About the Book
In the near future, there has been a series of terrorist attacks. With the War on Terror now a global conflict, the distinction between the war front and the home front has blurred. With the Homeland at war, the old rules of law and of war no longer apply. New enemies call for new tactics. Drone and satellite surveillance, warrantless search, universal electronic monitoring, internal passports, and abusive checkpoints and strip searches have become routine in the emerging National Security State. New enabling laws authorize secret courts and indefinite detention without charge or trial. Plunged headlong into a nightmarish world of “ghost” detainees in black-site prisons is Tom Benson, a banking executive and U.S. Army veteran. Growing distant from his wife, and with his son facing conscription, his troubles start when he is mysteriously unable to cash a check. Arrested and declared an Unlawful Enemy Combatant, he endures progressively harsher “enhanced” interrogation as he struggles to regain his freedom and strike back.
State of Terror explores Benjamin Franklin’s timeless warning: “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
I wrote State of Terror for an educational purpose. Essays and articles, no matter how well
reasoned or written, do not carry the impact in the human mind of a good
story. Talking abstractly about summary arrest, “enhanced”
interrogation, or drone surveillance doesn't make it real enough for
most people. What does it look like? How does it feel? Societies
continuing down the path we have chosen (or tolerated) have not stopped
their advance. Governments have not engaged in widespread domestic
spying and enacted extraordinary emergency powers and enabling laws and
then stopped there. It is not the nature of power. The impulse to
control others, the "will to power," to borrow from Nietzsche, doesn't
suddenly vanish.
My goal is to have State of Terror widely read to serve as a warning against encroachment on civil liberties. It's available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Apple, as an ebook and in paperback. Please post a review here
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HE605GC
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http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/state-of-terror-jo...
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