TWICE IN RECENT DAYS, President Bush has described America as “a hard country to defend.” In part, he is prudently lowering expectations that our success in stopping all attacks on American soil after 9/11 will continue indefinitely. At a gathering of newspaper editors on April 21, the president was asked about a poll showing two-thirds of Americans believe we will suffer another attack before Election Day. He gave a reasonable answer that suggested he shared the bleak, majority view: “I can understand why they think we’re going to get hit again. They saw what happened in Madrid. This is a hard country to defend.”
In part, too, the president is pointing out the obvious. A country as large and open and free as the United States is a target-rich environment for terrorists, especially suicidal ones. It doesn’t take an active imagination to conjure in one’s mind any number of frightful vulnerabilities that could be exploited by our enemies even now, when memories of 9/11 are fresh and we are vigilant. This of course is why George W. Bush decided two and a half years ago that we had no better choice than to fight the war on terror militarily, killing as many al Qaeda leaders, footsoldiers, financiers, functionaries, enablers, and allies as we can, wherever they are in the world. And it’s why Congress passed the Patriot Act to beef up our surveillance and interdiction capabilities.
But there is another way still in which this is a hard country to defend. As the 9/11 Committee hearings have made abundantly clear, when FBI agents hot on the trail of al Qaeda hijackers in the summer of 2001 were unable to connect the dots, that’s because the system worked as it was designed to. We had institutionalized safeguards against what in retrospect looks like a scandalously exaggerated suspicion of federal police powers.
Stewart Baker, general counsel of the National Security Agency from 1992 to 1994, gave eloquent testimony to the commission on this subject last year, some of which was later published in Slate:
Unfortunately, the culture of suspicion that raised the wall in the first place survived the 9/11 attacks and is still alive, if not exactly well. Congress made many of the key Patriot Act provisions temporary, in a bow to that culture, and they will expire next year. That’s why President Bush last week called on Congress to “renew the Patriot Act and to make all of its provisions permanent.” He surely knows this will start a fight, but it’s a necessary debate, and one voters deserve to hear before voting this fall.
John Kerry, for instance, though he voted for the Patriot Act in 2001, happily panders to the paranoiacs of his party, praising the “sunset clause” that takes effect next year and saying he will “change the Patriot Act” because it’s problematic when you have an attorney general like John Ashcroft who doesn’t “respect” the Constitution. We’ve heard right-wing libertarians make exactly the same argument in reverse: The Patriot Act is fine with Bush in charge, but God help us if Hillary Clinton becomes president in 2008.
We think both arguments are nonsense: Americans will be safer, their liberties more secure, if attorney generals of both parties have at their disposal the surveillance tools made available by the Patriot Act. More than that, though, we think the issue is too important to put off till next year, as some powerful congressional Republicans are reported to favor doing. It may be a hard country to defend, but there’s no time like the present to debate how best to do it.
—Richard Starr, for the Editors
