There have been a number of
times throughout our nation’s history where the question of whether our
civil liberties that we prize so dearly should be impinged upon in the
name of national security. Civil liberty was so paramount in the
Framers of our constitution’s minds that the wish to secure our liberty
is within the very first line of its preamble. When we go to war with
other countries, it is in the hopes of protecting our liberty (or
freedom) or to attempt to secure the same liberties that we enjoy for
others to whom we feel are oppressed by fascist or tyrannical
governments. Yet, it seems ironic that it is within those times of war
that we also put our civil liberties upon the firing line. As our young
men and women risk their lives to protect liberty, we, safe in our
homes, seemingly throw it away. If the compelling interest of the state
is capable of overriding civil liberties and civil liberties are the
most at risk during wartimes, I argue, instead, that it is during
wartimes where the protection of civil liberties should be the
government’s compelling interest and legislative acts and executive
orders that limit civil liberty for the sake of national security should
be regarded as potentially irrational, suspect, and subject to logical
review.
With the advent of the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, the gap between the risks that our soldiers take on the front lines and we, at home, take proceeding in our daily lives began to narrow. On that day, 2977 people perished within minutes in a highly televised, heart wrenching, and horrifying display. These people weren’t combatants at war: they were children, women, accountants, lawyers, businessmen, office clerks, janitors, and much, much more. These were people, like ourselves, by simply going to work or boarding a plane, lost their lives in the act of living their lives. When news of the attacks began to spread, I felt in my heart that these were no mere accidents but the work of terrorists and I, myself, felt terror and outrage. What these terrorists did was a direct attack on our liberty—our freedom to live our lives and the terror I felt was not that my own life was now in peril. Instead, I felt a deep fear in what my own nation’s response would be. The attack at the hand of terrorists was a two-fold attack, one on our liberties to travel freely and proceed about our lives without intervention and, the second, the creation of the scenario in which our liberties would be further impinged on by our government to prevent further attacks.
This second attack on our civil liberties came swiftly after the September 11th in the form of the nearly unanimously passed and broad ranging legislation called the Patriot Act. Simply viewed, the intent of the Patriot Act was to assist our nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in preventing further attacks upon our nation. The question of the constitutionality of some of the provisions of the Patriot Act has been hit upon over and over again throughout the years since its passing. Senator Russ Feingold (D) of Wisconsin was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act’s in October of 2001. In a statement of his opposition to the act, Feingold wrote, “As the chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, I recognize this is a different world with different technologies, different issues, and different threats. Yet we must examine every item that is proposed in response to these events to be sure we are not rewarding these terrorists and weakening ourselves by giving up the cherished freedoms that they seek to destroy.”
The need to protect our citizens from further terrorist attack was made clear in the failings of our intelligence agencies to stop the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the perceived threat of further attack was very high in the minds of Americans. In a Gallup poll taken on the day of the September 11th attacks, it was found that 58% of Americans were somewhat or very worried that they or a member of their immediate family "will become the victim of a terrorist attack” (Huddy et al 488) and in a CBS News national poll taken in October of 2001, 88% of respondents ” were somewhat or very concerned that there would be another attack on the U.S. in the next few months” (Huddy et al 494). These concerns combined with the passage of the Patriot Act renewed the debate on the delicate balance between civil liberties and national security. The majority opinion over the last several years has been that we, or some of us, should expect to give up some of our civil liberties to protect ourselves from terrorism. In his "Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism", Russell Hardin proposes the argument that very substantially hassling 50 people to find one terrorist is not likely to sound offensive to many citizens. We are entering a new era in which civil liberties will be stereotypical (81). On one hand, Hardin acknowledges that the detainment and interrogation of a few Arab-Americans would be a breach in civil liberties; however, it would lessen the inconvenience to the majority who would remain unaffected.
