NEW YORK, Oct. 24, 2011 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- In the days following the terror of 9/11, domestic security issues rose to the top of our national agenda. The mental state of emergency surrounding our antiterrorism policies has continued into the Obama administration, and so many hastily adopted measures have survived and escaped serious examination. But the Act demands too many tradeoffs of our own citizens, says American Civil Liberties Union President Susan Herman in her new book TAKING LIBERTIES: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy (Oxford University Press).
The most prominent of these actions was the passage of the Patriot Act, which reaches its tenth anniversary this Wednesday, October 26.
Herman does not deny that strong security measures are needed in this new age, but argues that any restrictions and requirements should be shown to be effective, and not too costly (in terms of our rights, our lives, and our democracy), and not actually counterproductive. Unfortunately, parts of the Patriot Act do not live up to that test. "Americans have been asked to give up their freedoms, to tolerate unwarranted surveillance and other paternalistic measures, in the name of national security," said Herman. "But the Patriot Act has not been shown to yield the type of benefits we would expect to see in exchange for sacrificing these rights."
In her book, Herman shows how the Patriot Act and companion measures have affected millions of ordinary Americans from all walks of life, many of whom have not been aware of its impact. For example, hundreds of thousands of National Security Letter requests have been served on telecommunications providers and other custodians of our records, demanding information about a wide variety of people and ordering the recipients never to tell anyone anything about their experience of receiving the order. In other cases, American citizens have been stranded abroad because their names were wrongly put on No Fly lists even though they were not guilty of anything. And a college student was even detained and interrogated for five hours solely because he possessed Arabic-English flash cards he was using to study vocabulary for a language course.
Herman argues that the costs of our antiterrorism measures, in terms of individual liberty and privacy, in terms of our rights, and even in terms of our democracy, are far greater than most Americans realize. "Because of the secrecy surrounding antiterrorism efforts, the public often lacks information or a human story that would illustrate the impact of surveillance and other measures," she says. And this is not something that has abated under the Obama Administration, as many seem to think. "The Bush Administration may have received more criticism for its domestic antiterrorism strategies," Herman said, "but little has changed under President Obama. And his administration uses the same defenses the Bush Administration was using in litigation, like the state secrets privilege, claims of immunity, and so on."
Perhaps most disturbing is that it's unclear whether we have benefitted as a nation by adopting the dragnets of the Patriot Act. "A decade after 9/11, there is still little basis for believing that some hastily created "emergency" measures are worthwhile, and increasing reason to believe that some measures may well be counterproductive," Herman said. "A government campaign against American-Muslim charities, for example, caused many law-abiding Muslims to fear the FBI and undermined prospects for cooperation…. It's time for us to question the illogical assumption that because we have not suffered another major attack, every emergency measure that ever found its way into law should be retained."
Angela Hayes
212-705-4221
ahayes@goldbergmcduffie.com
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