By ALAN DERSHOWITZ
This useful compendium of protest writing against the Bush administration’s heavy-handed domestic response to September 11th is a mixed bag of thoughtful, balanced criticism by genuine civil libertarians, interspersed with some knee-jerk nonsense from radical leftists who would themselves deny civil liberties to anyone who disagrees with them. Dangerous times make for some strange bedfellows. We read Republican Congressman Bob Barr — recently defeated for reelection — praising the ACLU, and then Congressman Barney Frank calling Barr “a bit of a faker” for voting in favor of the Patriot Act, after criticizing several of its provisions.
The best pieces, not surprisingly, are by professional civil libertarians, like ACLU President Nadine Strassen, who have been through similar, though less serious, crises over their long careers. The worst pieces are by America- hating and Israel-bashing radicals such as the entertainer Ani DiFranco, who toasts the “folks who live in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq,” calls America “not a true democracy” and seems to imply that our government knew of September 11th before it happened.
The book is bloated by its constant repetition: We read the early history of suspension of civil liberties — Adams, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt — over and over again, as if copied from the same history book. For example, the radical historian Howard Zinn’s “primer” essentially repeats what the ACLU’s Ira Glasser wrote in the previous article, but can anyone imagine a book of protests without Zinn? In one respect, the entire book is a lengthy “petition,” with the “names” of its contributors taking precedence over the content. And the names are indeed impressive, with one striking exception: Janna Malamud Smith – whose article on “The Million Babe Bare-Breasted” [CK] march on the Justice Department certainly qualifies as the silliest piece of writing — surely must know she made it onto the list of contributors on the strength of her father being Bernard Malamud, which she goes out of the way to tell us in her byline! (By the way, my father was Harry Dershowitz, former president of our local schul.)
This book, like any good petition, is heavier on rhetoric than on subtleties and some of the rhetoric is entirely predictable, considering its source. The former Chicago 7 defendant and California politician Tom Hayden lectures us for failing to understand the “root causes” of terrorism and for accepting the conservative theology that terrorists are evil. One does not have to be a conservative to recognize that the primary “root cause” of terrorism is its success, not poverty or desperation, since these conditions are rarely accompanied by the targeting of innocent babies. Desperate people may be easiest to recruit as human bombs, but the people who send them — such as Osama bin Laden and Yasser Arafat — are often wealthy elitists with many options who have opted for the tactic of terrorism because it works. As I demonstrate in my book “Why Terrorism Works,” the use of international terrorism by the Palestinians leap-frogged the Palestinian cause over others. Any tactic that is rewarded by the international community will become a recurring one. Nor do you need to be a theologian to characterize terrorism as an unqualified evil. Those who remember Nazism understand that evil must sometimes be defeated, rather than appeased. The “root causes” of Nazism were monumentally irrelevant to our need to defeat Hitler. Although suicide bombers themselves may not be deterrable, as GET ID FROM BOOK David Silver argues, those who send them out to murder, most certainly can be — but only if we are resolute in never allowing the cause for which the terrorism is being employed to be furthered by the tactic of terrorism.
Then there are those who believe that the war against terrorism can be fought effectively without even considering changes in our civil liberties. The reality is that liberties are expensive. We always give up some security in exchange for our liberty. Whenever a guilty defendant goes free because his 4th Amendment rights against unreasonable searches were violated, we give up some security. Whenever a racist or antisemitic march is permitted under the First Amendment, we give up some security. The same is true when we refuse to authorize telemetric standard ID cards that could help prevent terrorists from using identity theft to evade security. Rights come not from heaven or nature and they are not unalienable [CK], as the history cited in “It’s a Free Country” establishes. They come from experience, especially our experience with past wrongs. The real question, and one I try to address in Why Terrorism Works, is how to think about making the necessary trade- offs between liberty and security — how to maximize security without losing the feel of freedom, or its reality.
Despite its repetitive and uneven quality, “It’s a Free Country” serves a useful purpose. It reminds us both of the dangers we face from governmental over-reaction to September 11th, and to the reality that — as Princeton Professor Cornel West aptly put it — “the spirit of freedom is still alive in the face of panic-driven government policy.” It also reminds us that we, as a people, do learn from the disastrous lessons of our past. As this book’s co-author Danny Goldberg correctly summarizes the situation: “The government reaction has been nowhere near as bad as the Palmer Raids, the Japanese interment or blacklisting/McCarthyism.” But that may be small solace for those who have been victims of unexplained detentions, unexplained deportations and racial profiling, as documented by some of the “personal testimony” that close out this volume.
“It’s a Free Country” is best read selectively because of its unevenness, but there are enough worthwhile contributions to warrant its perusal.