An acquaintance had forwarded A
View from the Eye of the Storm (alternate
site), an interesting piece which I mostly agreed with. My one bit
of disagreement was on preëmptive strikes. The Isrælis
love this sort of thing, but I’m not so certain.
What we currently have are two models of dealing with problems: the
police and the military. The one is inward-directed and thus prone to
abuse, and because of this is highly circumscribed: we worry about due
process, chains of evidence, presumption of innocence and the rest; the
other is outward-directed, and thus safer (for us; obviously it’s
very dangerous for everyone else) and therefor less circumscribed: no
sane man argues that an enemy soldier should be arrested and tried,
presuming that he does not support his side, and only fought until a
jury of his peers have found that he does, in fact, support his state.
Preëmptive actions are necessary in war, but absolutely anathema
to police work (imagine if the police arrested everyone between the ages of
13 and 24, on the grounds that the vast majority will have used drugs
and alcohol illegally). Indeed, the greatest threat the civil
authorities pose to our liberties comes precisely when the police
entertain delusions that they are soldiers.
But terrorism of the al-Qaedist sort is something altogether
unamenable to either model. It would be suicidal to wait for terrorists
to attack, then try to hunt down and punish them (the civil model); but
it would be a great imposition on liberty (and practically unworkable)
to proceed on a military model, imposing martial law, sentencing
American citizens to death without trials and the rest. What is needed
is an approach which splits the difference. I’m not certain what
that approach would involve, but I do think that it would have certain
key characteristics.
First of all, it would need to be preëmptive.
In an age when a few thousand dollars’ worth of plane tickets can
kill thousands and destroy millions of dollars of property and cause
billions of dollars of damage to the economy, terrorist acts
must be nipped in the bud. There needs to be a branch of the
government (the FBI within the US; the CIA without) which attempts to
penetrate terrorist cells and foil attempts before they happen. We
cannot let a dirty bomb be detonated in Washington, DC; we cannot allow
anthrax to be released in New York City (loathe as I am to admit it,
Yankees haven’t been the enemy for a bit under a century; I am on
their side and they are on mine: we are all Americans); we cannot permit
poisons or drugs to contaminate our water supplies. Much of this can be
solved with ordinary civil means—but not all of it can be. What
if, say, it were discovered that bin Laden is holed up in
Iowa—calling out the local sheriff isn’t the right thing to
do. Maybe it would be appropriate to send a group of SEALs (or Rangers,
or whatever) to kill or capture him.
Secondly, we need to remember that with great power comes
great responsibility. If we empower someone to conduct
military operations on American soil, we need some way to ensure that
his power is not abused. No-one sane wants a system whereby the
President, or a governor, or a mayor, or Sgt. Billy Bob, can sign a
piece of paper and declare that Mrs. Murphy is a terrorist, authorising
that she be killed ASAP. We need some procedure whereby any
extraordinary operations are justified—and if not justified, that
those responsible are appropriately punished. I would not be opposed to
execution of someone who mistakenly authorised an operation which killed
an innocent.
Lastly, we need to set some well-defined limits on
counter-terrorism. We need judicial review of some sort, not
as lax as a civil court but not as strict as a military tribunal. We
need to figure out how to structure things such that no politician, no
soldier, no intelligence officer, no-one is likely to be able
to abuse the system. I don’t agree with the folks who claim that
the Guantanamo Bay captives are being wrongfully held—but imagine
if US citizens, captured in the US, were being held in the same way.
Above all, we need transparency—which is damned difficult given
that rolling up a terrorist cell requires secrecy. The entire endeavour
requires a massive balancing act, but the alternatives are tyranny or
destruction.
