Today I am reflecting on the lawlessness of the Bush Administration and on the faltering steps Obama has taken toward restoring the rule of law in the United States. Having traveled to South Africa in 1990 to support the African National Congress at a time when it was still (erroneously) on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, I suppose I have a slightly special perspective on post-9/11 America.        Glenn Greenwald has been particularly eloquent in pointing out what an outrage the militarized response to 9/11 has been, how deeply corrosive of the best things about the United States, effectively removing as it did even the guarantee of habeas corpus. Desmond Tutu has said that the correct response to 9/11 would have been a trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hague and he is right. History shows that wars actually cause terrorism.        We have, as a nation, answered murder with murder and thereby squandered the international good will we had in the wake of the attacks. Bush, by claiming the authority to detain even U. S. citizens indefinitely without judicial review has turned the United States into a country I hardly know anymore. My humanitarian support for the ANC when it was fighting for majority rule in South Africa was a deeply transformative experience for me, so much so that after 9/11 I had to leave the United States, going first to France, then to Holland, and then to Southeast Asia where I was tortured, perhaps with the connivance of the United States. I have never committed an act of political (or religious) violence.       The renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act in contravention of the United States Constitution and Obama’s endorsement of the equally unconstitutional idea of indefinite preventive detention has me wondering whether I have to quit the United States in protest yet again.