WikiLeaks, Light, and Darkness: Compelling the United States Government and its People to Confront Reality

WikiLeaks, Light, and Darkness 1

Running Head: WikiLeaks, Light, and Darkness

WikiLeaks, Light, and Darkness:

Compelling the United States Government

and its People to Confront Reality

David A. Benfell

321 S. Main St. #12

Sebastopol, CA 95472

(707) 348-4190

[email protected]

Goodness, Evil, Politics, and Change

California Institute for Integral Studies


Abstract

This essay examines the WikiLeaks releases as the “darkness”

that both policymakers and ordinary citizens resist viewing and as

compelling policymakers to a monstrous unknown realm of diplomacy

when secrets are let out. Given the criminal nature of much

previously secret activity, the people's responsibility for the

government takes on additional urgency.


As 2010 draws to a close, the WikiLeaks organization has been

releasing secret United States State Department cables, provoking an

outcry from outraged politicians who compelled the organization's

service providers to shut down the site, forcing WikiLeaks to change

hosting services and to enlist hundreds of other servers to mirror

its content. A “hacktivist” under the pseudonym, Jester, has claimed

credit for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on WikiLeaks

servers. U.S. politicians have labeled WikiLeaks a terrorist

organization and made death threats against Julian Assange, its

founder. Assange has been arrested in Britain on an international

warrant in a maneuver normally used only in much more extreme cases

than for questioning on rape allegations in Sweden. One of Assange's

accusers in those rape allegations has been linked to the U.S.

Central Intelligence Agency and there is some suspicion that the

arrest is a ploy to extradite Assange to the U.S. WikiLeaks has been

cut off from donations by PayPal, a Swiss bank, Visa, and MasterCard.

DataCell, which processed credit card payments for WikiLeaks, has

threatened to sue Visa. As part of its efforts to remain on line,

WikiLeaks purchased domain name services from Amazon—principally

known as an on line bookseller. Amazon quickly kicked WikiLeaks off,


and has accordingly been accused of censorship. A group of hackers

have begun their own DDoS attacks threatening anyone they believe is

censoring WikiLeaks. For all of this, neither Assange nor WikiLeaks

have yet been charged with a crime, and legal experts have expressed

doubts that charges against WikiLeaks could stick or that Sweden's

extradition request would succeed. And it will seem anticlimactic if

Time magazine honors an online people's choice and names Assange

“Person of the Year.” (BBC News, December 6, 2010; Bosker, B.,

December 8, 2010; Burns & Somaiya, December 8, 2010; Cole, December

5, 2010; Dodd, December 8, 2010; Durden, December 7, 2010; Edwards,

December 6, 2010; Elliott, December 7, 2010; Gerstein, December 2,

2010; Greenwald, November 30, 2010, December 7, 2010; Nakashima &

Markon, November 30, 2010; Ray, December 9, 2010; Robinson, December

8, 2010; Siddique & Weaver, December 1, 2010; Slajda, December 6,

2010, December 8, 2010; Strachan, November 29, 2010; Webster,

December 7, 2010; Youssef, December 10, 2010).

If there is such as a thing as a civil cyberwar, this might be

what it would look like. In the discourse on WikiLeaks, there have

been few “moderate” voices. Former Nixon administration official

John Dean (December 10, 2010), writing for Findlaw's Writ, claims to be


moderate but mostly affirms secret-keeping as a necessity. He thus

takes the side of elites, who have employed state power in a

seemingly obsessive and certainly excessive effort to hide

differences between its publicly-made statements and its secret

actions and statements, to gloss over realpolitik with outrage, and

arguably to preserve a U.S. assertion of a right to world hegemony.

Though they are plainly desperate to do something, the actions they

are taking against Assange and WikiLeaks may lack a sufficient legal

basis. On the other side are those who challenge U.S. policy and

demand transparency, whose only substantial resources are those of

the Internet (Assange, July 28, 2010; Bhutto, December 9, 2010; Cole,

December 5, 2010; Elliott, December 9, 2010; Gerstein, December 2,

2010; Greenwald, December 7, 2010; Hosenball, November 30, 2010;

Stewart, October 28, 2010; Shane, June 11, 2010). This debate—or

shouting match—casts competing values of “national interest” and

morality as good and light against revelation and embarrassment as

evil and dark.

