War's First Casualties
By Johnny Barnes, Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union, National Capital Area
Winter 2004
Volume 40, Number 1
Cherished Constitutional principles often become the first casualties of war. Peaceful coexistence between individual rights and military conflict seems out of reach when the Nation is preoccupied with war-related concerns. Liberty and justice appears to be cast aside when measured against safety and security. The American Civil Liberties Union believes that we can be safe and free. We cannot, however, be safe if we are not free.
Throughout America's his-tory, there have been times when, feeling threatened, our govern-ment has resorted to policies and practices antithetical to the very democracy we profess to protect. The Palmer Raids eighty years ago; The Red Hunts and the World War II Internments; J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO; STOP INDEX; CONUS; and now Patriot Act I and possibly II, are just some of the programs launched by the government. Our democracy has survived these initiatives and will survive current initiatives because an aware and informed public ultimately insists that our civil liberties are preserved and our constitution is conserved.
Part of the movement to secure peace must be aimed at providing instruction on the essence of our liberties, the historical context of the risk to our liberties and what actions have and can be taken to guard against the loss of those liberties.
Many of our fellow citizens are involved in hostilities in far away places. Of course, we wish for their safe return. But, while war is being waged over there, we are waging a war of our own over here. Ours is a war to defend democracy, to conserve the consti-tution, and to hold on to our freedoms.
We must wage our war over here even more fiercely than the war is being waged over there. If we do not, we could well prevail in a war we fight with weapons, over there, and lose the war we fight with words, over here.
Those words, found princi-pally in the bill of rights, reflect the essence of what America stands for, what we have always fought for and for what we are willing to sacrifice and die.
With our democracy at risk, we must press for more democracy. With our liberties in danger of loss, we must insist upon more liberty. An attack against the right of any one of us is an attack against the rights of all of us. Terrorism and other threats to our safety and security must be resisted. But, in doing so, we must not let demo-cracy die. As Judge Damon Keith wrote in a stirring opinion, "Democracy dies behind closed doors."
There are many actions our government is taking about which every citizen should be concerned, even alarmed. Following are a few.
Effective assistance of counsel, guaranteed by the sixth amendment, is as important and perhaps more important in the face of the exigencies of war than in times of peace. Yet, that historic right is in peril for many.
The presumption of inno-cence, a cornerstone of our system, does not seem to have the firmness today that it has had in times of less travail. The right to be secure in our persons, houses, paper, and effects appears to be willowing against the weight of war, and our right to be left alone, the right to privacy, is wilting beneath the burden of technology - tech-nology designed to help, but instead, too often used to hurt. Due process is more than mere words and platitudes. It is the very foundation upon which our way of sifting through facts and law is built. Yet, there are those who would easily discard this fund-amental method of functioning because the horrors of war or the revulsion of terrorism makes inconvenient the rights of indivi-duals, especially those who are different.
And, the first amendment, Freedom of Speech and Assembly, the right to petition our govern-ment, the very rights that give life and breath to our other rights, for some is easily cast away as an unnecessary companion to war.
When liberties are threat-ened, we must demand greater emphasis on liberties. When individual rights are at stake, we must be ever vigilant and un relenting.
It is, therefore, vital to the health of America that each of us, citizens of the world's greatest promise, democracy, make a commitment to become educated about the matters discussed here and to take the necessary action to keep the doors of democracy open. If I may borrow from the rhetoric of the sixties, on this matter, "If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem."
It seems to me that the highest form of citizenship, the highest form of loyalty to one's country is to dissent, to challenge, to question. "Give me liberty or give me death." We can be safe and free. But we cannot be safe, if we are not free.
Note- Parts of this article taken from recent statements made by Geoff Aronow
and Julie Ferguson Queen, President and Vice-Presi-dent, respectively,
of the ACLU-NCA.