Securing Liberty Introduction

Introduction

Everything Changed
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, altered the American
landscape in many ways. Approximately three thousand lives
were lost. New York City’s two tallest buildings fell. Within a
month, the United States was bombing Afghanistan, beginning
a war that continues a decade later. At home, Congress enacted
the USA PATRIOT Act within weeks of the attack, granting the
executive broad new surveillance powers while eliminating
judicial review and other safeguards. In an effort to coordinate
domestic security operations, the Department of Homeland
Security was formed, absorbing part or all of 22 different gov-
ernment agencies; it is now the third-largest federal bureaucracy
in the United States, after the departments of Defense and Vet-
erans Affairs. In short, the “national security state” was born,
as untold resources were redirected to the task of making the
nation safe from future attacks. On May 1, 2011, U.S. forces
located and killed Osama bin Laden, but the transformations
he triggered will long outlive him — as will, apparently, the war
in Afghanistan.

The world changed as well. The United Nations Security
Council approved resolutions requiring nations around the world
to adopt and implement counterterrorism measures, including
systems to track and stem the flow of funds to organizations
and individuals that the Security Council declared to be “ter-
rorist” — without affording those designated any opportunity
to challenge the label. The United States was targeted on Sep-
tember 11, but other mass attacks followed — in Indonesia, the

United Kingdom, Spain, Jordan, and India, to name only a few.
Many nations were prompted to strengthen their own counter-
terrorism laws. The United Kingdom, for example, authorized
indefinite detention without charge of foreign citizens suspected
of terrorist involvement — a measure its own highest court sub-
sequently declared incompatible with the European Convention
on Human Rights.

In the wake of the attacks, defenders of expanded govern-
ment power to fight terrorism argued that the attacks were a
wake-up call, demonstrating to the United States and the world
the increased vulnerability of citizens to deadly attacks on a
large scale carried out by small groups of committed individu-
als. Commentators and government officials raised the specter
of terrorists employing chemical, biological, or nuclear weap-
ons. Defending against such catastrophic threats posed new
challenges. Many nations have long had access to weapons of
mass destruction, but, as they are also responsible for protect-
ing civilian populations, they can presumably be deterred from
using such weapons by threats of retaliation; non-state terror-
ist groups have no such constraints. And suicide bombers have
shown that desperate individuals will sacrifice even their own
lives to strike a blow for their cause. The potential threats seem
limitless, and the vivid and horrifying images of September 11
made what had been previously unthinkable all too imaginable.

The United States’ Response
The United States responded to the attacks by adopting what
then-attorney general John Ashcroft called a “paradigm of pre-
vention.” He argued that it was not enough to capture terrorists
after the fact, we must seek to prevent the next attack. To do

 securing l i b e rt y

so, Ashcroft argued, the government had to act aggressively
against all who might pose a threat, in order to incapacitate
them before they are able to act against us. Many were per-
suaded by this view, and it soon became conventional wisdom
that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies had spent too
much time investigating completed crimes and not enough time
gathering intelligence to forestall future crimes. The charge is
overstated — law enforcement has always been as interested in
preventing and deterring crime before it happens as in catch-
ing criminals after the fact. And state and federal laws have long
made it a crime to plan for or prepare to commit crimes, so there
was never a need to wait until a bomb exploded to bring criminal
charges. After the attacks of September 11, however, the notion
that those bound to protect the nation had failed to “connect the
dots” in advance led inexorably to the idea that the government
must become “forward-leaning” in its approach to terrorism.

The impetus toward prevention is understandable. All other
things being equal, preventing a terrorist act is preferable to
responding after the fact — all the more so when the threats
include weapons of mass destruction and the attackers are
difficult to detect, willing to kill themselves, and seemingly
unconstrained by any considerations of law, morality, or human
dignity that we can recognize. There is nothing wrong with
prevention itself as a motive or a strategy — think, for exam-
ple, of preventive medicine. In the realm of ordinary criminal
law enforcement, preventive policing, which emphasizes direct
police involvement with communities to identify and solve
potential problems before they lead to criminal conduct, is sen-
sible, effective, and often more humane than imposing lengthy
prison sentences. Thus, prevention is a perfectly acceptable goal
in many contexts, and is surely permissible in counterterrorism.