The problem with this is that not all who might be considered terrorists are Arab-American or Arab at all. John Walker Lindh, a man who was certainly not of Arabic descent, was an American citizen captured as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan in 2001 and had received training at military camps funded by Osama bin Laden. Relinquishing civil liberties and participating in racial profiling based on ethnic background when the terrorists who attacked us were from that ethnic background makes sense until one considers the case of John Walker Lindh. Under Hardin’s argument, a person with possible terrorist connections like Lindh or domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh (a veteran) and Michael Scarpetti (an environmental extremist) may escape detainment and interrogation on the basis of ethnic background alone. The general consensus for the restriction of civil liberties during wartimes has been thus, historically, the American public has expressed generic support for civil liberties principles while at the same time backing restrictions against a clearly identified or understood “other”—particularly a group that is reviled (Gould 75). In the case of terrorism, there is no clearly identified “other”. It can be any one of us and that is the full force of the Patriot Act.
Although the actual risk of an American or their immediate family becoming a victim of terrorist attack was decidedly low, the perceived threat of such a thing happening was quite high at the time and in the months following September 11th. The reason behind this heightened perception of threat is found within the effects of threat, itself, and why the compelling interest of government should be civil liberties. Threat “reduces the efficiency of memory processes and promotes both threat-related thought content and perceptual hypersensitivity to information concerning threat” (Huddy et al 486). For our legislators, these effects of perceived threat are compounded by the need of our citizens to have swift assurance of security. Huddy also notes that “threat accompanied by time pressure has been found to heighten group conformity pressures and to reduce consideration of policy alternatives” (Huddy et al 486). Although the Patriot Act was intended to correct the failings of our intelligence agencies and strengthen law enforcement, both the speed in which it was written and passed following the September 11th attacks and the effects of a heightened perceived threat of further imminent attack should make the legislation suspect of potential irrationality.
Our congress was constructed in such a way that would assure the deliberative process through debate, thereby making it difficult for bills to be made into law—let alone pass unanimously. For example, in 1999, 5,514 bills were introduced in Congress (not counting procedural and internal Congress housekeeping bills) with less than 300 becoming law (http://berkeley.house.gov). This makes for a 5% probability of any given bill becoming a law. Comparatively, the single nay vote in regards to the passing of the Patriot Act within the Senate with so little time spent on deliberation should be viewed as nothing short of extraordinary. Another influencing factor had to be at work for such a swift passing and it is here that we can recall Huddy’s statement in regards to the influences of perceived threat and its effect on elites in regards to policy deliberation.
The question that then logically follows is: In what ways do the effects of perceived threat directly influence our regard of civil liberties within legislation itself? In a study measuring people’s willingness to exchange civil liberties for the sake of national security, Darren Davis and Brian Silver found that “whatever their ideological position, people’s willingness to exchange liberties for securities increases as their perception of threat increases” (Davis and Silver 43). In short, even a liberal, who normally would support the protection of civil liberties, will allay that support if they believe that there is high risk of an attack. Applying this to the swift passage of the Patriot Act again points to the power of perceived threat of personal and national security transcending prior ideological differences. Conservative and liberal politician, alike, actively chose to pass legislation that threatened our civil liberties in the aim to assure greater national security.
Yet another troublesome feature of the enactment of legislation and executive orders made during periods of perceived threat to national security is the tendency for increased ethnocentrism and xenophobia (Huddy 486). An example of how ethnocentrism and xenophobia may influence the enforcement of legislation and executive orders would be the exclusion of people in military areas via Executive Order 9066 during World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December of 1941. Schildkraut writes that despite the ethnic neutrality of the order, Japanese residents and Japanese Americans were the only ones excluded from these military areas and subsequently interned –an estimated total of 120,000 people in all (512). The attack by the Japanese on U.S. soil created a heightened perception of threat within the United States, which resulted in executive actions that were quickly deemed unconstitutional after the feeling of perceived threat was removed. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote, “If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure” (1). These words were never truer than in the case of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Simply put into Madison’s terms, the majority’s common interest was national security for which many had little issue with forgoing the rights of a particular minority (Japanese and Japanese-Americans) to secure.
