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Fear of principle Monday, Dec 26, 2005 By John Brummett Last weekend when President Bush confirmed that he had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap American citizens without a warrant, violating a constitutional principle and, it seems rather clearly, a law, a poll for The Washington Post and ABC News reported that his approval rating had surged from 39 percent last month to 47 percent. It probably had more to do with relatively peaceful elections encompassing a high voter turnout in Iraq, and with American desperation for good news and an end game there. But at the very least, violating Americans' constitutional protection against illegal searches and seizures - and doing so unilaterally and arbitrarily for the avowed purpose of fighting terrorism to keep us all safe - had not prompted any kind of outcry or backlash, or even much of a peep outside the Democratic side of the aisle and beyond the occasional editorialist. Americans have never appeared very comfortable with all these rights their founders insisted on giving them and that the courts subsequently have insisted on protecting. Americans have complained that police must jump through too many hoops to protect the public peace. They've complained that criminals have been turned loose because somebody didn't coddle them enough, and maybe violated one of their precious constitutional rights. Americans locked up Japanese-Americans during World War II for being Japanese-Americans. They tolerated, even applauded, McCarthy's witch-hunt against people who stood accused mainly of harboring political options that were in the extreme minority. Today, they ridicule somebody who carries a card of membership in an organization committed to protecting civil liberties. And they can't work themselves into any semblance of a lather over a suspicion that King George II has been listening in on people who look or act to him like maybe they would know something about terrorism. As a blog-poster put it the other day, the U.S. Constitution is just a piece of paper and a piece of paper won't do you very much good when a terrorist comes knocking. That was well put. It frames the broad issue. If your chief motivation is fear, and if your over-riding desire is protection from harm, then that constitution won't do you much good. Disregarding the Polyanna in it might. But if your chief motivation is principle, and if your over-riding desire is to preserve that principle in the face of any threat, then that constitution with its principles means more to you than any physical violence evil persons might inflict upon you. Americans should be made to choose, fear or principle, then to live by the decision in good times and bad. But the strange thing is that the current situation should not force such a choice. We have a law dating to 1978 allowing our government to go to a secret court to get probable cause warrants to wiretap domestic subjects for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence. These Bush people won't even abide by that. Instead, we've seen the kind of thing that was fully and sadly predictable. Shortly after 9-11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft relaxed rules by which the FBI could engage in domestic spying. So, according to documents gathered by the ACLU, the FBI went out and opened files on a sect of people who only eat vegetables, on a group that protests cruelty to animals and on a Catholic workers' group that struck the FBI, according to one of these documents, as kind of communistic in its thinking. Thus, the moral of today's story: Support your president if you must. Accept his spying on citizens. Choose fear over principle. Just don't dare step outside the mainstream. ------- John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
