Security, Liberty, and the Rule of Law
The Times reported yesterday that Europeans are putting new restrictions on civil liberties to combat terror. The president's supporters are sure to greet this as yet more evidence of European hypocrisy for criticizing America's secret prisons and extraordinary renditions as well as more reason to justify the many efforts to curtail our freedom at home.
There's just one difference, which The Times failed to point out: While in Europe the new restrictions on civil liberties are openly legislated by elected parliaments and assemblies, here the most drastic changes — from setting up military tribunals and holding people without charge for years to extraordinary renditions and warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States — have been the result of executive fiat.
In one case we see the rule of law; in the other the rule of potentates.
Restrictions on civil liberties are always sold as needed to fight external threats. At times it was anarchists, socialists, communists, jihadists, or whoever the bogeyman of the era was. The truth of the matter is that outside forces are never a significant threat (except in the case of deliberate, foreign, covert operations like the CIA bringing in the Shah in Iran).
Using the foreign theat as the excuse, domestic civil liberties are curtailed, and the focus quickly shifts to crackdowns on legitimate domestic opposition to the existing regime. Notice that the London subway bombers were a local product and not related to any foreign group except in terms of their world view.
The other lesson to be learned from incidents like the London bombing (and Oklahoma City, for that matter) is that individual actors who are not part of an organized group are almost impossible to find before they act. The only case that I can think of is the accidental discovery of the person trying to enter the US from Canada with a trunk full of explosives. Notice that he was caught by chance.
So what happens is that a secret police system is set up which starts to monitor and then arrest those who the regime feels may become a threat to their continuing in power. Dissenters are easy to track, because their objective is to make their dissent public so that they can influence opinion. We have already see this happening (again) in the US. Reports of spying on Quakers, PETA, the ACLU, etc. have started to surface.
I've written an (historical) essay on the dangers of a secret police and its actual ineffectiveness.
Surveillance and Civil Liberties
--- Policies not Politics
Daily Landscape
April 18, 2006 7:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Seems to me that the "one difference" won't make a lick of difference to the president's supporters. Elections, they would say (even stolen ones), have consequences. I know that when I try to talk about such matters with my Republican family members, the only parts of the Constitution they really seem clear on is their admiration for the Second Amendment and their disdain for the First Amendment. The rest of it is a buncha hogwash designed to let heathens run amok and allow the evil government take their money. Due process? "If you don't do anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about."
So the rule of law is really irrelevant to these people. They picked their man, and his actions aren't really a problem for them. If the rest of us don't like it, we love the terrorists, hate American, and should just go live in [Cuba/France/San Francisco].
April 18, 2006 8:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
I agree with both the post about misunderstanding the news and the comment about its not being a good thing anyhow. But also, I was struck in the article by how limited the restrictions were compared to ours, for a period of a couple of months, nothing like our history of suspensions of habeus corpus, much less Bush's policy of indefinite detainment and torture without recourse and all in silence. Those wimps in Old Europe just don't know to get tough, apparently, after all, thank goodness.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
April 18, 2006 8:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
thank you. i am so busy right now all i have time for, in that area, is to check this site.
it makes me feel better to know that you know.
April 18, 2006 8:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm sorry, but this is, at least in the case of France, more than a bit disingenuous. Surely Ivo is aware that France's leading anti-terror judge, M. Bruguiere, is effectively a law unto himself, with sweeping powers to order wiretaps, detain suspects for months or years without anything like habeas corpus, and powers of interrogation and sentencing that far exceed anything seen in the anglo-saxon world. This will shock good upstanding Bush-haters, but the simple fact of the matter is that when it comes to defending the integrity of the French state, the patrie and the patrimoine from violent threats, the French are far more ruthless than we are or are prepared to be.
April 18, 2006 9:21 PM | Reply | Permalink