The Bush mentality makes him the perfect al-Qaeda president. The terrorists are using our own worst inclinations against us. And we are playing along, perhaps beyond their wildest hopes. 9/11 was a terrible blow, but we have done far more damage to ourselves.

The president’s policy response to 9/11 was a blind spasm, but a predictable one. In retrospect we can see clearly that Bush was prone to that self-mutilation; he and his ilk never cared much for the constitution anyhow. 9/11 was terrible and shocking, but the catalogue of constitutional outrages is the more lasting and dangerous injury. If it’s so obvious to us that the president has fundamentally damaged our country, is it so strange to imagine that Osama and the other terrorist strategists could predict it?

Most considerations of 9/11 imagine that the terrorist attack was over when the last plane struck, but I believe that the reverberations were intended or at least hoped for. We accept that the economic effects were intended—why not the political ones? Bush was a predictable patsy. His simple-minded tendencies were counted as an asset by our terrorist enemies, and he came through for them big time. Since 9/11 Bush and his proxies have repeatedly suggested that failure to support the president amounts to treason. That idea was directly responsible for Bush’s reelection. But if we consider the definition of treason and the oath of office, the shoe fits the other foot.

What does Osama bin Laden most fear? What makes the US a key target for him and his movement? Certainly not the World Trade Center, full of regular people trading stocks and selling insurance and washing dishes. They hoped to arouse terror—but why? I believe they knew that terror might lead to an erosion of our freedoms, our liberties, our prestige, our Constitution. I believe they knew that the effect of a successful attack would be an autoimmune reaction against the rule of law: in short, against all of those complicated and troublesome freedoms.

Who better to lead that reaction but George W. Bush?

Sure, 9/11 was costly and terrible, but the ramifications have been a deeper and more lasting blow. 9/11 did not, even indirectly, cause fundamental instability in our central liberties; the president, and a compliant Congress, did that. Airplanes didn’t strike our Constitution; we did.

Extensive, careful, orderly, well sourced, and neatly objective. I feel that I've been informed but not steered. We seldom see this degree of craft even in the mainstream.

Such care is even less likely in the election coverage mosh pit.

Rove’s genius: we vote against our best interest, and love it.

The poor love the war though it has killed and maimed them disproportionately. Christians have voted for Christianist governments that flout Christ's teachings, though state religions are always corrupt. Fundamentalists Christians curse fundamentalist Muslims for their fundamentalism.

We love our congressman for the shiny empty new highway even as pieces fall off the old crowded one.

Debt strangles us, private and public, but Rove invites us to a happy grunting cake-fest even while we celebrate our lovely cake.

We surrender our innovation advantage to feel righteous about moral sex principles, while moral principles like poverty and illness are blandly, happily ignored.

Huge swathes of the population fear socialized medicine though they have no health insurance.

We’ve been taught to hate science, even as we demand satellite HDTV and Viagra. Anti-science generates quo for quid. Karl taught us to love hating ourselves.

...will be the justification of this long-running travesty. But of course that simple statement contains its own repudiation. We aren't given the truth, and it's likely we can handle it just fine if we are permitted to understand it.

In fact the torture and detention has an element of the punitive in it, and we like it that way. Americans have accepted a criminal justice system in which there is no moral objection to the punitive (as opposed to rehabilitative) components. A veneer of reasonable purpose gives us moral cover. In the case of domestic criminal justice it is the possibility of deterrence from the death penalty, when in fact law enforcement leverage and a sense of vengeance are the primary reasons it is popular (though both purposes are of questionable real value.)

For the torturer on the cell block, the nice distinctions among useful intelligence and effective tactics and so on will never matter much. They will use the tactics they can. They are human, and generally have our best interests at heart. Just remember how popular Jack Bauer and his knife-to-the-eye theatrics are on "24".

It is up to the citizens--despite the possibility that the truth is hard to handle--to draw a moral line and to tough out our raw desire for a punitive response to 9/11 (or, more likely, an atavistic urge to punish those who believe differently).

So it is important not to be drawn into discussions of what is effective and what is not. Why we do it: that is what is important.