Common Sense

There was a great two-hour show on the Discover Channel last night, hosted by Ted Koppel, called The Price of Security. It was an hour of Koppel’s own reporting on different aspects of post-9/11 America. He visited Gitmo to ask about treatment of prisoners. He interviewed the guy at the Justice Dept. who wrote the original memo defining torture in broad terms. He interviewed Tom Ridge and Condi Rice about what the administration’s thinking was and to communicate what they viewed as an existential or impending threat versus what could be done to prevent that.

The second hour was even better. He did a live town hall meeting with everyone that was used in the broadcast, several people in the Justice Dept. in the audience, 9/11 family members, George Soros, Ted Olson the former Inspector General, the head of the ACLU, the president of the Merkle Foundation and lots of others. And they actually discussed the balance between security and liberty. Plenty of people disagreed on what that balance should be and how to go about it, but they were talking and being rational throughout.

Apart from the town hall being live broadcast, it was also carried live on several NPR stations across the country.

Some of the points that were hit on:

On 9/11, the government viewed the terrorist attacks as acts of terrorism, and therefore mobilized law enforcement agencies to investigate. On Sept. 12, they said the attacks amounted to an act of war and there was a “paradigm shift” at all levels of government to reflect that new thinking. Because it was law enforcement that was mobilized, it means that we have law enforcement fighting a war and some of the questions that have arisen from that are where we might be overstepping legality.

One of the women from the 9/11 families put it very well when she described exactly what kind of war we are engaged in. She said we aren’t fighting at war against terrorism because terrorism is merely a tactic. What we’re fighting is the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism and its spread. The language we use is extremely misleading.

Throughout the broadcast, many members of the administration described the threat they perceived as existential. There were terrorists around every corner and another major attack was likely at any second and that necessitated taking extraordinary action to protect America. One of the members of the audience who worked in the intelligence community, I think he was a retired Lt. Col., called us the United States of Amnesia. He pointed out that we have faced, in the words of Gen. Zinni the “long war,” before. During the Cold War, we faced an ideology totally at odds with us in communism. And with 30,000 nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at us, we could be wiped off the map at any time.

There was lots of other good stuff and I wish more people could have seen or heard this important discussion that watched a docudrama that falsified the history of what happened leading to 9/11. This is an important debate and we all need to have a say.