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Moreover, there are many ways to deter or prevent ter-
rorism that pose little or no concerns from the standpoint of
civil liberties. Airport metal detectors and X-ray machines are
preventive measures, as are concrete barriers and increased
security around government buildings and other vulnerable
targets. More careful screening of individuals and cargo enter-
ing the country is also a preventive measure. Expanding and
improving our ability to analyze and understand intelligence
data may help identify and interdict threats before they can be
carried out. Developing positive ties to communities and nations
that might have individuals sympathetic to terrorist causes may
simultaneously reduce the likelihood that such individuals will
act on their sympathies and help to identify potential bad actors
so that they can be monitored. Providing foreign aid to countries
with dire economic and humanitarian needs may reduce the
likelihood that extremists and terrorists will find fertile recruit-
ing ground among desperate people. Many of these preventive
measures are relatively uncontroversial, in large part because
they do not necessitate substantial sacrifices with respect to lib-
erty, privacy, or equality.

The Perils of Prevention
In the wake of 9/11, however, the United States did not limit itself
to such responses. It also sought to employ the government’s
most coercive powers — the power to monitor, abduct, detain,
interrogate, and even kill — in “preventive” fashion, using these
tactics against individuals and groups based on speculation
about what they might do rather than evidence about what they
had done. When a democratic state deploys its harshest coer-
cive measures based on speculative predictions about future

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behavior, it all too often sacrifices some of its most fundamen-
tal commitments to the rule of law. In the absence of a focus on
objective conduct, for example, suspicion may be predicated on
race, ethnicity, or religious affiliation, leading to discriminatory
profiling. Because accurate predictions are so difficult, mistakes
will be made, subjecting innocents to wrongful surveillance,
detention, or worse. Fair process will be short-circuited, as it is
difficult to square with predictive guesswork rather than objec-
tive assessments of fact.

Much of the Bush administration’s “war on terror” was explic-
itly justified in preventive terms. He launched a war, the most
extreme deployment of coercive force, against Iraq on preven-
tive grounds. Iraq had neither attacked us nor threatened to
attack us, but President Bush argued that Saddam Hussein might
have weapons of mass destruction that he might at some point
give to terrorists who might use them against us. It turned out
that Saddam Hussein didn’t have such weapons, and there was
no evidence that he would have turned the weapons over to ter-
rorists even if he had them — but using the preventive rationale,
we declared war on pure (and baseless) speculation.

On similar preventive grounds, President Bush authorized the
National Security Agency (NSA) to intercept millions of phone
calls between persons suspected of being associated with al
Qaeda abroad and individuals here at home, without judicial
approval and in apparent contravention of a federal criminal
law. He created secret prisons run by the CIA into which the
United States “disappeared” suspected terrorists — abducting
them, detaining them, and denying to the world that they were
in U.S. custody. To get high-value suspects to talk, President Bush
authorized the CIA to use cruel, inhuman, and degrading meth-
ods, and torture itself — including extended sleep deprivation,

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stress positions, slamming suspects into walls, and waterboard-
ing (temporarily asphyxiating an individual by pouring water
over a towel wrapped around his mouth and nose, creating the
sensation of drowning). He authorized the CIA to kidnap other
suspects and “render” them to security services in countries,
Egypt and Syria among them, known for routinely using torture
during interrogations. He opened a prison camp at Guantá-
namo Bay, where the military held more than 775 men, many
without objective evidence that they were fighting against us.
The president initially refused to acknowledge that they had
any legal rights, much less access to a U.S. court to challenge
the legality of their detention. He established “military commis-
sions” in which military officers could try and execute terrorists
for war crimes based on secret evidence that the defendant
had no opportunity to see or rebut — and even on the basis of
evidence obtained through torture. President Bush contended
that he could authorize these and other actions as commander
in chief even where Congress had made them illegal. And he
insisted that the Geneva Conventions — international treaties
governing the treatment of civilians and combatants in armed
conflict — did not protect fighters for al Qaeda or the Taliban
at all. All these measures were undertaken in the name of pre-
venting another terrorist attack — and, indeed, by the end of
President Bush’s second term, no more terrorist attacks had
been perpetrated on U.S. soil.