Although internments on the scale of World War II did not occur after September 11th, the effects of threat driven ethnocentrism and xenophobia still have had its influence. Seemingly ridiculous stories of racial profiling occurring in particular at U.S. airports against people with darker complexions abound. My own experience was being pulled aside for additional search by airport security and bemusedly watching my then 5 years old half Native American daughter’s shoes be singled out for testing for explosive powders. The question remains for me as to whether my dark complexioned daughter was a victim of racial profiling at the tender age of 5 or whether the actions of the airport security were based on random search. Racial profiling during wartimes, especially after a direct attack on U.S. soil, is a symptom of perceived threat and subject to fear based irrationality and potentially unconstitutional action.
If the role of fear in the form of perceived personal and national threat can so greatly influence our actions and viewpoints on civil liberties and minority groups, then it is essential that, during times of heightened perceived threat, our legislators should attempt to retain rationality in the formation of new laws. If civil liberties, especially for an “other”, are the most easily discarded when the perceived threat level is high, then it is the upmost importance that civil liberties should be the compelling interest of the government to assure that the actions of those legislators maintain both rationality and constitutionality. Hardin writes, “a sort of grain of truth—solely pragmatic—in the absolutist position on civil liberties is that we should probably give greater force to civil liberties than we might suppose just because it is easy to weaken them and very hard to strengthen them; and the moments when we think to weaken them are almost always going to be moments of crisis when the longer run interest in civil liberties gets over-shadowed by the urgency of the moment” (88).
One could argue that the impingement that our government has taken on our civil liberties since the September 11th attacks have been successful in preventing further terrorist attacks from happening. However, there is sufficient evidence that showed that the Central Intelligence Agency had information regarding the September 11th attacks prior to their occurrence and failed to act upon it (NY Times). The sheer atrocity of the events of September 11th, in itself, assures that any whispers of a potential terrorist threat to our country will be taken with much more gravity in the future. Actively choosing to make civil liberties the compelling interest of our government during times where our national security is threatened is still not without risk. In 2002, one of the Patriot Act’s most anti-civil liberties provisions that were noted at the time is the requirement that financial institutions “closely monitor daily financial transactions and share information with government intelligence services” (Gould 74). Such a provision would never be allowed if the protection of civil liberties was the compelling interest over national security. However, the tracking of particular types of financial transactions such as the purchase of large numbers of guns or items used to create an explosive device could feasibly prevent a terrorist attack from happening.
Today, we have become poignantly aware, through disclosures via Edward Snowden, that the data collection provisions that have promulgated under Section 215 of the Patriot Act are far more encompassing than what Gould noted in regards to financial transactions in 2002. Furthermore, revelations and questions of the constitutionality of "sneak and peek" warrant tactics as well as "stop and frisk" in our cities have further shown the erosion of our civil liberties in this post September 11th era. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, formed in November of 2002, has accelerated the militarization of the domestic police force, which was already long occurring through the Department of Defense's 1033 program, by issuing out hundreds of millions of dollars in grants each year to police departments across the nation for the purpose of fighting terrorism. The end result of the Patriot Act and its ambiguity has been quite painfully clear as tanks have rolled out onto our city streets in manners which, frequently with hindsight, are reflected upon with questioning horror. In response to the Boston Marathon Bombing, the entire city was shut down in the hunt for a single 19 year old young man, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as 19,000 National Guard troops rolled through the city's streets in armored vehicles (The Washington Post). Likewise, in Ferguson, Missouri, armored vehicles once again rolled out onto yet another city's streets in response to protests that were ironically against the police department, itself.
