新闻周刊：美国失去了什么?我们对911事件显然反应过度

nicholasxw

　　[译文]
　　美国失去了什么?
　　──我们对911事件显然反应过度
　　Fareed Zakaria 文；王玉珏 译
　　来源：《新闻周刊》
　　911事件已经过去了九年，还有谁怀疑基地组织是个巨大的威胁？自从2001年那可怕的一天过去之后，各国政府纷纷采取严厉的应对措施，奥萨马·本·拉登的恐怖主义网络已无法再针对美国或欧洲的重要目标展开袭击。虽然基地组织开始利用身在美欧的本土圣战分子开展小型袭击，但它却已无法独立开展袭击活动。如今，基地组织把希望寄托在网络上寻找一些深陷麻烦的、激进的年轻人，教唆他们在贴身衣物里藏入爆炸物。
　　我并不是在淡化基地组织的残忍意图，我只是在质疑它的能力。在最近所有与恐怖主义事件中，美国都正确地认识到了对手的邪恶意图，但却过分夸大了对手的能力。在20世纪80年代，当苏联的政治和经济都已处在崩溃边缘时，我们却以为苏联的实力和影响力还在扩张。20世纪90年代，我们确信萨达姆·侯赛因拥有核武库，而事实上，萨达姆那些备受怀疑的工厂生产的只是肥皂而已。
　　但这次的误判带来的危害更大。911事件打击了美国人的心灵和美国的制度，所以我们反应过度了。《华盛顿邮报》一组重要的报道“绝密美国”中，戴纳·普里斯特(Dana Priest)和威廉姆·阿金(William Arkin)花费了两年时间来搜集关于911事件如何改变该美国的信息。
　　我摘取了其中一些重要信息。2001年9月11日后，美国政府新建或改组了至少263个组织机构来应对反恐战争的某些事务。情报方面的花费增加了250%，达到750亿美元(这还只是粗略估算的公开数字)。这项花费比世界其他地区的总和还高。仅为各种情报机构所建造的新建筑群就有33处，共占地1700万平方英尺──相当于22栋美国国会大厦或3栋五角大楼。距白宫东南5英里处正在建造国土**部的办公大楼，这是50年来美国最大的政府办公场所，耗资34亿美元。该部门共有23万名工作人员，其规模仅次于五角大楼和退伍工人事务部。
　　这一新体系每年制造5万条新闻报道──也就是每天136条!这就意味着只有很小一部分真正被人阅读过。那些读了这些报道的高级官员们认为大多数报道都相当乏味;其中一位跟我说，“很多报道简直能用Google在一小时内拼凑出来。”在15个州里，有51个独立的官僚机构追踪恐怖组织的资金流动情况，但这些机构很少进行资源共享。
　　大约有3万人被专门聘来监听美国境内的电话等通讯设施。但是军方的情报机构中却无人发现纳达尔?马里克?哈桑在其曾经见习的华盛顿沃特里德陆军医院制造过一系列奇怪的威胁。企图在2009年圣诞针对一架美国客机实施爆炸未遂的尼日利亚男子的父亲曾向美国大使馆报告他儿子的异动，但这一消息却并未被传递到美国的庞大情报机构中去。这一爆炸只是因为当事人自身的经验不足以及部分乘客的警觉而告失败。
　　也许情报上的这些疏忽情有可原，但这种益发严重的国家安全威胁却使得政府的触角越伸越长，如今已经伸到了美国人生活的方方面面，即使是那些看上去与恐怖主义无关的方面也被触及。戴夫·伊格(Dave Egger)触人心弦的著作《泽图恩》一书中最令人心惊的一幕是，联邦政府应对卡特里娜飓风时最为快速有效的反应就是(在一天之内)构建了一个关塔那摩式的监狱，1200位美国公民被迅速扣留，并被剥夺宪法所赋予他们的权利达数月之久。人身保护权被架空了，这看上去就像是卡夫卡小说里的情节。
　　过去，美国政府在战争中逐渐建立，采取应急权力措施，有时也滥用折衷权力，但战争结束后依然会取消这些应急措施。但这次的战争确实没有止境的。我们何时能宣布胜利?应急权力何时能被取消?
　　保守人士为逐渐扩张的国家权力而担忧。显然这种篡权行为比一些联邦经济刺激计划更令人不安。詹姆斯·麦迪逊(James Madison)对此问题进行了一番深思熟虑后得出一个简单的结论：“公共自由的所有敌人中，战争也许是最令人畏惧的，因为它包含并滋生了所有其他敌人的萌芽。同样也是在战争中，行政机构的自行决定权被扩张了，所有用来蛊惑人心的手段也都被用来镇压人民。
　　“没有一个国家能够在连续不断的战争中维护其自由，”麦迪逊说道。
　　[原文]
　　What America Has Lost
　　It’s clear we overreacted to 9/11.
Nine years after 9/11, can anyone doubt that Al Qaeda is simply not that deadly a threat? Since that gruesome day in 2001, once governments everywhere began serious countermeasures, Osama bin Laden’s terror network has been unable to launch a single major attack on high-value targets in the United States and Europe. While it has inspired a few much smaller attacks by local jihadis, it has been unable to execute a single one itself. Today, Al Qaeda’s best hope is to find a troubled young man who has been radicalized over the Internet, and teach him to stuff his underwear with explosives.
I do not minimize Al Qaeda’s intentions, which are barbaric. I question its capabilities. In every recent conflict, the United States has been right about the evil intentions of its adversaries but massively exaggerated their strength. In the 1980s, we thought the Soviet Union was expanding its power and influence when it was on the verge of economic and political bankruptcy. In the 1990s, we were certain that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear arsenal. In fact, his factories could barely make soap.
The error this time is more damaging. September 11 was a shock to the American psyche and the American system. As a result, we overreacted. In a crucially important Washington Post reporting project, “Top Secret America,” Dana Priest and William Arkin spent two years gathering information on how 9/11 has really changed America.
Here are some of the highlights. Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.
This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.
Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.
Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.

In the past, the U.S. government has built up for wars, assumed emergency authority, and sometimes abused that power, yet always demobilized after the war. But this is a war without end. When do we declare victory? When do the emergency powers cease?
Conservatives are worried about the growing power of the state. Surely this usurpation is more worrisome than a few federal stimulus programs. When James Madison pondered this issue, he came to a simple conclusion: “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germs of every other … In war, too, the discretionary power of the executive is extended?.?.?.?and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people.
“No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual war,” Madison concluded.
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