While WikiLeaks has released only a portion of the documents it

has on hand, the criticism that has been leveled against it glosses

over information or confirmation that in these long wars,


policymakers have misled the public on progress in the war in

Afghanistan; that civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq have paid a

horrific price—often in lives, often due to soldiers' arbitrary

actions—that U.S. citizens would be unlikely to accept at home; that

these actions increase sympathy for the enemy that these same

soldiers are fighting; that Pakistani intelligence services have

sometimes supported the Taliban; that U.S. helicopter pilots killed

even insurgents who attempted to surrender; that the U.S. military

abuse of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib was not an exception; that the Iraqi

government has tortured its own citizens; that U.S. military

interrogators exploited its knowledge of Iraqi torture when

questioning subjects; that the U.S. military failed to investigate

reports of Iraqi torture; that even with knowledge of Iraqi torture

and despite Obama's pledge to end torture, the U.S. military handed

over subjects who had already been abused to the Iraqis; and that a

growing reliance on contractors has complicated the war effort

(Associated Press, October 26, 2010; Carlstrom, October 22, 2010,

October 23, 2010 a, October 23, 2010 b, October 24, 2010; Chivers,

Gall, Lehren, Mazzetti, Perlez, & Schmitt, July 25, 2010; Cockburn,

July 27, 2010; Davies, October 22, 2010 a, October 22, 2010 b; Davies


& Leigh, July 25, 2010; Davies, Steele, & Leigh, October 22, 2010;

Gebauer, Goetz, Hoyng, Koelbl, Rosenbach, & Schmitz, July 25, 2010;

Glanz & Lehren, October 23, 2010; Leigh, October 22, 2010; Leigh &

O'Kan, October 24, 2010; Mazzetti, Perlez, Schmitt, & Lehren, July

25, 2010; Meek, October 23, 2010; Steele, October 22, 2010 a, October

22, 2010 b; Wander, October 22, 2010 a, October 22, 2010 b). It

seems difficult to sustain a government view that the policies and

execution of these policies that have led to the incidents detailed

in these reports should be beyond challenge. Indeed, the Iraq

releases led the United Nations Chief Investigator on Torture,

Manfred Nowak, to demand that the United States investigate

violations of international law (Batty & Doward, October 23, 2010).

But perhaps most fundamentally, the conclusion in a New York Times

article that the releases may undermine political efforts to build

public support for the war (Schmitt & Cooper, July 26, 2010)

privileges a notion that the public should support elite policies—

even when criminal—over a notion that elected politicians should

represent and be accountable to voters. This issue of accountability

to the public is one to which we shall return.

In looking at these revelations, three perspectives on good and


evil might be brought to bear. First, Philip Zimbardo (2008)

advances a compelling theory for the “power of the situation” in

causing people to do evil, which he sets in contrast to a

dispositional approach. Where the former suggests that people in

given situations will act in ways which in abstract we view as

shameful, the latter attributes blame to the individual. He backs

this up with his own experience as principal investigator in the

infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which had to be terminated early

—and should have been ended earlier—due to abusive behavior on the

part of guards. He extends this experience to atrocities at a then

U.S.-run Iraqi prison at Abu Ghraib and at Guantanamo.

While the conduct of soldiers acting as prison guards is a

compelling example, Zimbardo (2008) casts a considerable portion of

blame for abuses on the elites who created the situation and condoned

it. He does not, however, consider the power of the situation as it

might act on politicians, such as Barack Obama, who came to the

presidency promising greater transparency, but accelerated a

crackdown on leakers; who promised to close Guantanamo and end

military commissions and torture, but has kept the facility open,

prosecuted a child soldier, and moved torture to secret jails in


Afghanistan; and who promised to change the thinking that got the

U.S. into war in Iraq, but escalated the war in Afghanistan (Fisher,

November 1, 2010; Gopal, January 28, 2010; Greenwald, June 26, 2010;

Madar, November 4, 2010; Obama, January 31, 2008; Savage, June 25,

2010; Shane, June 11, 2010; Worthington, May 4, 2010). Such an

examination might reveal useful information about the actual

functioning of the U.S. government.

Second, Timothy Beal (2002) begins by asking, “Who is more

monstrous, the creatures [we depict as monsters] who must live

through this vale of tears, or the creator who put them here” (p. 3)?