This is the definitive problem of the War on Terror and its primary legislation, the Patriot Act, that promotes the perceptions of an ambiguous threat that can arise from anywhere, at any time, and from any source. The chance that there will be another attack on U.S. soil is most likely inevitable but Rusell Hardin also makes a well grounded point in stating that the scale of annual harms from SUVs (sport utility vehicles) in the U.S. is reputedly greater than all terrorist actions together. I think we should do something about the dangers of SUVs and about possible future terrorism, but we should keep the actions in proportion to the dangers (79). The War on Terror that our country is in is a war without end. Terrorism will always be a threat to our way of life and that the United States will be a target of future attack is certain. It could happen today, tomorrow or 10 years from now. The question that remains is whether or not we will deprive ourselves of the civil liberties found within our U.S. Constitution for an indefinite length of time or if we will come to understand what our founders and soldiers have long understood in regards to liberty:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. --Benjamin Franklin
References
Official Website of Rep. Shirley Berkeley, FAQ’s http://berkley.house.gov/GovInfo/FAQ.html
CNN. The Case of the Taliban American. Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/people/shows/walker/profile.htm
Feingold, Senator Russell “On Opposing the U.S.A. Patriot Act”, retrieved from http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-2/feingold.htm
Franklin, Benjamin. Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755.—The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, vol. 6, p. 242 (1963).
Davis, Darren W. and Silver, Brian D. “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Jan 2004), pp. 28-46.
Gould, Jon B. “Playing with Fire: The Civil Liberties Implications of September 11th” Public Administration Review, Vol. 62, Special Issue: Democratic Governance in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001 (Sep. 2002), pp. 74-79.
Balko, Radley "Was the police response to the Boston Bombing really appropriate?" The Washington Post (April 22, 2014) Retrieved from: The Washington Post
Hardin, Russell “Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism” The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 8,
No. 1, Terrorism (2004), pp. 77-95, retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115782
Huddy, Leonie et al. “The Consequences of Terrorism: Disentangling the Effects of Personal and National Threat” Political Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 3 Special Issue: 9/11 and Its Aftermath: Perspectives from Political Psychology (Sept. 2002) pp. 485-509.
Madison, James. Federalist No. 51, Independent Journal (Feb. 1788). Retrieved from:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm
Mazetti, Mark. “C.I.A. Lays Out Errors It Made Before Sept. 11” New York Times (August 22, 2007). Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/washington/22cia.html
Schildkraut, Deborah J. “The More Things Change… American Identity and Mass and Elite Responses to 9/11” Political Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, Special Issue: 9/11 and Its Aftermath: Perspectives from Political Psychology (Sept. 2002), pp. 511-535.
With the advent of the attacks on the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001, the gap between the risks that our soldiers take on the front lines and we, at home, take proceeding in our daily lives began to narrow. On that day, 2977 people perished within minutes in a highly televised, heart wrenching, and horrifying display. These people weren’t combatants at war: they were children, women, accountants, lawyers, businessmen, office clerks, janitors, and much, much more. These were people, like ourselves, by simply going to work or boarding a plane, lost their lives in the act of living their lives. When news of the attacks began to spread, I felt in my heart that these were no mere accidents but the work of terrorists and I, myself, felt terror and outrage. What these terrorists did was a direct attack on our liberty—our freedom to live our lives and the terror I felt was not that my own life was now in peril. Instead, I felt a deep fear in what my own nation’s response would be. The attack at the hand of terrorists was a two-fold attack, one on our liberties to travel freely and proceed about our lives without intervention and, the second, the creation of the scenario in which our liberties would be further impinged on by our government to prevent further attacks.
This second attack on our civil liberties came swiftly after the September 11th in the form of the nearly unanimously passed and broad ranging legislation called the Patriot Act. Simply viewed, the intent of the Patriot Act was to assist our nation’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in preventing further attacks upon our nation. The question of the constitutionality of some of the provisions of the Patriot Act has been hit upon over and over again throughout the years since its passing. Senator Russ Feingold (D) of Wisconsin was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act’s in October of 2001. In a statement of his opposition to the act, Feingold wrote, “As the chairman of the Constitution Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, I recognize this is a different world with different technologies, different issues, and different threats. Yet we must examine every item that is proposed in response to these events to be sure we are not rewarding these terrorists and weakening ourselves by giving up the cherished freedoms that they seek to destroy.”
