More on the Bravery of Being Out of Range

[womzilla]

I'm way behind on my reading of The New York Review of Books--four issues are now out that I haven't read all of--and as a result I've just started reading Ronald Dworkin's "Terror & the Attack on Civil Liberties", which is a good discussion of what the US has done over the last two years to violate international law in the handling of supposed enemies of freedom.

The title of this post refers to one key paragraph:

Many Americans believe that the Bush administration's security policies are a justified response to the terrorist threat. They believe that the attacks on September 11 require (as it is often put) "a new balance between liberty and security." That much-used expression suggests that we can properly judge the new policies by asking whether they are in our overall interest, as we might decide, for instance, whether to strike a new balance between road safety and the convenience of driving fast by lowering speed limits. But, with hardly any exceptions, no American who is not a Muslim and has no Muslim connections actually runs any risk of being labeled an enemy combatant and locked up in a military jail. The only balance in question is the balance between the majority's security and other people's rights, and we must think about that as a matter of moral principle, not of our own self-interest.

Contrary to Ben Franklin's much-quoted comment, I think that sometimes people do have to choose to forego a little liberty to gain security. However, what outrages me about the current situation is the degree to which the anti-freedom brigade choose to forego other people's liberty for their own security. It's really easy to support shredding Constitutional protections if one believes that one will never be under the examination lamps oneself.