Beal constructs an image of monsters as human imaginings projected

onto that which is not controlled by “our” religion, “our” society,

and “our” technology, leading to a suggestion that we are the

monsters, projecting ourselves onto what we fear and do not know.

Beal's depiction of the monstrous may be seductive as a view on

an elite determination to keep secrets manifest in a fear of the

unknown consequences of their revelation. It might shed more light

on a mindset that fears a backlash from the dissemination of

knowledge of their dealings. But a more satisfying alchemy will also

include the views of Stanton Marlan (2005), who chooses to embrace


the darkness, to see it as essential to light, to consider such

questions of goodness and evil as an alchemy, neither as good, nor as

evil, but as what is real. It is something like this that needs to

happen, that as a starting point, as Scott Stewart (October 28, 2010)

wrote for Stratfor, government needs to classify less, to accept

“that something that causes embarrassment and discomfort to a

particular administration or agency does not necessarily damage

national security.” Stewart criticizes a “culture of classification,

a “propensity of the U.S. government culture to classify documents at

the highest possible classification rather than at the lowest level

really required to protect that information,” and a “belief among

government employees that knowledge is power, and that one can become

powerful by having access to information and denying that access to

others.” Instead of being shared with agencies with a need to know,

secrets are used to build bureaucratic empires (Stewart, October 28,

2010).

Stratfor, the organization for which Stewart writes, is a think

tank that focuses heavily on foreign affairs and security issues,

whose thought appears constrained by a common political science

paradigm that assumes Realpolitik, which Barash and Webel (2002)


describe:

If power is properly and securely held and wielded, there shouldbe little reason for war or insurrection, except perhaps for occasional brief wars to adjust the “international state system,” that is, for what has come to be called (legitimate) “reasons of state.” War may be acceptable, even laudable, if itserves to prevent civic and moral breakdown. (p. 17)

Peace, in this perspective, is little more than the absence of

war. In this unfortunately prevalent paradigm, states are seen as

pursuing their own interests, even when they claim altruistic motives

—hence their concern over the release of secrets that reveal

discrepancies between public and private statements. Barash and

Webel (2002) do not find this an adequate approach. They fear that

“human rights will be sacrificed on the altar of state sovereignty,

expediency, and Realpolitik” (p. 449).

Yet even at these non-integral levels of analysis, the WikiLeaks

releases expose a profoundly inadequate system that manifestly not

only fails to protect, but actively violates human rights and denies

human dignity. It is a system that demonstrates greater capacity for

criminal conduct than for improving the human condition, yet U.S.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the releases “an attack on

the international community - the alliances and partnerships, the


conversations and negotiations that safeguard global security and

advance economic prosperity” (quoted, Sheridan, November 29, 2010).

And according to one survey, 70 percent of people in the United

States “think the leaks are doing more harm than good” (Thomma,

December 10, 2010).1 Because, presumably, Clinton, her colleagues,

and many other people can imagine no other way of dealing with other

human beings on the planet—Beal's (2002) monstrous “other.”

And as Beal (2002) might also phrase it, because elites fear the

unknown alternatives that continued WikiLeaks-type revelations may

force upon them. These alternatives could involve journeys into

unknown realms of diplomacy that might be likened to portions of

ancient maps that cartographers labeled, “here be dragons.” All

1 The survey questions in the McClatchy-Marist poll were not released. The full sentence in the article reads, “The survey found that 70 percent of Americans think the leaks are doing more harm than good by allowing America's enemies to see confidential and secret information about U.S. foreign policy.” (Thomma, December 10, 2010). If the question was framed in anything like this language, referring to “America's enemies,” that would obviously bias the response. A CBSNews poll suggested that 73 percent of people in the U.S. do not “do not think the public has the right to know everything the government does, if secret information concerns national security” (Condon, December 3, 2010). The CBS question was posed as a dichotomy between total transparency and keeping information secret for “national security” reasons; it appears to have followed another question which frames the issue in terms of diplomatic relations (CBS News, December 3, 2010). A Pew survey found that 60 percent felt the WikiLeaks releases are harmful to the public interest (Pew Research, December 8, 2010). Angus-Reid survey results, covering the U.S., Canada, and Britain were more circumspect, indicating that only 51 percent of U.S. respondents felt “WikiLeakswas wrong to publish this information” and that opinion in the other countries was split (Angus-Reid, December 9, 2010).


because, as Marlan (2005) might see it, they are being forced to

integrate what was once hidden with what they had chosen to be

visible.

