The Price of Liberty May be Your Liberty

                                            By: Carol Chehade
“It [the responsibility of citizenship in the United States] expects all Americans to be alert guardians of our ideals, and eternally vigilant against those subversive elements that seek to undermine, tear down and destroy our form government. It expects us to watch for those undercover groups and individuals who would deny to their fellow citizens the privileges of freedom, justice and equality on which democracy was founded. It expects us to keep our country and land where men and women may live free from fear and terror…” (Attorney General Tom C. Clark, May 18, 1947)

Our rights are rarely hijacked overnight. Instead, they are taken at a slow, seductive pace and before you know it you are giving them up without even being asked. The Patriot Act has been shaped into one of the most powerful systematic surveillance powers in the world. The Act was sold to us under the pitch of promised protection. Yet, our domestic landscape is still ill prepared against another terrorist attack. Even on the grounds where 9-11 occurred, subway systems in New York are no more protected than they were before 9-11. The money that should have been used to protect us has been misused through the creation of a renegade law matrix operating outside the formal law. It survives by playing up our fears and hatreds, with protection coming at the expense of taking rights from the people. In other words, we may become what we fear- a people with no rights, no liberties and no voice. At the rate we are heading, martial law is looming in the shadows waging its onslaught on civil law or, worse yet, constitutional law. Undoubtedly, in the climate we exist in, we need safeguards. The argument is not against the Act. The argument is about monitoring those who have drafted the Act to make sure they are not diverting us from our democratic principles.

 A document so great in scope will impact us locally, and if we do not recognize its power we will turn into slaves who happily believe our masters’ decisions as true and final authority. This may be something that we in the mid-west feel will not hurt us, but think again. Imagine legalized racial profiling; imagine intelligence agencies working incestuously with local law enforcement; imagine our Federal government further discounting the checks and balances system our forefathers placed; imagine authorities gathering data about you that is not even related to what they are charging you for, imagine curfews; imagine lack of due process; imagine “sneak and peak” searches that allow unknown and unauthorized investigations into our telecommunications devices, e-mails, computers, financial records, library records, book purchases, credit checks, and even personal purchases; imagine being called unpatriotic every time you use your right to free speech to express disagreements with your elected officials. This isn’t the “Imagine” that John Lennon sang about. This is the record’s flip-side and it is being played as we read.

On this record’s flip side, the abuses of the Act are most seen and felt when martial law seeks out partnerships that allow them to work with local police on an even greater scale, which will be excused as patriotic sacrifices. Thus, playing with the boundaries that regulate the relationship between the police and citizens.

From the War on Communism to the War on Drugs, administrations have long used fear to manipulate us into benefiting the privileged few. The Patriot Act has brilliantly linked its policing efforts through establishing a medium that joins all forms of intelligence agencies down to civil police. This blurs civilian laws with laws expressly created for wars.  Because we do not know our rights, they are taken away that much easier through legislation. There are some things that fall under protection, but abuses of rights are in direct conflict with protecting citizens. 

The rules that dictate how we operate in a terrorist climate must not leak and poison how we operate on a local level. In other words, we will crumble as a nation if we fall into the pit of allowing martial law to become the new order of our communities. This very real potential was forecasted in 1878 under the Posse Comitatus Act. This particular Act was created so that in the era of war, the military branch does not infiltrate and change the basis of local law enforcement. The extreme manifestation of martial law means that the military branch can decide which domestic laws are considered broken and have the power to carry out punishment outside the paradigm of civil law. This can be accomplished by promoting both founded and unfounded fears of terrorism.

 The Patriot Act was enacted so quickly because we needed a heavy-duty security blanket after 9-11. We didn’t have time to debate it because we were in a state of emergency. Logically we wanted protection and the Act provided that secure blanket. When security is stable, many of the laws passed in times of turmoil would have been more thoroughly debated and examined. We are now past the infancy stage and it is time to question the particulars of the Act. Meaning: we haven’t caught Bin Laden in Iraq yet, so we have a better opportunity to examine the impact this vast Act has on the citizens of America. Homeland Security has failed in cultivating a long –term plan that educates security personnel and protects the people without paying the price of stealing rights. 

This blurring of martial and civil rights is presented in a friendly manner that makes us feel as if it is all beneficial. When we hear former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, tell reporters, “I'm confident that if we can work through governors down through mayors and local governments, we will get stronger and more secure every single day in the future as we have every single day since 9/11," we don’t think about what steps are taken to have that tremendous flow of power in place. As there are casualties of war, there are also casualties that come from obtaining security. As citizens, we must be aware that the balance of power between martial and civil law does not make us one of those tragic causalities.

We should not be blackmailed in exchange for protection for which we are entitled to receive. In other words, we pay through our citizenship the right to be protected. We should not pay through our silence and fears of speaking out for the risk of being called unpatriotic.

The same government that protects its own citizens can also be the same entity that possesses the greatest threat to its own citizens. We must maintain domestic order while at the same time protecting ourselves from the threat of all types of terrorism. The relationship between international security and domestic liberty is an on-going balancing act. If the balance tilts too far to the national security side, it inevitably crushes the benefits of our domestic liberties. Individual rights should not be sacrificed for federal rights and vice versa.

The war on terrorism will be here for a while. This isn’t a war against any one immobile nation. Rather, it is a war against a mobile force known as terrorism. Will we become devoured and become the very thing we are fighting? Or will we hold strong to the principles of freedom? We need to improve the steps toward national protection by enhancing what we proclaim as being unique to America- democracy. We cannot allow terrorism to do what slavery did in the Old South and that is exposes our hypocrisies.

We must be sure that the money spent on fighting terrorism is actually being spent on just that and not following paranoid leads that implicate the wrong person or organization. We cannot allow racial profiling to be legalized. Our continued ignorance of the power of the Act will place us in the same type of internment camps that the Japanese-Americans were quarantined in during World War II. . Allowing abuse of power anywhere will hurt all citizens. Abusers of power are hunters also of those who take on a different color, ethnicity or religion than those we stereotypically associate as threats to our security. Ignorance of the Act endangers all Americans in the long run because it solidifies unjust practices and makes them the rule. This only make it easier to set precedent for anyone who doesn’t look Arab or Muslim, but someone who simply doesn’t agree with national policy, to be locked away for disagreeing. Once the threat of terrorism is over, we will have to deal with another set of issues. We must step up and join cities like Chicago who are already organizing and speaking up against the negative consequences of the Act.

True democracy is not proven to be successful in times of prosperity. True democracy‘s power is proven in times of turmoil. If we fall back into the same tyranny that we are supposedly fighting, then how can we promote democracy when our nation’s leaders are only perpetuating more tyranny? There is an old Latin phrase we must eventually answer which translates into, “Who guards the guardians?”