The need to protect our citizens from further terrorist attack was made clear in the failings of our intelligence agencies to stop the attacks on September 11, 2001 and the perceived threat of further attack was very high in the minds of Americans. In a Gallup poll taken on the day of the September 11th attacks, it was found that 58% of Americans were somewhat or very worried that they or a member of their immediate family "will become the victim of a terrorist attack” (Huddy et al 488) and in a CBS News national poll taken in October of 2001, 88% of respondents ” were somewhat or very concerned that there would be another attack on the U.S. in the next few months” (Huddy et al 494). These concerns combined with the passage of the Patriot Act renewed the debate on the delicate balance between civil liberties and national security. The majority opinion over the last several years has been that we, or some of us, should expect to give up some of our civil liberties to protect ourselves from terrorism. In his "Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism", Russell Hardin proposes the argument that very substantially hassling 50 people to find one terrorist is not likely to sound offensive to many citizens. We are entering a new era in which civil liberties will be stereotypical (81). On one hand, Hardin acknowledges that the detainment and interrogation of a few Arab-Americans would be a breach in civil liberties; however, it would lessen the inconvenience to the majority who would remain unaffected.
The problem with this is that not all who might be considered terrorists are Arab-American or Arab at all. John Walker Lindh, a man who was certainly not of Arabic descent, was an American citizen captured as an enemy combatant in Afghanistan in 2001 and had received training at military camps funded by Osama bin Laden. Relinquishing civil liberties and participating in racial profiling based on ethnic background when the terrorists who attacked us were from that ethnic background makes sense until one considers the case of John Walker Lindh. Under Hardin’s argument, a person with possible terrorist connections like Lindh or domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh (a veteran) and Michael Scarpetti (an environmental extremist) may escape detainment and interrogation on the basis of ethnic background alone. The general consensus for the restriction of civil liberties during wartimes has been thus, historically, the American public has expressed generic support for civil liberties principles while at the same time backing restrictions against a clearly identified or understood “other”—particularly a group that is reviled (Gould 75). In the case of terrorism, there is no clearly identified “other”. It can be any one of us and that is the full force of the Patriot Act.
Although the actual risk of an American or their immediate family becoming a victim of terrorist attack was decidedly low, the perceived threat of such a thing happening was quite high at the time and in the months following September 11th. The reason behind this heightened perception of threat is found within the effects of threat, itself, and why the compelling interest of government should be civil liberties. Threat “reduces the efficiency of memory processes and promotes both threat-related thought content and perceptual hypersensitivity to information concerning threat” (Huddy et al 486). For our legislators, these effects of perceived threat are compounded by the need of our citizens to have swift assurance of security. Huddy also notes that “threat accompanied by time pressure has been found to heighten group conformity pressures and to reduce consideration of policy alternatives” (Huddy et al 486). Although the Patriot Act was intended to correct the failings of our intelligence agencies and strengthen law enforcement, both the speed in which it was written and passed following the September 11th attacks and the effects of a heightened perceived threat of further imminent attack should make the legislation suspect of potential irrationality.
Our congress was constructed in such a way that would assure the deliberative process through debate, thereby making it difficult for bills to be made into law—let alone pass unanimously. For example, in 1999, 5,514 bills were introduced in Congress (not counting procedural and internal Congress housekeeping bills) with less than 300 becoming law (http://berkeley.house.gov). This makes for a 5% probability of any given bill becoming a law. Comparatively, the single nay vote in regards to the passing of the Patriot Act within the Senate with so little time spent on deliberation should be viewed as nothing short of extraordinary. Another influencing factor had to be at work for such a swift passing and it is here that we can recall Huddy’s statement in regards to the influences of perceived threat and its effect on elites in regards to policy deliberation.