World leaders may be up in arms, but people in the real world really don’t care, and no one has really learned anything we didn’t know already. I was in Istanbul when the story broke, and it broke there loudly; Turkey was one of the most talked-about topics in the first group of cables the Times released. Yet even there, a merchant at the city’s Grand Bazaar pointed out to me, “It’s not exactly news that every country looks afterits own interests – or that people gossip and say nasty things about one another.” (Esman, December 6, 2010)

This should be easier. There is little in the WikiLeaks

releases that is surprising to those who have been paying attention

(Cole, December 5, 2010; Knigge, December 10, 2010; Stewart, October

28, 2010). But the reaction of elites who are being forced to

integrate their private personas with their public personas suggests

they fear that large differences will be perceived; that many people

were already mostly aware of their skulduggery seems not to fit in

with elites' own perceptions of their public personas. Some of this

is surely for show. Henry Porter has

lost count of the politicians and opinion formers of an authoritarian bent warning of the dreadful damage done by the WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables, and in the very next breathdismissing the content as frivolous tittle-tattle. To seek simultaneous advantage from opposing arguments is not a new


gambit, but to be wrong in both is quite an achievement. (Porter, December 11, 2010)

Porter may cynically see this argumentation as a gambit, but

this schizophrenic style of advocacy also suggests that elites

deceive themselves and that they deceive those who trust mainstream

journalists who are too often stenographers for power (Altschull,

1995; Herman & Chomsky, 2002). But while the public seems largely

complicit in dismissing the darkness to which they might attribute

their standard of living, elites deceive few others.

The delusional qualities of these public personas might best be

addressed by a social psychologist. Zimbardo (2008), concerned more

with actually preventing evil, recommends that people finding

themselves in situations where they are expected to do evil “learn[]

how to resist unwanted influences” (p. 446). He even proposes a

“ten-step program” (p. 451). In essence, he suggests that if the

road to hell is paved with good intentions, the road to heaven might

be paved with affirmations and progressively altruistic acts. This

requires first, a recognition that they are doing evil; second, a

willingness, among people who have clawed their way to the highest

ranks of society that they should do more than sound altruistic, that


they should actually do good; and third, that they should do so

against the resistance of nearly all their peers.

Marlan's (2005) alchemy of light and darkness—here, public and

private—seems an essential part of the solution. But it can only

occur when elites feel they have permission to acknowledge their

“dark” selves and when they feel they can trust the “others” with

whom they deal (Anderson, 1997; Beal, 2002). Getting elites to a

place where they can remedy their delusional and sociopathic

tendencies might seem to call for mass psychotherapy, but to the

extent that wars have marked changes in the course of human history,

this civil cyberwar may well herald a new situation, one in which

elites will either adapt or become irrelevant and in which people

will be compelled to acknowledge what politicians are doing in their

name.

That they may adapt is not necessarily a good thing. A possible

response, one that some have suggested, is that they may seek to

implement tighter controls on the Internet, as China does. As Glenn

Greenwald (December 7, 2010) told Democracy Now!,

What’s really going on here is a war over control of the internet and whether or not the internet can actually serve whata lot of people hoped its ultimate purpose was, which was to


allow citizens to band together and democratize the checks on the world’s most powerful factions. That’s what this really is about. It’s why you see Western government, totally lawlessly, waging what can only be described as a war on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange outside the bounds of any constraints, because that’s what really is at stake here. (Greenwald, December 7, 2010).

Greenwald, a constitutional lawyer who writes for Salon, an

online magazine, highlights the lawlessness with which elites have

responded in this situation. He is not the only one to notice. The

senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Kit Bond

said, “If DoJ [the Department of Justice] has no legal tool to

[prosecute Assange], it needs to be upfront with Congress and the

American people” (quoted, Hosenball, November 30, 2010). So far, the

Obama administration appears not to care, which may mean 1) that they

are proceeding recklessly out of sheer desperation, 2) that they have

confidence that the courts will rule on their side, or 3) that their

confidence is misplaced—and that they will be in for a rude shock

when (and if) this matter arrives in court. And regardless of the

outcome of the instant case, Congress may well enact legislation with

constitutional implications:

“The reason the government hasn’t acted to take down WikiLeaks is it knows, as does every First Amendment scholar, that would run afoul of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Pentagon Papers


case,” said Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was referring to the landmark 1971 Supreme Court ruling that rejected the Nixon administration’s attempt to stop The New York Times from printing leaked, high-level military reports on the Vietnam War.

