A Delicate Balance
By Melissa Dittman Tracey
His staff meeting in the White House had just wrapped up when Brian Besanceney heard that first one, then two airplanes had plowed into the World Trade Center.
Minutes later, a Secret Service agent pulled a fire alarm and Besanceney and his colleagues scrambled to evacuate the building. “When I walked [outside], the first thing I saw when I looked over to the left was the smoke coming out of the Pentagon,” he recalled.
Five years since the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, Besanceney and countless others across the country and around the world continue to be affected by those events in ways large and small. The repercussions are constant reminders of how terrorism—or, some would say, the idea of terrorism—remains a threat to the nation’s security.
Besanceney, for one, later left his job as a White House communications director to become assistant secretary for public affairs for the Department of Homeland Security, which didn’t even exist in 2001. (He recently moved on to the State Department.)
The Patriot Act, passed just six weeks after the 9/11 attacks, allows widespread government surveillance of various indicators—such as the books people check out from the library and the e-mail messages they send—under the banner of fighting terrorism. Recently, the National Security Agency reported that it has been collecting phone records of millions of Americans and analyzing call patterns in an effort to thwart terrorists.
As the government tightens the nation’s borders and communications networks to prevent future attacks, some experts fear that such measures trample on the public’s civil liberties. Others see them as part of the cost of waging a war on an enemy few of us really understand.
Sol Bermann, an associate director of the Center for Inter-disciplinary Law at Ohio State, is among those urging caution. “When one takes rights for granted and doesn’t worry about them, it’s not a big deal until they’re taken away or infringed upon,” he said.
“Are we at a crisis point? I think we’re getting there.”
A SENSE OF INSECURITY
“9/11 . . . brought the risk [of terrorism] more to the attention of the general public,” said Richard Herrmann, director of Ohio State’s Mershon Center and an expert on international relations and political psychology. “And when the general public is frightened and panicked by things, it tends to react in ways that can constrain democracy.” The same was true in the cold war era, he said.
Studies have shown that since 9/11, people have become more accepting of indefinite detention of terrorism suspects, investigations of people who fit certain profiles, and wiretapping to monitor possible terrorist activity.
Indeed, 65 percent of more than 500 Americans interviewed in a 2006 Washington Post-ABC News poll said it was important to investigate potential terrorist threats “even if it intrudes on privacy.” A 2003 Gallup poll found that nearly 30 percent of people said the government should take “all steps necessary” to prevent terrorism, even at the cost of violating civil liberties.
Historically, restrictions on civil liberties in the United States have come at times of conflict. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, the American government sequestered some 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps, fearing they would align with the enemy against the U.S. or be recruited as spies.
Since 9/11, the country has imprisoned suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban members at Guan-tanamo Bay in Cuba without charge or review by the U.S. legal system. (The Supreme Court ruled in June that the Bush administration’s system for trying prisoners using military tribunals violated U.S. and international law, but the future of the prison remains unclear.)
The Patriot Act sanctions broad government powers in the fight against terrorism, such as expanding the authority of law enforcement agencies, authorizing electronic surveillance, and forcing businesses to turn over private financial information.
To many people, the restrictions imposed since 9/11 are simply inconveniences—such as waiting in longer lines at the airport and not being allowed to carry certain items on board because of tightened security procedures.
And as such steps prove an effective deterrent to those who want to harm the nation, people may be more willing to give up some conveniences for the good of public safety, said Cathy Collins-Taylor, readiness branch chief of Ohio’s Department of Homeland Security. The situation requires a “delicate balance” of increasing security without infringing on rights to privacy, she said.
Some inconveniences can overstep boundaries, Bermann said. He gave the example of profiling people with Arabic names or dark skin, especially at airports.
In a study conducted in 2003, Ohio State geography professor Mei-Po Kwan and graduate student Farida El-Hennawy found that since 9/11, Muslim women living in Columbus had felt restricted in their use of public space and freedom in daily activities.
Most of the 37 women interviewed said they had experienced discrimination, intimidation, or harassment based on their religious beliefs, as well as increased anxiety because of counter-terrorist homeland security measures that could be used to justify anti-Muslim policies.
AN ILLUSION OF DANGER?
Even as experts weigh how to balance fighting terrorism with guarding individual liberties, not everyone agrees that the situation poses a risk to democracy.
“The culture of free speech in America is too strong” to let that happen, Herrmann said. “Americans know propaganda when they see it. . . . People just have to push back and say, ‘No, I don’t buy that.’”
Herrmann believes terrorism restrictions are not weakening democracy as long as laws are abided by and are open to checks and balances.
