L.A. TIMES Book Review, 9/21/03 Liberties disappearing before our eyes
Why Societies Need Dissent; Cass R. Sunstein; Harvard University Press: 256 pp., $22.95 paper Freedom and the Court: Civil Rights and Liberties in the United States; Henry J. Abraham and Barbara A. Pe
By John W. Dean John W. Dean is a former Nixon White House counsel, a Findlaw.com columnist and the author of several books, including a forthcoming biography of Warren G. Harding.
September 21, 2003
If you don't believe that America's war on terrorism threatens your freedoms, delving into any one of these books will change your mind as well as advise you of the rights and liberties that are in true jeopardy. This collection of new works, which address the effect of the war on terrorism on civil liberties, contains one remarkably consistent theme: The federal government has overreacted to the terrorism threat and, in doing so, has traded freedoms of all Americans for an illusion of security. This reality is supported by overwhelming evidence. My hope is to provide at least a whiff of what will be found in each work while winnowing the list for those who want to better understand the situation.
Terrorism, by definition, is an effort to terrify, frighten and intimidate. Terrorists can't vanquish their enemies, only hurt them, so they deliver their hurtful messages of hate through violent attacks against innocent people. As horrible as terrorism can be, it must be understood in context. Compared with the policy of mutually assured destruction of the Cold War (with its inherent potential of annihilating humankind), national security experts will tell you, privately, that terrorism's threat to Americans appears to fall somewhere between that of killer bees (which scare people but take very few lives) and drunken drivers (who frighten very few people while killing 17,000 annually).
Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who experienced the horrors of terrorism firsthand on Sept. 11, 2001, says, "Everyone faces much greater risk every single day to their life, to their health, to their safety from terrorism." Giuliani has terrorism in perspective. Reading this collection of authors who have been monitoring our response to terrorism, makes it clear that President Bush has a very different perspective. Although he is aware of the likely dangers, he keeps pushing worst-case scenarios for his own political agenda.
Bush has made terrorism his raison d'être, as he shamelessly and endlessly exploits it, actually using its threat to govern. More specifically, he is using terrorism to "manufacture consent," to borrow newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann's phrase. Noam Chomsky explains that consent is manufactured because democratic governments cannot coerce people, yet some democratic leaders want to control (rather than lead) the "bewildered herd," as Lippmann called the public, and they seek to do so by influencing how people think. As the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon have shown, nothing manufactures consent better than fear. With a few qualms, people are giving up basic rights and liberties...
Jim D