“Under the First Amendment, the legal presumption is strongly in favor of free speech and against prior restraint,” Bankston said. “The government would have the burden of demonstrating serious, really imminent harm and would have to doso for each document it wants to enjoin.” (Gerstein, December 2,2010).

It appears that for the elite to prevail in their effort to

regain control over information, they will need to take steps so

draconian that there would no longer be any doubt that constitutional

protections have eroded.

That leaves four other unsatisfactory possibilities, 1) that the

elite will adapt to a freer flow of information in a way not

suggested by Zimbardo, Beal, or Marlan; 2) that leaks such as those

now flowing from WikiLeaks will somehow cease; 3) that the elite will

simply continue to be embarrassed, which one might assume could

eventually lead to them becoming discredited and irrelevant; or 4)

that the people themselves will schizophrenically dismiss revelations

as simultaneously banal and outrageous.

That the elite will adapt or that the present leaks might

somehow cease seems unlikely. WikiLeaks has released only a small


portion of the material it is believed to possess and continues to

slowly release material (Associated Press, December 3, 2010). The

organization has also released an encrypted “insurance” file which

reportedly “contains full versions of all the U.S. documents received

by WikiLeaks to date – including those that have been withheld from

publication or have had names and details removed in order to protect

the lives of spies, sources and soldiers” (Saunders, December 6,

2005). Apparently 100,000 people have copied this file; all it will

take is for the key to be disseminated—a trivial problem—to make that

information fully available (Cole, December 5, 2010; Gerstein,

December 2, 2010; MSNBC, December 5, 2010; Williams, August 2, 2010).

Stopping leaks therefore requires either a change in

relationship between those who presently leak the material or might

do so in the future and the governments which seek to protect it or a

change in the willingness of people to learn what governments have

been concealing from them. The latter again seems unlikely; to the

extent that relationships are built on trust, governments have

evinced ever decreasing trust in their own citizens with increasingly

intrusive yet dubious security measures since the 9/11 attacks. The

Transportation Security Agency has recently begun requiring air


passengers to undergo full body scans or searches involving either a

hands-on pat down including of breasts and genitalia or a scan that

reveals the same areas (Engelhart, November 30, 2010; Goldberg,

October 29, 2010; Richardson, October 30, 2010; Rozen, November 22,

2010; Smith, November 23, 2010; Stewart, November 23, 2010).

“Most of these security features are for public consumption,” said Vahid Motevalli, the co-founder of the Aviation Institute at George Washington University and now a professor at Purdue University. “In many cases, if you don't catch these issues wellin advance of the airport, it's too late.” (Kravitz, November 13, 2010).

The contrast between the government's determination to intrude

on citizens' privacy and the same government's determination to

protect its own “privacy” is more likely to engender sympathy for the

former than the latter. As to the possibility of changing the

relationship between government and its employees who leak secrets,

the Obama administration has instead chosen an increasingly punitive

approach—despite a campaign promise of greater transparency—that is

apparently welcomed by both major political parties as increasingly

needed. But already severe penalties have proven ineffective.

“Often even a determined hunt fails to find the source [of leaked

material among hundreds of government employees], and agencies


sometimes oppose prosecution for fear that even more secrets will be

disclosed at a trial” (Shane, June 11, 2010). And the Pentagon has

banned the use of removable media on computers connected to its

secret network (Shachtman, December 9, 2010):

But [according] to several Defense Department insiders, the steps taken so far to prevent another big secret data dump have been surprisingly small. “After all the churn…. The general perception is business as usual. I’m not kidding,” one of those insiders says. “We haven’t turned a brain cell on it.” (Shachtman, December 9, 2010)

There is always a trade-off between security and convenience.

In the same breath as the Pentagon order threatens violators with

court-martials, it acknowledges that adhering to its instructions may

“impede timeliness on mission execution” where controlled networks

are unavailable or slow (Shachtman, December 9, 2010). It is

possible that the government may be reaching the limits of its

ability to secure information.

