DISPATCHES: By Hank Kalet
To quote Thomas Paine, author of the Revolutionary War pamphlets "The American Crisis" and "Common Sense," "These are the times that try men’s souls."
The freedoms we hold dear, that we celebrate today, Independence Day, are under attack.
I’m not talking about by Al-Qaeda. I’m talking about by the Bush administration and Congress.
Over the last eight months, as America mourned the 3,000 or so who died in the Sept. 11 terror attacks and fretted over the dangers of what many perceive as a drastically different world, the Bush administration has moved to consolidate federal power, enhancing the authority of law enforcement while removing much of what it has done or plans to do from judicial oversight.
The short list is fairly compelling:
It has placed at least two Americans under indefinite detention without charges or an attorney, claiming that they worked with the Al-Qaeda terror network and therefore forfeited the constitutional protections the rest of us enjoy.
It has rounded up and kept secret the names of hundreds of foreign-born individuals, most without charges or access to legal representations, essentially replaying our detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Congress, under cover of night and with the full support of the Bush administration, passed the U.S.A. Patriot Act. The bill is a constitutional nightmare that twists the assumptions contained in the Bill of Rights, unleashing law enforcement authorities to ignore issues of privacy and due process by legalizing roving wiretaps and covert searches.
And it expands the definition of terrorism in a way that could potentially allow the government to levy heavy penalties for relatively minor offenses, including political protests, making it a potent weapon against political dissent. Under the rules, environmental or labor groups who take to the streets to protest the World Trade Organizations could be identified as terrorists if their rhetoric falls outside boundaries set by government officials.
The Bill of Rights, of course, is supposed to guarantee us the right to speak freely and to assemble and seek "a redress of grievances." It is supposed to protect us from unreasonable searches and seizures by police, without "probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." And it is supposed to require that those arrested and accused of crimes be guaranteed due process of law, an attorney and the right to confront their accusers.
Attorney General John Ashcroft and his supporters and the majority of Americans, according to the poll numbers say we have to be willing to relinquish some of our freedoms temporarily to ensure our safety and security in this time of war.
It is easy to see why people might feel this way. But we cannot be secure unless we maintain our freedoms. The political philosopher Sidney Hook, in a 1940 essay called "Bread and Freedom," took to task those who would trade freedom for security in his case, economic security.
"How can there can be genuine security so long as arbitrary power, whether it be of an employer or a group, or especially of the state as employer, is not subject to the restraints of a freely operating democratic process?" (emphasis in original)
Hook’s essay was written in response to American communists, who were preaching that "bourgeois freedoms" were secondary and could be sacrificed to ensure that the proletariat achieves economic sufficiency. Being free to speak one’s mind, to worship as one wished, to be free in one’s house thought to be less important than put food on the table or finding food and shelter.
Hook explained the danger of the tradeoff, saying that the only way to maintain freedom and security was to ensure that our core freedoms remain intact. These core freedoms of speech and assembly, of inquiry and teaching, of press and other forms of communication, of cultural opportunity and development are "what we should primarily mean by the American way of life," he wrote.
"For these are the strategic freedoms that enable us to win new freedoms and check the excesses of the old," he wrote. "So long as they prevail, modifications of and restrictions on other freedoms are reversible. Where they are undermined, no other freedom can be anything but an assertion of power by a privileged group."
And it’s important to note that what we are calling a temporary tradeoff is likely to have a much longer shelf life than any of us realize today. The fact is, we are involved in a war against a "shadowy network of adversaries rather than a nation state," one that is likely to have no end, writes Ted Galen Carpenter of the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. Because of this, he says, it is likely that this tradeoff will become permanent, as well.
"We therefore need to ask whether we want to give not only the current president but also his unknown successors in the decades to come the awesome power that President Bush has claimed," he wrote.
Allowing the national security state to grow unchecked is dangerous and potentially could alter the face of our nation, changing it from the democratic republic we have known into something very different, something not worth celebrating as far as I’m concerned.
Hank Kalet is managing editor of the South Brunswick Post.