Posted on 09/12/2001 10:41:59 AM PDT by JRadcliffe
WASHINGTON - As American leadership at every level moves to cope with the immediate crisis of mounting death and destruction from the disasters at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an important question will arise: Can national security and civil liberty co-exist?
This issue will be at the forefront, testing President Bush and his administration as they lead a frightened and angry country.
In pursuit of security, experts believe demands will be heard for more intrusive use of wiretaps, searches, detainment and "profiling" techniques to seek out possible terrorists. These could turn on skin color and national origin or ethnicity, and fall particularly hard on Arab Americans and Muslims.
"We will now see ourselves as a battlefield as never before and our sense of privilege, protection and isolation is forever destroyed," said Henry Aaron,a senior fellow and public policy specialist at the Brookings Institution. "The ultimate impact . . . on the American psyche . . . is going to be profound and will manifest itself in the political system and the way we live our lives. This is not a passing or small event."
In times of national distress, the American public and Congress rally behind the president, who is central to establishing control, reassuring the nation and leading it out of tragedy.
Lyndon Johnson did that after President Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
"By the time the plane came down in Washington, he was beginning to act not just presidential, but awesomely presidential," recalled Fred I. Greenstein, chair of the Program in Leadership Studies at Princeton University. Now it's Bush's turn.
"This is his opportunity to really assume the mantle of the presidency," Greenstein said. While Pearl Harbor seemed the obvious analogy to Tuesday's attacks, historian David M. Kennedy was not sure it is the right one.
Certainly there is the common element of stunning surprise, but Pearl Harbor was a calculated and unambiguous act of war by another nation.
As the search begins for perpetrators of Tuesday's calamity, Kennedy sees a major danger that American ideals of freedom might be undermined and swept away in a storm of anger, a rush for vengeance, a demand for protection against future attacks.
During World War II, the U.S. interned thousands of Japanese-Americans in what has been seen as a tragic mistake.
The continuing threat is not to "security interests in the usual sense of the term" but to "maintaining civil liberties and an open society and not becoming obsessively paranoid about internal threats," said Kennedy, a Stanford University historian who won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, "Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-45."
As President Bush declared that "the resolve of our great nation is being tested," Kennedy wondered how Bush meant that to be understood. He noted that President Roosevelt, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, passed two tests of leadership: He didn't panic, and he maintained confidence in the strength and vitality of American society. "We need to remember what kind of people we are, what kind of country we are," Kennedy said. "That's in danger too, and that needs to be preserved."
At such a moment, the nation inevitably looks to the president for assurance that the guilty will be punished, that things will return to normal. "He has to interpret the events for people, identify the cause, and explain the significance for the country," said David Hart, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. "Does it mean we have to change our daily lives? Change our transportation or communication system in ways that affects us on a daily basis?"
In times of great crisis, the president has great powers, not all of them spelled out in the Constitution. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of habeas corpus, allowing Union troops to arrest and imprison people without formally charging them with violating any law. In this crisis, consequences will come in two types: short-term and long-term, said Stephen Wermiel, a law professor at American University. "The short-term question is the degree that law enforcement will try to get around the limitations that have existed on wiretapping, searches, stopping people at borders, detaining people at airports and ports of entry, profiling overtly on basis of skin color and national identity. "I think we'll see that start to happen immediately," Wermiel said. "They will use powers without a lot of concern for what we thought were fairly clearly established civil liberties. The notion of probable cause will be a lot easier to establish than it normally would be. I suspect that any Muslim group remotely suspected of sympathy with groups suspected of terrorism will become a target of wire taps and surveillance and maybe searches." And the passions of an emotional public will support all that, Wermiel said. "But I hope we're not going to panic and forget about the tradition of protecting the rights of all Americans on which this country has been built."
Now that the nation has received its biggest wake-up call ever, one pivotal question remains, will the US Government further erode our Bill of Rights in the name of security.
Our nation is great ONLY because of the individual liberties as outlined in the Bill of Rights. No other nation, prior to the US, ever believed in the limited power of government and the right of peaceful people to pursue happiness. Without this fundamental premise, our nation is as good as dead, and the terrorists will have ultimately won anyway. Personally, I'd rather have to fight the terrorists than my own government, but if our government entertains ANY notion of destroying this great nation in order to save it, then it will be my sworn enemy.
The terrorists must not win by default!
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