The question that then logically follows is: In what ways do the effects of perceived threat directly influence our regard of civil liberties within legislation itself? In a study measuring people’s willingness to exchange civil liberties for the sake of national security, Darren Davis and Brian Silver found that “whatever their ideological position, people’s willingness to exchange liberties for securities increases as their perception of threat increases” (Davis and Silver 43). In short, even a liberal, who normally would support the protection of civil liberties, will allay that support if they believe that there is high risk of an attack. Applying this to the swift passage of the Patriot Act again points to the power of perceived threat of personal and national security transcending prior ideological differences. Conservative and liberal politician, alike, actively chose to pass legislation that threatened our civil liberties in the aim to assure greater national security.
Yet another troublesome feature of the enactment of legislation and executive orders made during periods of perceived threat to national security is the tendency for increased ethnocentrism and xenophobia (Huddy 486). An example of how ethnocentrism and xenophobia may influence the enforcement of legislation and executive orders would be the exclusion of people in military areas via Executive Order 9066 during World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December of 1941. Schildkraut writes that despite the ethnic neutrality of the order, Japanese residents and Japanese Americans were the only ones excluded from these military areas and subsequently interned –an estimated total of 120,000 people in all (512). The attack by the Japanese on U.S. soil created a heightened perception of threat within the United States, which resulted in executive actions that were quickly deemed unconstitutional after the feeling of perceived threat was removed. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote, “If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure” (1). These words were never truer than in the case of the internment of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Simply put into Madison’s terms, the majority’s common interest was national security for which many had little issue with forgoing the rights of a particular minority (Japanese and Japanese-Americans) to secure.
Although internments on the scale of World War II did not occur after September 11th, the effects of threat driven ethnocentrism and xenophobia still have had its influence. Seemingly ridiculous stories of racial profiling occurring in particular at U.S. airports against people with darker complexions abound. My own experience was being pulled aside for additional search by airport security and bemusedly watching my then 5 years old half Native American daughter’s shoes be singled out for testing for explosive powders. The question remains for me as to whether my dark complexioned daughter was a victim of racial profiling at the tender age of 5 or whether the actions of the airport security were based on random search. Racial profiling during wartimes, especially after a direct attack on U.S. soil, is a symptom of perceived threat and subject to fear based irrationality and potentially unconstitutional action.
If the role of fear in the form of perceived personal and national threat can so greatly influence our actions and viewpoints on civil liberties and minority groups, then it is essential that, during times of heightened perceived threat, our legislators should attempt to retain rationality in the formation of new laws. If civil liberties, especially for an “other”, are the most easily discarded when the perceived threat level is high, then it is the upmost importance that civil liberties should be the compelling interest of the government to assure that the actions of those legislators maintain both rationality and constitutionality. Hardin writes, “a sort of grain of truth—solely pragmatic—in the absolutist position on civil liberties is that we should probably give greater force to civil liberties than we might suppose just because it is easy to weaken them and very hard to strengthen them; and the moments when we think to weaken them are almost always going to be moments of crisis when the longer run interest in civil liberties gets over-shadowed by the urgency of the moment” (88).
One could argue that the impingement that our government has taken on our civil liberties since the September 11th attacks have been successful in preventing further terrorist attacks from happening. However, there is sufficient evidence that showed that the Central Intelligence Agency had information regarding the September 11th attacks prior to their occurrence and failed to act upon it (NY Times). The sheer atrocity of the events of September 11th, in itself, assures that any whispers of a potential terrorist threat to our country will be taken with much more gravity in the future. Actively choosing to make civil liberties the compelling interest of our government during times where our national security is threatened is still not without risk. In 2002, one of the Patriot Act’s most anti-civil liberties provisions that were noted at the time is the requirement that financial institutions “closely monitor daily financial transactions and share information with government intelligence services” (Gould 74). Such a provision would never be allowed if the protection of civil liberties was the compelling interest over national security. However, the tracking of particular types of financial transactions such as the purchase of large numbers of guns or items used to create an explosive device could feasibly prevent a terrorist attack from happening.
