Fierce debates rage in England about new proposals to curb terrorism. The same debates will reoccur in America. (Israelis watch all this with a grim and weary smile.)
The underlying argument concerns how far a civilized country can go in its containment of terrorists without fatally damaging the nation’s cherished civil liberties.
Some of England’s anti-terrorism practices are already under attack by civil libertarians — for example, a system of surveillance by street cameras so extensive, it is said, that almost every ordinary Londoner will be photographed at least once, like it or not. But Prime Minister Tony Blair now has some brand new proposals, such as the automatic deportation of any foreigner who habitually visits militant Muslim Web sites, and the ability of police to hold suspects for weeks without filing charges. The public justification of terrorism would also become a criminal offense.
Adopting such proposals for the United States would today cause angry protests. But it was not always thus. Television recently served up an old World War II film, “Sahara,” in which an American sergeant, played by Humphrey Bogart, brutally tortures a Nazi army officer who is on the verge of a painful death by unquenched thirst. The sergeant refuses to give any water to the captured Nazi prisoner, unless he divulges certain information vital to the Allied cause. The American taunts his desperate prisoner by pouring precious water on the sand.
The point is that American audiences accepted the sergeant’s behavior without question. We were at war with a ruthless Nazi enemy — and when the film was released in 1943, it was not yet clear that we could win. The film’s writer caught the national mood exactly, a mood that had been displayed by our nonfictional government a couple of years earlier. At that time, all Japanese on the West Coast, including many American citizens, were uprooted and sent to detention camps for the duration. There were a few muted murmurs of protest from the American public — but only a few.
We already know what would happen today if an American soldier — fictional or real — were portrayed or actually caught torturing a prisoner in that way. He or she would certainly not be treated as a hero, like Bogart’s character. And if our government attempted to remove all Muslim Arabs from the metropolitan areas to detention camps, there would be a furor from the public and from the media, which decades ago was silent in the face of the inexcusable, wholesale Japanese American imprisonment.
What is the difference between now and then? If we consider this less of a war, the terrorists less of a danger than the Nazis, then we are in serious denial. But insofar as Americans have become more humanized, more sensitive to the sanctity of our liberties, the difference between then and now is a bright sign of progress. The dilemma is this: In order to protect ourselves and our cherished civil liberties against the 12th century mindset and 21st century technology of terrorists, we may well have to ourselves adopt some of Blair’s new proposals.
In that case, how do we prevent those liberties from nnn from 16a
disappearing forever down that famous slippery slope?
Wait a minute! Let’s look at that history again. A half-century ago, we permitted ourselves to demolish some boundaries set by our Constitution and our sense of personal liberty. But we have been able to climb back up that slippery slope. The government has officially apologized for its behavior then, and our liberties are stronger than they ever were.
As the great Judge Learned Hand once put it, “Liberty lives in the hearts of men and women, when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can save it.” We will probably have to stunt some of our liberties in order to deal with the secret and irrational ways of the terrorists. But, up to a point, the American public will accept that for the sake of liberty, and when the terrorists have been extirpated, the public will demand that we return to even higher standards.
The most popular flag flown in the days just before the American Revolution and before the Constitution, carried the words, “Don’t tread on me!” As the terrorists and those skeptical of the American public will both discover, that flag still flies.
Earl Raab is executive director emeritus of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Relations Council. He is director emeritus of Brandeis University’s Nathan Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy.