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The Freedoms
Defended Since 9/11
by Anthony Gregory, September 9, 2011

“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward,”
said George W. Bush on September 11, 2001. “And freedom
will be defended.”

President Obama apparently agrees that the U.S. government’s
response to 9/11 has been to defend freedom. This past Memorial Day
he announced, “From Gettysburg to Kandahar, America’s sons and
daughters have served with honor and distinction, securing our
liberties and laying a foundation for lasting peace.”

We might wonder which freedoms the U.S. government, under both
Bush and Obama, has defended since 9/11.

It doesn’t appear to be the First Amendment’s freedoms of speech
and association. Otherwise it would be hard to explain the National
Security Letters that forbid their recipients from telling anyone,
even a lawyer or spouse, that the FBI is monitoring them. It would
be difficult to understand the Bush administration’s “free speech
zones” that kept war protesters far from presidential appearances,
or U.S. spying on peace activists under both administrations. It
would be perplexing that Obama would detain Bradley Manning for the
crime of releasing incriminating information about the U.S. warfare
state, or that his administration’s officials would hint that
WikiLeaks’s project of exposing government wrongdoing should be shut
down.

Maybe the government has mostly been protecting Americans’ right
to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. Then again, it
would be confusing that both Bush and Obama would stand by the USA
PATRIOT Act, which has eroded the Fourth Amendment, forced
businesses to spy on their customers and hand information over to
the Justice Department, loosened restrictions for wiretapping, and
empowered agents to conduct special searches without alerting
Americans right away that their property had been searched. It would
also be a mystery why both Bush and Obama have stood by the National
Security Administation’s power to spy on American telecommunications
without a warrant. Then there is the whole question of the
Transportation Security Administration, which summarily searches
American airline passengers, their luggage, and their persons,
forcing them to go through invasive pat-downs and potentially
dangerous irradiating “porno-scanners.”

Perhaps the freedom being defended is the long-celebrated right
to due process and habeas corpus for those detained by the
government. That would be hard to reconcile, however, with the Bush
administration’s roundup of hundreds of innocent aliens right after
9/11, the “material witness” doctrine that allowed for indefinite
detention without charge, or the “enemy combatant” designation that,
when pinned on someone by the president, even on a U.S. citizen,
means there will be a total disregard for traditional due process.
It would certainly make a puzzle out of Guantanamo, where some
detainees have been determined innocent of all wrongdoing but are
nevertheless kept detained; and it would be hard to make sense of
the military commissions that deprive subjects of both the standard
protections of criminal suspects or those of prisoners of war. The
secret evidence used in many cases in the last ten years certainly
seems to be in tension with the right to confront one’s accuser and
the evidence laid against one. And Obama’s very concept of
“prolonged detention” and his administration’s fighting the courts
on numerous habeas corpus cases are a little bit of an enigma if
indeed the right to due process is what our leaders have in mind
when they’re waging these wars for our freedoms.

Maybe it’s the right not to be subject to cruel and unusual
punishment that Bush and Obama have been defending! Although that
would seem to be in conflict with the mistreatment of whisteblower
Bradley Manning, the abuse that continues at Guantanamo, the
waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and the psychological and
sexual abuse that became a regular interrogation practice throughout
Iraq and other U.S.-controlled areas at the height of the war on
terror.

Other freedoms that haven’t seemed to be enhanced, much less
defended by the war on terrorism, include the right to travel,
financial freedom, the right to bear arms, and the right to a fair
civil proceeding against government agents who have violated one’s
liberties. Economic freedom hasn’t exactly blossomed since 9/11.
Come to think of it, most of the freedoms that have been held as
sacred for so long in this country aren’t exactly easy targets for
terrorists to undermine in the first place; free speech, due
process, privacy, and other such civil liberties are much easier for
governments to compromise than for terrorists to take away.

But there is a class of people whose freedom has surely been
strengthened since 9/11, as a direct consequence of the wars fought
abroad. That would be people at the top of the executive branch, and
especially presidents themselves.

The right of the president to wage war unilaterally has been
defended against enemies, both foreign and domestic. The right of
the president to order torture and get away with it and to cover up
for those who perpetrated such acts of barbarism has been secured.
The freedom of the president to declare someone an enemy of the
United States, and thus be fit to be jailed without any semblance of
judicial oversight, or even be killed by a predator drone strike,
has been affirmed. The president is now at liberty to spy on
people’s communications without even the flimsy standards adopted in
the 1978 FISA guidelines.

In short, Bush was right that freedom would be defended after
9/11, and Obama is right to thank soldiers for fighting for “our
freedom.” The only confusion comes in thinking these presidents were
speaking on the behalf of the American people, when in fact they
were speaking only about the small class of Americans known as U.S.
presidents, and their freedom to wage war, detain, torture, spy, and
execute without restriction.

Anthony Gregory is a research analyst at the Independent
Institute, a policy advisor for the Future of Freedom
Foundation, and a columnist at LewRockwell.com. His website is AnthonyGregory.com. Send him email.

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