[wordup] Give me liberty, or give me . . . what? Security?

[Adam Shand]

From: 
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/04/21/IN83832.DTL

The New War on Freedom : Give me liberty, or give me . . . what? Security?
Gore Vidal 
Sunday, April 21, 2002 

Last week marked the anniversaries of three landmark events that paved the 
way for the further erosion of our personal freedoms we face today. Nine 
years ago, the FBI ended a stand-off that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco 
and Firearms had begun 51 days earlier, resulting in the deaths of 82 
Branch Davidians, including 30 women and 25 children -- guilty only of 
being members of a religious commune. Seven years ago last week, on the 
second anniversary of the killings at Waco, 168 men, women, and children 
were killed in Oklahoma City when the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building was 
bombed -- many believed in protest of those horrific events for which no 
federal employee had ever been held accountable. Timothy McVeigh, convicted 
and executed for the bombing, made no comment during his trial until his 
sentencing, when he quoted Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis: "Our 
government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it 
teaches the whole people by its example." 

Six years ago last week, in response to the Oklahoma City bombing (which, if 
indeed perpetrated by a lone nut armed only with a rental van and 
fertilizer, begs the question of why sweeping new legislation was 
necessary), Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty 
Act, "antiterrorism" legislation which not only gives the attorney general 
the power to use the armed services against the civilian population, neatly 
nullifying the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 (which prohibited the use of 
federal troops for civilian law enforcement), but also selectively suspends 
habeas corpus, the heart of Anglo-American liberty. As he signed it into 
law, Clinton attacked critics of the bill as "unpatriotic": "There is 
nothing patriotic about pretending that you can love your country but 
despise your government." This is breathtaking since it includes, at one 
time or another, most of us. Put another way, was a German in 1939 who said 
that he detested the Nazi dictatorship unpatriotic? 

Thus began the latest chapter in the death struggle between the American 
republic, whose plainly ineffective defender I am, and the American Global 
Empire, our old republic's enemy. Since V-J Day 1945 ("Victory over Japan" 
and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the historian 
Charles A. 

Beard called "perpetual war for perpetual peace." I have occasionally 
referred to our "enemy of the month club": Each month we are confronted by 
a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. The 
Federation of American Scientists has catalogued nearly 200 such military 
incursions since 1945 initiated by the United States. 

According to the Koran, it was on a Tuesday that Allah created darkness. 
Last Sept. 11, when suicide pilots were crashing commercial airliners into 
crowded American buildings, I did not have to look to the calendar to see 
what day it was: Dark Tuesday was casting its long shadow across Manhattan 
and along the Potomac River. I was also not surprised that despite the 
seven or so trillion dollars that we have spent since 1950 on what is 
euphemistically called "Defense," there would have been no advance warning 
from the FBI or CIA or Defense Intelligence Agency. While the Bushites have 
been eagerly preparing for the last war but two -- missiles from North 
Korea, clearly marked with flags, would rain down on Portland, Ore., only 
to be intercepted by our missile-shield balloons -- the foxy Osama bin 
Laden knew that all he needed for his holy war on the infidel were fliers 
willing to kill themselves along with those random passengers who happened 
to be aboard hijacked jetliners. 

The awesome physical damage Osama and company did to us on Dark Tuesday is 
as nothing compared to the knockout blow to our vanishing liberties: The 
Anti- Terrorist Act of 1996 and the recent USA PATRIOT Act (still being 
written after it was passed, and thus unread by the Congress which passed 
it), which among other things grants additional special powers to wiretap 
without judicial order and to deport lawful permanent residents, visitors 
and undocumented immigrants without due process. Even before signing the 
Anti- Terrorist Act, President Clinton revealed his disregard for the Bill 
of Rights: 

"We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary 
Americans." A year later: "A lot of people say there's too much personal 
freedom. When personal freedom's being abused, you have to move to limit 
it." 

According to a November 1995 CNN-Time poll, 55 percent of the people 
believed that "the federal government has become so powerful that it poses 
a threat to the rights of ordinary citizens." Three days after Dark 
Tuesday, 74 percent said they thought, "It would be necessary for Americans 
to give up some of their personal freedoms." Eighty-six percent favored 
guards and metal detectors at public buildings and events. 

Bush himself, in an address to a joint session of Congress, offered up his 
interpretation of Osama bin Laden and disciples' motives: "They hate what 
they see right here in this chamber." I suspect a million Americans nodded 
sadly in front of their TV sets. "Their leaders are self-appointed. They 
hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our 
freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other." If this is 
indeed the terrorists' motivation, they are succeeding beyond even their 
dreams, as each day, with each extension of "emergency powers," our Bill of 
Rights is shredded more and more. Once alienated, an "unalienable right" is 
apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the 
last best hope of Earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens 
are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is 
universally imitated. 
----
Gore Vidal's new book is "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to 
Be So Hated" (Thunder's Mouth Press), from which this article is adapted. 
He spoke in San Francisco on Thursday at a program sponsored by The 
Independent Institute (on the Web: www.independent.org