BENJAMIN Franklin once said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Apparently, Jillian Bandes never read Franklin. Bandes, a columnist for the University of North Carolina's Daily Tar Heel, recently wrote a now-notorious column on the desirability of racial profiling and has since been fired for badly misquoting her sources, offers the following claim: all Arabs should be "stripped naked and cavity searched" should they come near an airport, the rationale being that "they kill[ed] 3,000 of our relatives." What should be alarming here is not her poor defense of racial profiling, but the message underlying her column that rights can and should be sacrificed for any gain in security.
This is not issolated reasoning but a prime example of the development of the new, post-Sept. 11 American right. For a movement that, at its core, is supposed to value the primacy of human freedom above all else, the willingness with which the right has abandoned that premise in the name of a little temporary safety is of utmost concern for a nation that purports to be spreading freedom across the globe.
One of the earliest occurrences in this vein was the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act. While it did contain many valuable measures to improve American security,some of its provisions were clear and unnecessary infringements on our liberty. Powers no one would have accorded to the government before Sept. 11, such as the ability to conduct searches in secret and with limited probable cause, were suddenly not only on the table but passed with the sound of applause. While there was a strong desire by both parties to be seen as patriotic, it was the sudden devaluing of liberty and the clamor for anything that might make us safer that provided the primary intellectual calculus driving the act's passage.
The next major instance of this newfound willingness to sacrifice rights for safety would involve the violation of not our own rights, but those of foreigners. In Iraq, the right's new mantra has taken its most visual and painful form. Operation Iraqi Freedom was never about Iraqi freedom as much as it was protecting our own. Saddam Hussein suddenly became a military target because he presented even a small threat to the United States.
The price that the Iraqi people might have to pay for this venture, now more than 25,000 civilians according to Iraq Body Count, a U.S. and British civilian organization, was apparently not of sufficient concern.
Perhaps an even greater concern with the right's new philosophy, apart from the liberties sacrificed, is that it isn't producing results. Back in June, Karl Rove, President Bush's chief political adviser, made the comment that "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11