What balance?
Most debates about the issue of civil liberties and the war on terror assume that there is something to “balance.” There is an assumed trade off that if you keep to all the picky little rules of protecting people’s rights that this will allow terrorists to get away free.
I have my doubts about this.
Most of the Bush administration semi-legal actions (detaining large numbers of immigrants on weak charges, sweeping up people from the battlefield, widespread spying on Americans, etc.) have, if you notice carefully, produced almost no terrorists to convict or kill. Aside from the sad comedy playing out around Moussaoui, can you recall a single major terrorist trial since 9/11? I can’t. Lots of minor cases about “sympathizing” or “supporting” terror – by talking to people we don’t like or making ill-advised trips to suspicious training camps, but no one who actually planned a significant terrorist action or led a terror group. Many people who overstayed a visa, but not very many who built bombs.
The Bush administration also claims to have stopped terror plots before they could come to fruition, but none of these have produced any arrests, and I’m sure the Bush gang would have trumpeted them if they had them.
So what have we gotten for this wholesale assault on liberty? What have we gotten in exchange for a president who says he has unilateral power to suspend the enforcement of the law, the power to make people disappear, the power to serve secret warrants, the power to tell the courts what they can and cannot do?
What are we “balancing”? Pretty much nothing, I think.