COMMENT & ANALYSIS ASSAULT ON AMERICA: Paying for security with liberty: Michael Ignatieff argues that vulnerability often tempts strong nations to take self-destructive measures and and actions that lead to injustice
By Michael Ignatieff

(Financial Times, Sep 13, 2001)

As America awakens to the reality of being at war - and permanently so - with an enemy that has as yet no face and no name, it must ask itself what balance it should keep between liberty and security in the battle with terrorism. The words of Benjamin Franklin, one of its founding fathers, are worth bearing in mind. In 1759, he wrote: "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

These are wise words - and they are much cited today as America comes to terms with its awful vulnerability - but they are easily brushed aside in the rush to judgment and vengeance. Vulnerability often tempts strong nations to take self-destructive measures. There are two dangers: first an inadequately prepared and indiscriminate attack on foreign targets suspected of harbouring terrorist suspects; second, indiscriminate arrests or detention of suspects at home suspected of association with the crimes.

As to the first, President George W.Bush's warning that America will pursue the terrorists and those states that harbour or give assistance to these groups leads one to expect strong retaliatory action against suspect states such as Afghanistan. This forgets that ill-planned and indiscriminate attacks by the Clinton administration in Sudan and Afghanistan, far from sending the terrorists a message, won them friends in the Arab world while encouraging the terrorists to believe in their own invulnerability. The most effective responses may not be the instant vengeance of a cruise missile but concerted international police work that leads to arrest, extradition, trials and imprisonment of the perpetrators.

Likewise, as every headline in America screams War! it is worth remembering that when democracies declare war, liberties at home frequently suffer. Today the analogy with another day of infamy - the attack on Pearl Harbor - is on everyone's lips but today's Japanese Americans cannot forget that Pearl Harbor brought with it the shame and injustice of mass internment. The incarceration of loyal American citizens, on the orders of a president whom most Americans remember as a giant, is just the most obvious example of the follies to which rage, fear and vulnerability can drive a great democracy.

This is not the only example. After anarchists set off bombs in eight American cities in 1919, the Palmer raids that followed - the arrest, detention and deportation of more than 5,000 people - prepared the climate of opinion that led to an infamous miscarriage of justice: the arrest and execution of two Italian immigrants, Sacco and Vanzetti, now posthumously exonerated of all charges.

Other democratic states, faced with terrorism, have sacrificed liberty for the sake of order and come to regret it. In 1970, an extremist group in Quebec kidnapped and murdered a prominent politician. In response, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau ordered the arrest and detention, without trial, of more than 500 Canadian citizens. Trudeau, like Roosevelt, is now judged to have been a great leader; yet most Canadians now see his action in 1970 as excessive and feel that far from reducing support for Quebec separatism, it increased it.

Britain also had to learn that the only effective weapons against terrorism are precision tools, not blanket suspensions of civil liberties. The UK experimented with detention without trial in the early phases of its response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, only to discover that internment, far from stamping out terror, won adherents to its cause. The best hope for controlling terror groups is through infiltration and neutralisation by the secret services. In the 1990s the British security services did a relatively good job of infiltration, though even here - in the most protracted campaign against a terror campaign by any democratic state - bombs still went off. Citizens of Belfast had to grow used to constant limitations on their freedom of movement.

The question before Americans is whether the financial centres of New York should come to resemble Belfast. Already a ring of steel protects the financial centre of the City of London. Those who submit to the searches and surveillance that accompany any anti-terror campaign usually do not object to the inconvenience. Following the catastrophic events in Washington and New York, everyone will have to get used to much more intrusive surveillance and policing of our travel. The people who will pay the price of such surveillance, particularly at borders and frontiers, will be non- citizens, particularly those from countries or regions that have some notional association with places that support or harbour acts of terror. People who do not have passports from western liberal democracies, who have Arabic or non-white skins, risk being interned or deported without due process of law.

Benjamin Franklin's words would have us remember that a civilised society ought to afford due process and basic human fairness, especially the presumption of innocence, to all peoples, citizens and non-citizens, sojourners and inhabitants, visitors and strangers. This ideal may be the one most endangered by the carnage of the past days. The moral temptation to resist is to consider liberty divisible; that is, to defend the liberty of citizens by extinguishing the liberties of all others, especially foreign strangers within our gates. If we succumb to this temptation, we shall give terror precisely the victory over liberty that it is seeking.

The writer is Carr professor of human rights policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

(Copyright: The Financial Times Limited)

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