Today, we have become poignantly aware, through disclosures via Edward Snowden, that the data collection provisions that have promulgated under Section 215 of the Patriot Act are far more encompassing than what Gould noted in regards to financial transactions in 2002. Furthermore, revelations and questions of the constitutionality of "sneak and peek" warrant tactics as well as "stop and frisk" in our cities have further shown the erosion of our civil liberties in this post September 11th era. Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, formed in November of 2002, has accelerated the militarization of the domestic police force, which was already long occurring through the Department of Defense's 1033 program, by issuing out hundreds of millions of dollars in grants each year to police departments across the nation for the purpose of fighting terrorism. The end result of the Patriot Act and its ambiguity has been quite painfully clear as tanks have rolled out onto our city streets in manners which, frequently with hindsight, are reflected upon with questioning horror. In response to the Boston Marathon Bombing, the entire city was shut down in the hunt for a single 19 year old young man, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, as 19,000 National Guard troops rolled through the city's streets in armored vehicles (The Washington Post). Likewise, in Ferguson, Missouri, armored vehicles once again rolled out onto yet another city's streets in response to protests that were ironically against the police department, itself.
This is the definitive problem of the War on Terror and its primary legislation, the Patriot Act, that promotes the perceptions of an ambiguous threat that can arise from anywhere, at any time, and from any source. The chance that there will be another attack on U.S. soil is most likely inevitable but Rusell Hardin also makes a well grounded point in stating that the scale of annual harms from SUVs (sport utility vehicles) in the U.S. is reputedly greater than all terrorist actions together. I think we should do something about the dangers of SUVs and about possible future terrorism, but we should keep the actions in proportion to the dangers (79). The War on Terror that our country is in is a war without end. Terrorism will always be a threat to our way of life and that the United States will be a target of future attack is certain. It could happen today, tomorrow or 10 years from now. The question that remains is whether or not we will deprive ourselves of the civil liberties found within our U.S. Constitution for an indefinite length of time or if we will come to understand what our founders and soldiers have long understood in regards to liberty:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. --Benjamin Franklin
References
Official Website of Rep. Shirley Berkeley, FAQ’s http://berkley.house.gov/GovInfo/FAQ.html
CNN. The Case of the Taliban American. Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/people/shows/walker/profile.htm
Feingold, Senator Russell “On Opposing the U.S.A. Patriot Act”, retrieved from http://www.archipelago.org/vol6-2/feingold.htm
Franklin, Benjamin. Pennsylvania Assembly: Reply to the Governor, November 11, 1755.—The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard W. Labaree, vol. 6, p. 242 (1963).
Davis, Darren W. and Silver, Brian D. “Civil Liberties vs. Security: Public Opinion in the Context of the Terrorist Attacks on America” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Jan 2004), pp. 28-46.
Gould, Jon B. “Playing with Fire: The Civil Liberties Implications of September 11th” Public Administration Review, Vol. 62, Special Issue: Democratic Governance in the Aftermath of September 11, 2001 (Sep. 2002), pp. 74-79.
Balko, Radley "Was the police response to the Boston Bombing really appropriate?" The Washington Post (April 22, 2014) Retrieved from: The Washington Post
Hardin, Russell “Civil Liberties in the Era of Mass Terrorism” The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 8,
No. 1, Terrorism (2004), pp. 77-95, retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/25115782
Huddy, Leonie et al. “The Consequences of Terrorism: Disentangling the Effects of Personal and National Threat” Political Psychology, Vol. 28, No. 3 Special Issue: 9/11 and Its Aftermath: Perspectives from Political Psychology (Sept. 2002) pp. 485-509.
Madison, James. Federalist No. 51, Independent Journal (Feb. 1788). Retrieved from:
http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm
Mazetti, Mark. “C.I.A. Lays Out Errors It Made Before Sept. 11” New York Times (August 22, 2007). Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/washington/22cia.html
Schildkraut, Deborah J. “The More Things Change… American Identity and Mass and Elite Responses to 9/11” Political Psychology, Vol. 23, No. 3, Special Issue: 9/11 and Its Aftermath: Perspectives from Political Psychology (Sept. 2002), pp. 511-535.
