View from a Farley The Current Events and Opinion Weblog of Chris Farley

Terrorism

As yet another report surfaced of former Vice President Cheney’s complicity in legally questionable, morally deplorable, and blatantly dishonest conduct to “fight terrorism,” I was struck by a few things. Terrorism, despite immediate appearances, almost always fails in the end. The only possible way for terrorism to succeed is with help — help from unwitting accomplices like Vice President Cheney.

It is first helpful to understand the purpose of terrorism. In the case of Islamic extremists, they seem to take issue with our acceptance of more than one belief system. For them, it is painful that an Islamic world could relatively peacefully coexist with Jewish, Christian, and atheist ones. I don’t think they would be too happy about our freedom of speech, nor our republican government. That is exactly why terrorism is not about killing people. It is my understanding that killing people is a desirable byproduct for terrorists because terrorists know that it’s not possible to kill every person with conflicting values. It is much easier to kill the values.

The best example of this is 9/11. In the post 9/11 frenzy and fear, incredibly intelligent individuals were driven to do irrational things, like warrantless domestic surveillance. By creating fear, terrorism accomplishes one half of its purpose — to cause terror. The second half of its purpose is for the extraordinary terror to cause our value system to collapse. It’s at this point that it’s possible to stop terrorism, by not playing the same game. It is possible to protect against a terrorist threat without compromising principles like privacy, abandoning agreements like the Geneva Convention, or violating rights like habeas corpus.

No one willingly aids a terrorist, but they certainly can do so accidentally. Vice President Dick Cheney, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, Deputy Attorney General John Yoo, and many other members of the Bush administration were the greatest accomplices to modern terrorism, but the damage they did was in their idiotic and poorly considered zealousness to defend the United States from terrorists. They managed to convince themselves that the world was split into good people and terrorists, so warantless domestic spying, torture, and indefinite detention — all very illegal — were justifiable. So much for privacy, the Geneva Convention, and habeas corpus. If the goal of terrorism is to end our values, and in order to stop terrorism we erode our values, then we have betrayed ourselves.

This all hinges on the ability to fight terrorism without resorting to the extreme methods preferred by the Bush Administration. It would not be unreasonable to rationalized the Bush Administration’s methods by arguing that while the methods are undesirable, it is worth it in the context of loss of life. Unfortunately, the efficacy of the Bush Administration’s policies is uncertain at best, and criminally unjustifiable at the worst. The CIA’s inspector general reported that warrantless wiretapping yielded “limited results.” Torture is also of questionable usefulness, and indefinite detention is just stupid because if there is no reason to hold people that wouldn’t stand up before a judge, then there doesn’t seem to be much of a justification to hold them.

The key to fighting terrorism is exercising all possible measures within existing laws, and creating reasonable new laws to fight new threats. If domestic wiretapping is necessary, then it should be done with warrants and with congressional oversight. If interrogations need to be done, then they should be done legally and without coercion. Secrecy will inevitably be necessary in some circumstances, but never from our own Congress. There is a judicial system for warrants, and there is a Congress for oversight. Any law that ignores those two things for any reason has gone too far astray.

New crimes call for new laws, not new legal systems. We need to adhere to the values upon which our country was founded, or we have truly let the terrorists win. Fear causes a knee-jerk reaction, but that reaction isn’t necessarily a prudent one. The Bush Administration set us on an imprudent course — one that completely ignores two hundred years of Constitutional law and American values. I would much rather be confident that the American people are safe today because of measures conducted in accordance with American principles than through questionable methods that play into terrorist plans. We are now over nine years on from 9/11; it’s time to move from fear-based policies to thought-based ones.