.
The invasions of privacy and violations of due process Denzel
Washington warns about in the movie are now a routine part of
life, the Patriot Act, which President Obama quietly renewed.
Post-9/11, both the Bush and Obama administrations have
routinely engaged in severe violations of our civil rights,
including getting major wireless providers to give up personal
data collected from people stupid enough to give it to them. We
are now and have been for some time living in an Orwellian age
where privacy, an unenumerated constitutional right, has been
utterly obliterated because a handful of guys stole some planes
and flew them into buildings.
"They've Already Won!": Washington warns against civil rights violations.
Then And Now
There simply is no privacy in this country anymore, which also
may have been an inevitability as most developed nations make
you walk around with papers of some kind.
The advent of Facebook and smartphones hasn’t helped. Dozens of
these online networking sites, online file backups, this “cloud”
computing business, and cell carriers allowing you to backup
your smartphone data online: this represents a complete loss of
privacy in this country. Worse, most people don’t ever think
about it, don’t ever consider how much of themselves they are
freely giving away with a few thumb clicks. “Wow, this is cool.”
Idiot. Typing your personal data into the air like that. Putting
your trust in some huge corporation because they issue a
“privacy statement.” I never fail to be chagrined at America’s
naïveté, its like we simply refuse to stop being stoopit. Apple
has billions of credit card numbers, names, addresses, phone
numbers. Worse, even if you yourself don’t freely give up your
personal info, don’t worry, your buddy is doing it for you.
People with these “smart” phones are entering my name, my
email address, my phone number, my birthday—you schmucks—my
address, what I like for dinner, into these devices which they
have connected to Facebook, of all places. The data inevitably
gets into
these idiotic online networking sites. It makes me furious. It
is incredibly wrong to give someone’s personal information to
a third party without their permission, but stupid people do
this every single day by thoughtlessly entering their friends’
data into these devices or uploading that info, knowingly or
unkowingly, to websites.
Billions of addresses, phone numbers, birthdays. “Send a
birthday wish!” Idiot.
There is so much
pressure for people to buy a smartphone
that smartphones are
fast becoming, literally, all you can buy. Why? Because hundreds
of millions of Americans still live this fantasy where they
actually believe their every move isn’t being monitored, and
that all that data—gigs and gigs of it—they enter into
these devices is somehow magically protected. This is foolish
and dangerous thinking. Every piece of email you’ve ever
written, every single text you’ve ever sent, and every piece of
information, every photo or video you have ever saved on a
“smartphone” can be easily accessed, stored and retrieved. Apple
was busted last year for keeping track of everywhere you go with
an iPhone, for storing that data. Google routinely provides
lists of every search you have ever made—ever—to law
enforcement. Google literally saves trillions of searches and
can trace every single search you have ever made to the IP
address of the computer sitting on your desk.
This is not freedom. This is nowhere near freedom. 9/11 didn’t
cause this, but the terrible events of that day certainly
accelerated it. Both government and the private sector have
routinely exploited those tragedies to do what they’ve wanted to
do all along.
The government’s ongoing routine violation of our basic
freedoms, in the name of protecting us from terrorism, is
terrorism in and of itself. 9/11 has been exploited by virtually
everyone for virtually everything, from the former president
using it as an excuse to invade a country that was no threat to
us, to the tee-shirt vendors at Ground Zero. This horrifying
loss of privacy was likely coming anyway: that is simply where
the technology was going. But government’s continuing and
troubling access to all that data floating around out there is a
devastating blow to the very principles this nation was founded
upon. What’s even more horrifying is that nobody seems to notice
or care.
Christopher J. Priest
11 September 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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