That makes Marlan's (2005) approach all the more critical. The

government as a form of “self” must reckon with its own darkness—in

the light. As Beal (2002) might recommend, it must confront its own

fear of the unknown. The apparent impossibility of some form of

therapeutic process to address government's self-delusional and


sociopathic tendencies raises only the possibility that government

will instead continue along a self-destructive path. Given its ample

military resources, that might involve extensive “collateral damage.”

A necessary intervention can only come from the people on whose

behalf the government claims to act. Citizens have acquiesced to

government authority partly because they are socialized to do so, in

rituals such as the Fourth of July and Veterans' Day celebrations,

the performance of the Star-Spangled Banner at sporting events, and in

the Pledge of Allegiance recited each morning by school children.

They have also acquiesced because authorities command brutal military

and police force; the human potential movement arose in response to

the perceived impossibility of confronting the world's most powerful

military as a way of gaining individual liberation that, if adopted

widely enough, might ultimately undermine a repressive society.

Citizens have acquiesced in part because they have been led to trust

in “experts” who collaborate with elites as technology has advanced

our way of living far beyond what most people can create or

understand for themselves while exhausting them with ever longer

working hours, and pacifying them with illusions of wealth on

television. And they have done so because elites have grudgingly


conceded just enough to just enough people that they have an interest

in the status quo (Chomsky, 2005; Curtis, 2002; Ellul, 1964, Postman,

1993, Reich, 1970; Zinn, 2003).

But the propaganda in support of the U.S. system of government

is that people vote for politicians who will represent their

interests, that these politicians are accountable to voters, and

therefore, we must understand, that voters are ultimately responsible

for what politicians do on their behalf, even when politicians

conceal information from them. To the extent that propaganda has

substance, it raises the possibility that “entire bodies of

people . . . can be guilty for the crimes actually carried out by a

few” (Fletcher, 2002, p. 1504). People will have to learn what their

government has concealed from them. The Nuremberg trials sought to

ascribe guilt principally to a few individuals, but

the liberal bias toward individual criminal responsibility obscures basic truths about the crimes that now constitute the core of international criminal law. The four crimes over which the [International Criminal] Court has jurisdiction—aggression, crimes of war, crimes against humanity, and genocide—are deeds that by their very nature are committed by groups and typically against individuals as members of groups. Whatever the pretense of liberal international lawyers, the crimes of concern to the international community are collective crimes. It is true that as a formal matter only individuals are prosecuted, but they areprosecuted for crimes committed by and in the name of the groups


they represent. (Fletcher, 2002, p. 1514)

So even if the United States government does not accept the

jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, and even if the

people of the U.S. might prefer to look the other way, they cannot

evade their responsibility under international law for the crimes of

their political leadership. The WikiLeaks revelations expose to the

public that which they have delegated to government and that which

they have avoided dealing with themselves, partly through the

auspices of a mainstream media that subordinates itself to elite

interests (Altschull, 2002; Herman & Chomsky, 2002), and partly out

of a sense that we are not collectively responsible for crimes

committed in the prosecution of the “war on terror.” Some of the

outrage at WikiLeaks might be understood in terms that Marlan (2005)

might recognize, that the public has avoided—intentionally or

otherwise—looking at the darkness of a government which cooperates by

concealing that darkness or in terms that Beal (2002) might

recognize, the monster within the government. Also in terms that

Beal might recognize, the people have thus been able to cling to

simplistic notions of other people and other societies, such as an

archetype of Islamist radical “terrorists” as monstrous, as an enemy


to replace communists generalized across over one billion Muslims who

think and practice in a variety of ways and live in lands around the

world but especially across a portion of the earth reaching from

Morocco and the Western Sahara to the Philippines (Küng, 2007). But

in terms of international law, a widening war principally against

Muslim countries, torture and other forms of abuse against mostly

Muslims at Guantanamo, support for the Israeli occupation of

Palestine, a round-up of and mass deportations of Arabs in the wake

of the 9/11 attacks, and continued harassment of Muslims inside the

United States, appears as more than a “hate crime” (Bauman & Corn,

August 23, 2010; DeYoung & Jaffe, June 4, 2010; Lewis, March 1, 2003;

Russell, July 4, 2010). It is not just the government that needs to

reckon with its dark side, but the people of the United States as a

whole.


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