Menos libres, menos seguros

El resultado de la "guerra contra el terrorismo": Mucho menos libertad y seguridad. ¿Hasta cuándo se les permitirá seguir en esta guerra contra las libertades humanas?

Within weeks after 9/11, civil liberties lawyer David Cole published what would be the first of many articles warning about the danger of compromising, as we reacted to the shock and the carnage, our own cherished rule of law. In the Oct. 8, 2001, issue of The Nation, he wrote, "Nothing tests our commitment to principle like terrorism."

Our commitment failed that test: We sat by, willing to see the Bill of Rights dismantled as secret searches and wiretaps were used without probable cause, thousands of foreign nationals were detained or deported, and hundreds of people -- no one knew exactly who they were -- squatted or kneeled in chain-link cages at Guantanamo Bay while being denied the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions.

Cole, who is also a law professor at Georgetown University, began to focus his alarm: If we don't afford noncitizens due process, how long before we treat citizens the same way? In April 2002, when one of the Guantanamo detainees was discovered to be Louisiana-born, Cole's rhetorical question was answered: Yaser Hamdi, American citizen, was transferred to a military jail, without lawyer, arraignment or trial, and in complete isolation. Two months later, American citizen Jose Padilla was arrested, beginning his more than three years in legal limbo.

Across the country, pressure was put upon the FBI to produce more terrorism cases. Here in Portland, we had a front-row seat for several spectacular cases: the prayer leader of a Southwest Portland mosque was arrested at the airport in September 2002, allegedly with traces of cocaine and TNT on his luggage; seven local Muslims were indicted in late 2002 on charges of attempting to travel to Afghanistan to fight alongside the Taliban; and a local lawyer, also Muslim, was held in May 2004 as a material witness because his fingerprints allegedly implicated him in the train bombing in Madrid, Spain.

None went to trial: not Imam Kariye, because the illegal substances were found to be imaginary (he later pleaded guilty to lying about his income and using false identification when applying for health insurance); nor the Portland Seven, who although they only went to China, pleaded guilty to reduced charges when faced with possible life sentences (for conspiracy to wage war, it should be noted, and not for terrorism); nor for Brandon Mayfield, who never went to Spain.

In 2003, the Guantanamo count then at 650, Cole published "Enemy Aliens: Double Standards and Constitutional Freedoms in the War on Terror," a catalog of U.S. legal abuses in previous moments of fear and xenophobia, with chapters on the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans and the infiltration and disruption of the civil-rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and '70s.

Yet the apparatus that stoked the fear of terrorism made many people indifferent to the abridgment of their constitutional rights, as long as they felt "more safe."

Keeping citizens at a high pitch of anxiety, Cole recognizes, tips the scales toward national security at the expense of civil liberties. Hence, in his new book, "Less Safe, Less Free: Why America Is Losing the War on Terror," co-authored by Jules Lobel, a University of Pittsburgh law professor, they argue that not only are we allowing the erosion of our own liberties, we're not even made more safe by these sacrifices. These tactics, Cole and Lobel assert, along with our pre-emptive war in Iraq and our dubious intelligence procedures -- renditions, disappearances and torture -- have made us less safe than ever while providing "ideal recruitment fodder for our enemies."

To this chilling picture, Cole and Lobel offer reasoned alternatives based on noncoercion, diplomacy, multilateral solutions and a return to the rule of law.

Martha Gies is the author of "Up All Night" and is a frequent contributor to Women's Review of Books.