The President Retreats
Many of these measures proved highly controversial — and the
president was never able to prove that they were, in fact, nec-
essary to foil a follow-up terrorist attack. Indeed, by the time

 securing l i b e rt y

President Barack Obama succeeded him, President Bush had
been forced to retreat on many of these policies, without any
apparent increase in terrorist attacks. In Rasul v. Bush (2004)
and Boumediene v. Bush (2008), the Supreme Court rejected his
contention that he could detain suspected terrorists at Guantá-
namo Bay indefinitely without any access to court to challenge
their detentions, and ultimately ruled that not even the presi-
dent and Congress acting together could deny court review to
the detainees. In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), the Court declared
that President Bush’s military commissions were illegal under
domestic law and the Geneva Conventions, dismissing the
president’s contention that the Conventions do not apply to the
conflict with al Qaeda.

When a secret Justice Department memo authorizing water-
boarding and other illegal interrogation tactics was leaked to the
Washington Post in 2004, the administration quickly rescinded the
memo as it apparently could not defend in public what it had
done in secret. (As detailed in Chapter 4, however, the Justice
Department continued to authorize illegal interrogation tactics
in secret even after appearing to abandon them in public.) Con-
gress, under the leadership of Senator John McCain, forbade
the use of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment against all
detainees. International condemnation of rendition to torture
seems to have led the Bush administration to halt that practice,
although the secrecy surrounding the program makes certainty
difficult. After the NSA spying program’s existence was dis-
closed, the president halted it until Congress amended the law
to authorize electronic surveillance with greater oversight. And
Congress added checks and balances to some of the most con-
troversial PATRIOT Act provisions. Even after all these reforms
were adopted, there were no further terrorist attacks on the
United States, calling into question the administration’s claims

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that the extreme measures it initially adopted were actually nec-
essary for U.S. security.

President Obama—Continuity or Change ?
When President Obama took office in 2009, he introduced
further reforms to bring our security policy in line with our com-
mitments to liberty, equality, human dignity, and the rule of law.
On his second day in office, he issued executive orders prohib-
iting the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Bush
administration’s euphemism for the torture and cruel treatment
that it had authorized. He ordered the closure of the CIA’s secret
prisons, and promised to close the prison camp at Guantánamo
Bay within a year. Shortly thereafter, he ordered a temporary
halt to military commissions at Guantánamo, appointed an
interagency task force to review all Guantánamo cases, and
released several previously secret Justice Department memos
that had continued to authorize coercive interrogation tactics.
Most important, President Obama sounded a very different over-
all theme on national security, arguing in a speech at the National
Archives in May 2009 that the United States can and must defend
itself within the confines of the rule of law and that our country
will be stronger, not weaker, for doing so. Whereas President
Bush had dismissed legal restrictions as an obstacle to be dis-
regarded in the name of security, President Obama insisted that
we must pursue security in ways that also preserve our liberty.

As is often the case, however, that goal proved easier to
proclaim than to accomplish. Even when Obama’s own party
controlled both houses of Congress, legislators objected to
moving any Guantánamo detainees inside U.S. borders, even
if the detainees would be housed in the most secure facilities.

 securing l i b e rt y

Congress repeatedly barred the president from spending any
money to relocate Guantánamo detainees to the United States,
effectively blocking his effort to close the camp — a goal every-
one from former President Bush to Defense Secretary Robert
Gates and former Defense Secretary Colin Powell agreed was
desirable from a foreign policy standpoint. When Attorney
General Eric Holder announced plans to try men accused of
planning and facilitating the 9/11 attacks, including the alleged
principal architect of the attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in
a New York civilian courtroom, the plan was roundly criticized.
Congress ultimately barred a civilian criminal trial, and Holder
was forced to charge Khalid Sheikh Mohammed before a military
commission in Guantánamo — an untested forum that may well
cause many more complications than a civilian trial would have.

