The cost of absolute safety from terrorism is too high.
With the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 still fresh and the mid-term Congressional elections seven short weeks away, it’s an appropriate time to evaluate our post-9/11 world. Is President Bush’s claim that Americans are “safer but not yet safe” an accurate assessment?
Bush’s assessment assumes that we can be totally safe – a goal that cannot be achieved and should not be sought.
Every time any one of us slides into a car, taxi, or bus, we assume risks. We know that accidents happen but we accept the risk of injury or death in trade for the speed, convenience and freedom of motorized travel. The cost of absolutely safe motorized travel is too high in terms of speed, convenience and freedom.
Similarly, the cost to attain absolute safety from terrorism is too high. To achieve it – or more precisely, to achieve the illusion of it – we must trade our civil liberties, the rule of law, and the balance of power between the branches of our government; these essential values that make us Americans are priceless and ought not to be traded for anything, most especially an illusion.
The current debate over the treatment of terror suspects is a prime example. As many – including several men with combat military experience in Bush’s own party – have noted, we lose our moral authority in the war on terrorism and put Americans at higher risk when we try to duck the rules of Geneva Convention, try to create wiggle room to justify torture and deny access to a system of justice to our enemies.
Yet the secret overseas prisons that Bush recently acknowledged exist and foreign detainees held for years at Guantanamo Bay without access to a justice system demonstrate how much we’ve compromised our principles, our very Americanness, already.
Consider warrantless wiretapping and the Patriot Act, to name just two post-9/11 civil liberty issues that directly affect American citizens, and it’s fair to ask if the compromises Bush has made in pursuit of absolute safety are worth the price.
It is also fair to question Bush’s claim that we are safer today. Four years after 9/11, the federal government miserably flunked the test of disaster preparedness called Hurricane Katrina. The war in Iraq, poorly planned and disastrously executed, has transformed a terror-neutral Middle Eastern country into a leading recruiting site for terrorists.
Despite massive new bureaucracies and billions spent in the pursuit of homeland security, we have made disturbingly little progress in safeguarding our ports, borders, chemical and nuclear plants or the cargo that rides in the bellies of passenger planes.
We’re all for making Americans safer from terrorism, but five years after Sept. 11, so little real progress has been made on these fronts – areas in which no compromise in our essential American values needs to be made to improve safety – that we can find little comfort in Bush’s “safer” assessment.
Safer? It’s a dubious claim at best.
Safe? It’s an unwise and unattainable goal, and we ought to treat our civil liberties as much more precious than the illusory goal of absolute safety.
We hope that Americans will send that clear and unmistakable message to their leaders with their votes on Nov. 7.
