Despite the very real threat, little has been done to safeguard
our ports, borders, chemical and nuclear power plants, or cargo in
planes
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.
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.
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 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 whether we are safer today. The war in Iraq has transformed a terror-neutral Middle Eastern country into, arguably, 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.
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.
