One day, terrorists fly a single-engine prop plane into a stadium during NFL Sunday, killing thousands of people.
The next day, the president orders the roundup of millions of American citizens. He places them all in concentration camps for up to five years while he invades the country from whom the attackers came from. In the meantime, he passes the Sedition Act of 2008 through Congress, forbidding any protests or public dissent of the United States government, its actions or its military.
Officials use the Patriot Act as a pretext to spy on American phone lines, whether one side of the connection is out of country or not. The president then postpones the 2008 presidential election, citing security concerns, and ends up staying in office for another year and half. When the presidential race finally resumes and elections are held, the candidate in the same party as the former president is elected easily in a landslide, although he was predicted to lose before the election was postponed.
Meanwhile, the military clamps down on the borders in direct violation of the Posse Comitatis Act, which results in numerous casualties among illegal immigrants. Simultaneously, massive deportations are enforced, separating millions of people from their homes and families.
Desperate times will call for desperate measures, and new interrogative techniques (torture) will be sanctioned in places such as the Guantanamo Bay prison, Abu Ghraib and the ?internment? camps.
Meanwhile, in the attackers? home country, which has been invaded by the United States, it will be discovered that the local government had actually been trying to find and stop the terrorists, sparking an international uproar. The U.S. will enforce martial law and increase its military involvement as a rebellious insurrection emerges, in the process ignoring the Geneva Convention as at Abu Ghraib but on a much larger scale and sanctioning the wholesale neglect of civil rights.
Back home, many people will be jailed as a result of wiretapping or government dissent, including the former presidential candidate. Numerous people of non-Caucasian ethnicity will be killed by civilian vigilantes and racists. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan will reemerge on the national level.
Paradoxically, this will all be very plausible, because it?s almost all been done before. In World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt the Great rounded up our nation?s Japanese-Americans, whether they were citizens or not, four months after Pearl Harbor. Though not trustworthy enough to live peaceably with their families in their own homes, some incarcerated Japanese-Americans were allowed to work in numerous jobs, including a munitions factory.
Warrantless wiretapping has already been demonstrated just recently by the National Security Agency in 2005, though it only includes conversations in which one party is outside of the country. Large scale warrantless wiretapping, however, is not too far away, depending on who gets elected today.
Waterboarding, a form of torture, is already condoned by the Bush administration. Earlier, during the Abu Ghraib scandal, bad political leadership facilitated the use of torture at the prison. Perhaps it would not have happened, however, if the mid-level leadership did not directly and knowingly encourage it or let it slide.
The right of habeus corpus has been eliminated for many Arabs and Muslims at Guantanamo Bay as they are held for an indefinite amount of time without any evidence and wait for a trial that will most definitely not be fair.
Two seditions acts, both outlawing freedom of speech, have been passed throughout our American history, once in 1798 during John Adam?s administration only 11 years after the passing of the Constitution and another in 1918 by another one of our supposedly great presidents, Woodrow Wilson. Why can?t it all happen again?
Fifty years from now, we will look back on the War on Terror and be disgusted, just like I was after recently reading about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Just as we are not proud of our part in the history of slavery, we will hopefully progress and look down upon our past.
Lazarus Austin is a senior majoring in history. He can be contacted at [email protected].