Meanwhile, President Obama continued some of his prede-
cessor’s controversial policies. He asserted the right to detain
suspected al Qaeda and Taliban members without criminal trial.
He invoked the “state secrets privilege” in several lawsuits seek-
ing to hold U.S. officials accountable for unconstitutional and
criminal conduct, including rendition to torture. He opposed
court review of those detained at Bagram Air Force Base in
Afghanistan, even though some of the detainees there, like many
at Guantánamo, were captured in foreign lands far from any bat-
tlefield. He defended as constitutional a federal law that makes
it a crime to advocate for human rights and peace if one does
so in conjunction with a group designated as “terrorist” — even
if the individual’s purpose in doing so is to encourage the group
to forgo violence and to pursue peaceful avenues for political
change. His administration also opposed efforts to reform the
USA PATRIOT Act to implement greater safeguards for Ameri-
cans’ privacy, and authorized the “targeted killing” of radical
cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen far from any battlefield,

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on grounds that he was associated with al Qaeda and planning
future attacks.

History confirms that sacrificing liberties in times of crisis
is not a partisan issue. Republican president Abraham Lincoln,
one of the most revered champions of equality and liberty in all
of U.S. history, unilaterally suspended the writ of habeas corpus
during the Civil War, thereby denying those detained by Union
forces any access to court to challenge their detention. The
Constitution grants the power to suspend habeas corpus to Con-
gress, not the president, but Lincoln argued that the emergency
justified his otherwise illegal action. President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt, a progressive Democrat, was responsible for intern-
ing in camps some 120,000 people of Japanese descent during
World War II, solely because of their Japanese ancestry. Some
70,000 of them were American citizens. None were individually
found to pose a risk of espionage or treason. President Bill Clin-
ton, a Democrat, supported and signed the Anti-Terrorism and
Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, a law that radically restricted
habeas corpus review for all prisoners, criminalized speech as a
form of “material support to terrorism,” and established depor-
tation for foreign nationals based on secret evidence that they
had no opportunity to confront or rebut.

Does Sacrificing Liberty Increase Security?
Thus, history suggests that balancing liberty and security is no
simple matter. Reasonable people will value liberty and secu-
rity differently and therefore will be inclined to adopt different
trade-offs between the two. Moreover, the very idea of “bal-
ance” is misleading; the values sought to be weighed against
one another are incommensurable. How does one quantify the

 securing l i b e rt y

value of liberty, of privacy, or of equal treatment as measured
against the costs of a terrorist attack?

More to the point, sacrificing rights often does not in fact
increase security, and may make us less safe. When President
Bush authorized torture, for example, he argued that his inter-
rogators obtained information that they could not have learned
using lawful, noncoercive interrogation tactics. But the CIA’s own
inspector general, reviewing the program, found no evidence
that the tactics had resulted in information that could not have
been gleaned through legal means. As Ali Soufan, a seasoned U.S.
interrogator, argues in Part 2, developing rapport is a much more
effective technique for obtaining reliable information. There
is no conclusive evidence that coercive interrogation worked.

What we can and do know is that the strategy of coercive
interrogation has entailed tremendous costs. The interrogation
policy eventually led to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, in which
all the world saw graphic photographic evidence of the demean-
ing ways that U.S. soldiers treated Arab and Muslim detainees.
Those revelations, in turn, provided a powerful recruiting tool
for al Qaeda, as extremist websites prominently featured the
images to stoke anti-American sentiment around the world.
Polls suggested that, in short order, the United States went from
being the object of the world’s sympathy on the day after 9/11
to a country more widely resented than ever.

In addition, the desire to use evidence obtained by torture
to hold terrorists accountable led the Bush administration to
establish military commissions that fell drastically short of fun-
damental fairness guarantees. A fair trial cannot be based on
evidence obtained through torture, period. Eventually, Con-
gress reformed the commission rules to make clear that coerced
confessions could not be used. But that, in turn, creates major

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obstacles to holding Guantánamo detainees accountable for
their alleged wrongs. Once a defendant has been tortured, try-
ing him becomes extremely difficult because fundamental rules
of due process and fair play demand that the government not
benefit in any way from information it learned through its tor-
ture, and it is often difficult or impossible to establish that none
of the government’s evidence is tainted.

Are We Safer?
Has the “war on terror” in general made us safer or more vul-
nerable? It is difficult to say. But there are reasons to doubt that
many of the measures have been effective. According to the July
2007 National Intelligence Estimate, al Qaeda by that time had
fully reconstituted itself in Pakistan’s border regions. Terrorist
attacks worldwide grew dramatically in frequency and lethality
after 2001, with suicide bombings particularly on the rise. New
terrorist groups, from al Qaeda in Iraq to the small groups of
young men who bombed subways, buses, and commuter trains
in London and Madrid, have multiplied. And only a small number
of individuals have been convicted of engaging in or conspiring
to engage in a terrorist act since 9/11.

