American Perspective Online
9.12.01
by Robert Kuttner In this new era of stealth war, America faces new and multiple dangers. But heightened risks of hijackings, suicide bombs, chemical, biological and digital assaults are only half the story. One other risk is that America turns itself ineluctably into a garrison state.
Civil Liberty Under Siege. The new peril surely justifies enhanced security measures. But it also gives free rein to every national-security paranoid for whom civil liberty is a naive inconvenience.
Expect sweeping plans for much broader electronic surveillance, security cordons around public spaces, random searches, limits on peaceful protest, and special courts for terrorism suspects. Even under the Clinton administration, which had a far better civil liberties record than Bush's, legislation passed taking away due process rights of immigrants and restricting the right of habeas corpus; executive measures permitted star-chamber tactics sometimes against innocent people.
War always menaces civil liberty. From the Alien and Sedition Acts after the American Revolution to the rounding up of radicals during World War I, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and McCarthyism during the Cold War, liberties are trampled, often needlessly, in the name of security.
One early test will be at the end of this month when protesters plan to demonstrate the austerity policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Despite terrorism, there is still a right of peaceful assembly and protest. But there are also a handful of anarchists committed to acts of violence. The opening gambit of security authorities was a "yellow line" around half of downtown Washington. Protestors were to be consigned to distant fields, far out of sight.
Peaceful protest groups are challenging this proposal. Now, the terrorist attacks give the authorities a pretext for even more stringent limits. This will be the first test of whether the anti- terrorist state becomes an anti-civil liberty state.
Missile Defense Inoperative. Remember President Bush's proposed missile defense? You can probably forget about it -- and so can Bush. A lot of good this would have done against kamikaze terrorists wielding hijacked commercial airliners.
The U.S. will probably have to spend tens of additional billions on legitimate anti-terrorist measures. This increased defense spending crowds out plans for a missile defense which is both unworkable, and now tragically overtaken by events.
One World? The reigning ideology of the new century has just been sundered. On the one hand, the new order is supposed to be a single, global community with free movement of capital, commerce, products and persons. On the other hand, we've just had a gruesome wake-up call. America's border security is pretty sloppy, and Mexico's is worse. The European Union has long worried about having common frontiers and free passage between countries with high security, like Britain and Germany and those with lax security like Italy and Greece. It's a big setback for grandiose pretensions that the U.S. and Mexico are really one big happy country called North America. The conceit that the nation-state is suddenly passe is now up for a major reappraisal.
Guard Labor. The late economist David Gordon wrote extensively about "guard labor" -- the fact that millions of Americans were employed guarding other Americans. This included police, prison guards, and proliferating private security forces. His point was that guard labor added little to useful economic output, and that when you adjusted for people engaged in guard labor, mostly at low wages, America's employment statistics were not quite as rosy.
Guard labor, tragically, is about to become America's next economic stimulus program. One of the reasons why airport security is so sloppy is that the security guards, so easily outwitted at metal detectors, are underpaid, undertrained, and more stage-props than a genuine safeguard for the public. Average pay is about $6.25 an hour, less than what fast-food workers get. Average turnover, not surprisingly, is 200 percent a year.
We need to upgrade this workforce, as we upgrade security systems, and at the same time not go overboard. As trans-atlantic tourists will appreciate, Europe has managed to get this balance about right. European airport security is far more professionalized and effective, and delays are about on a par with our more generally inefficent air-traffic system.
In sum, it is possible for America to become more secure, with modest incursions on our convenience but without major assaults on our freedoms. Would that the president in this dreadful hour were of the calibre of Lincoln, or Roosevelt, or Kennedy. If George W. Bush does not appreciate both sides of the precious balance, the rest of us need to be extra vigilant against both terror and against loss of liberty.
http://www.prospect.org/webfeatures/2001/09/kuttner-r-09-12.html