Go out and see Minority Report. In Blame Runner David Edelstein writes that “Minority Report is a fabulous, witty totalitarian nightmare”. Jeremy Lott provocatively asserts in Reason that the movie will be to the Bush administration what Wag the Dog was to the Clinton team: both “capture a political and cultural moment”. Wag the Dog featured a war to distract the public from a presidential sex scandal, and soon afterward the bombing on Kosovo began during the peak of the Lewinsky scandal. Minority Report convicts and punishes perpetrators of future crimes before they can commit them.
Of course, in a world without “pre-cogs” to stop the future before it happens, we’re stuck back with all the inconveniences of potentially flawed justice, and therefore the due process guarantees that help protect us from inevitable mistakes. Unless, of course, John Ashcroft decides that we are an “enemy combatant”, in which case we (like American citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi) can be held without a lawyer until the war ends, i.e., until hell freezes over.
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