Consider the measurable results from one of the most exten-
sive domestic preventive campaigns conducted by the United
States in the wake of 9/11. Using immigration law, the Bush
administration after 9/11 called in 82,000 foreign nationals for
fingerprinting, photographing, and “special registration” simply
because they came from predominantly Arab or Muslim coun-
tries — on the theory that it might find a terrorist. It sought out
another 8,000 young men from the same countries for more
extensive FBI interviews, again based solely on the fact that they

 securing l i b e rt y

were young men who had come from predominantly Arab and
Muslim countries. And immigration officials placed more than
5,000 foreign nationals, virtually all Arab or Muslim, in preven-
tive detention in the first two years after 9/11, again in hopes
that they would identify a terrorist. Yet not one of these individu-
als stands convicted of a terrorist crime. The government’s record,
in what is surely the largest campaign of ethnic profiling since
the Japanese internment during World War II, is 0 for 95,000.

But how can we account for the fact that the United States
has been free of a terrorist attack since 9/11? One cannot ulti-
mately prove what combination of factors contributed to this
fortunate result. Could it have been the military response in
Afghanistan (notably not a “preventive war,” but an act of self-
defense)? Information obtained from lawful surveillance and
interrogation? Information obtained from illegal surveillance and
interrogation? Increased airport security measures? Increased
spending on intelligence analysts, and increased coordination of
intelligence agencies? The detention of suspected al Qaeda and
Taliban fighters at Guantánamo and Bagram? All of the above?
Some of the controversial preventive measures undertaken may
have helped disrupt a terrorist attack, identify a potential ter-
rorist, or deter someone from committing a terrorist act in the
first place. We can never know for sure.

Debating Our Future
This is what makes the debates that this book seeks to foster
so challenging. The competing values at stake are vital, but
impossible to quantify. So much that we might want to know
is unknowable. Yet we must nonetheless act — and judge our
actions — in the face of this uncertainty. At the end of the day, the

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debates must be guided by an exploration of our fundamental
values. As Senator McCain said in opposing the use of any cruel,
inhuman, or degrading interrogation tactics against suspected
terrorists, it’s not about who they are; it’s about who we are.

This volume highlights six issues for debate and presents
competing views on each issue. It asks whether ethnic or reli-
gious profiling of Arabs and Muslims is constitutional or effective.
It explores the question of when, if ever, a state official is justified
in employing torture or otherwise illegal coercive interrogation
tactics in an attempt to avert an impending disaster. It exam-
ines whether the United States is obliged to investigate and
consider criminal prosecution of those who authorized torture
for intelligence-gathering purposes. It examines the issue of pre-
ventive detention in the conflict with al Qaeda, asking whether
the United States should be required to try al Qaeda members
on criminal charges or release them, or whether it is appropri-
ate to detain them in military custody without criminal charges.
It uses the controversy over President Bush’s authorization of
sweeping warrantless electronic surveillance to assess the extent
and limits of the president’s executive power as commander in
chief: Can the president ignore valid criminal laws if he believes
they interfere with his execution of the war effort? Finally, the
volume examines the question of what Christian Parenti calls
the surveillance society: Has the United States sacrificed funda-
mental protections of privacy in essentially unwarranted ways
or has it simply adapted to the increased threat that terrorism
poses? Reasonable people can and have come down on opposite
sides of all of these questions. They are hard questions without
obvious answers. Your task is to explore their nuances, to rec-
ognize the difficult issues that lurk behind each of the debates,
and to struggle, for yourself, with finding the answer that would
reflect the United States at its best.

 securing l i b e rt y

The United States and the world after 9/11 will never be the
same. The attacks of that day have compelled us to confront
new tensions between liberty and security for a decade. The
debates will continue as the current generation of high school
and college students grows up, graduates, and takes on the
responsibility of leadership and stewardship that our democracy
assigns to “We the People.” It is all the more essential, there-
fore, that young people grapple with these issues. The debates
covered here will continue to be defining issues for generations
to come, and the choices we make will determine the kind of
country — and world — we live in.

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Securing Liberty Introduction

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Securing Liberty Introduction