In fact, he says there have been improvements, particularly in freedom of speech, since 9/11, allowing the public to recover from the shock and take a more critical look at tensions in the Middle East and what led to the attacks.
“We were blaming everything on the outside and seeing ourselves as entirely benign,” Herrmann said. “Even the president was framing everything as ‘evil’ or practically a mission of God. A lot of people reacted to that because they love their country. . . .
“Now things have recovered from the shock of 2001 and 2002 when it was very difficult to talk about these things—not because of the government, but because of public opinion and public attitude.”
How to best protect civil liberties while increasing security is an issue that will have to be resolved through a national debate, said Todd Stewart, director of the International and Homeland Security Program at Ohio State and a recent presidential nominee to the National Security Education Board. “I don’t see [terrorism as creating] fundamental threats to the nation’s democracy, although there are certainly challenges to what this democracy has to deal with,” Stewart said.
But Bermann says the public’s First Amendment rights are being threatened due to government secrecy—in particular because of wiretapping both here and abroad. He’s concerned about the extent of the wiretapping and what and whom the government is monitoring.
Such practices have the potential to infringe on freedom of speech and the public’s right to assemble, as well as privacy, Bermann said. Rights to privacy are not protected under the constitution, he said, but over time the courts and the government have determined what constitutes those rights.
“If [the government] wants to change the laws, then don’t keep it secret from the American people. . . . Have an open debate about it,” Bermann said. “Transparency is a huge part of the American democratic process. If we don’t have transparency about the government and aren’t clear about what is happening with the government, how can we make a well-informed vote?”
FEAR AND ANXIETY
John Mueller believes the fear terrorism generates—an inflated fear, he says—can cause the public to needlessly give up rights to feel more secure. The terrorists win if the nation becomes overly protective, says Mueller, who is the Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Policy at Ohio State.
Instead of investing billions of dollars in shoring up protections against an elusive enemy, Mueller says the nation needs to address the fear and anxiety that terrorism presents and stress its low risk. The public used to understand that—prior to 9/11, he says. After all, everything is a potential target for terrorists, and it’s impossible to monitor everything.
“Terrorists want to terrorize,” Mueller said. “The best way to counter them is to not be terrorized.”
Experts agree the goal of terrorism often is to increase anxiety among the public, undermine confidence in the government, and influence government or social policy.
In speeches he gives across the country, Mueller talks about reactions and overreactions to terrorism and tells audiences how goading the nation seems to be a strategy of al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden. In a 2004 videotaped message, bin Laden said, “All that we have to do is send two mujahidin . . . to raise a piece of cloth on which is written ‘al-Qaeda’ in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses.”
“Terrorists can’t destroy the country, but we can [by] making the enemy us,” Mueller said.
THE PUBLIC'S RESPONSIBILITY
Ohio State’s motto—Disciplina in civitatem, or “Education for citizenship”— offers an important reminder of how the public can respond to terrorism, Stewart said.
“It’s not ‘those’ people in Washington or ‘those’ people in respective state governments. It’s each of us that are fundamentally responsible,” he said. “We need to understand what the issues are and, through the representative process, speak our mind and get actively involved as individual citizens.”
Since 9/11, the nation has reworked its preparedness and response strategy and pushed for improvements in communications among intelligence communities. The public has become more focused on Middle East policy and border security issues.
“The events of 9/11 showed us there is a terrorist threat and there needs to be preparation, detection, prevention, response, and recovery,” said Collins-Taylor, whose office often works with Ohio State’s International and Home-land Security Program and the School of Public Health on training and improving emergency preparedness and response statewide.
More than a dozen of Ohio State’s academic units now offer courses related to homeland security and terrorism, courses that aim to boost research and technology advances and address policy issues. In June, the College of Humanities hosted a weeklong event for Ohio public school teachers to discuss ways to improve understanding of the Arab culture among students and teachers.
“The more we educate ourselves, the better prepared we are as citizens and through professional careers to lead these challenges,” Stewart said.
After all, the public’s awareness of the terrorism threat poses the best line of defense, Collins-Taylor said. The state homeland security department recently launched a “See Something, Say Something” campaign encouraging people to call a hotline to report possible terrorist activity or suspicious behavior, such as videotaping government buildings, wearing bulky winter coats on hot summer days, or tampering with security equipment.
“We need to be concerned about what’s going on in our neighborhoods, our workplaces—not with the notion of spying on each other, but with the notion of looking out for each other,” Stewart said.
Reprinted from the September/October Ohio State Alumni Magazine. The magazine is a benefit of membership in the Alumni Association. To get your copy, join now.
