COMMENT US media ensnared
in liberty vs security
debate By Ehsan Ahrari
There is an important debate taking place
in the United States over the Bush
administration's resolve to conduct its "war on
terror" versus the need of the media to be the
nation's conscience. Time magazine in its latest
issue calls it "the tension between liberty and
security".
That subject has arisen many
times in the short history of the United States.
It was never really resolved before in the sense
that no lasting conclusions were reached that are
applicable during different eras. Instead, a
general understanding has prevailed whereby the
media have acquired a permanent role as the
watchdog of the people to ensure that there
remains a healthy balance between liberty and
security.
This time, the issue is the
government's need to wage the "war on
terror" and the US
media's responsibility to report
ostensibly unconstitutional or extraconstitutional
actions. The administration of President George W Bush,
as expected, holds to its right to do whatever
is necessary to protect the American people
against global terrorism, while the media have
decided that they have been too deferential to
the government's claim of its rights to wage the
war, and now should scrutinize and report its
actions vigorously in the name of protecting liberty
and ensuring that the system of checks and balances,
which the US constitution has so carefully
established, is not violated by the executive
branch.
Two issues arose recently, causing great controversy in the United States.
The first one was the National Security Agency's
involvement in warrantless eavesdropping on the
conversations of US citizens, which the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act prohibits. As
expected, the Bush administration invoked its
rights to determine what actions it could take
with minimal participation or interference from
the Congress and none from the media.
The
controversy never really faded away.
The second and most recent
episode is the New York Times' decision
to report about the government's highly
classified program to monitor bank records. Bush weighed
in by labeling the Times report "disgraceful",
and claimed it has caused "great harm" to the
United States.
Bush's claim
has certain merit in the sense that in the
information age, stories of that nature are given much wider
publicity than they deserve. So when the terrorist
groups read them, they become more cautious.
However, the issue of terrorist financing is too
intricate and has too large a scope to be damaged
by reports of government's questionable
activities.
There is nothing
new or earth-shattering in reports that the
US government has decided to "follow the
terrorist money" since September 11, 2001. It has
closed down a lot of Islamic charities that
were allegedly being used by such organizations
as Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad. It
has exerted considerable pressure on a number of
countries to scrutinize Islamic charities closely.
Consequently, a lot of corrective measures have
been taken.
However, terrorist financing
is a multibillion-dollar business. A large portion
of that business is done through money-laundering
and by buying a lot of legal businesses in Asia
and elsewhere in the world. Terrorists have become
too sophisticated and are working too closely with
the international financiers, who know all the
tricks to convert huge sums of "black" money into
"white" money with considerable ease. To top it,
the hawala system (transferring money
through a network of brokers) is still as strong
as ever. Billions of dollars are still being
transferred throughout the world on a daily and
weekly basis - especially in poorer countries,
where terrorist organizations are thriving - via
the hawala system.
Considering
these patterns of global financial transactions,
what is needed is more international cooperative
measures and techniques to track down new patterns
of terrorist operations and close them down
permanently. In this sense, one can understand the
interactions between the Bush administration and
SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial
Telecommunication), a huge international database
that daily routes about US$6 trillion in funds.
What is not clear is how the disclosure of that
interaction so jeopardizes US national security
that Bush can go to the extreme of depicting it as
"disgraceful".
What is really at stake
here is the executive branch's decision to take
whatever action it deems necessary in the name of
national security and under the rubric of fighting
a "war on terror". In the aftermath of September
11, the attacks the United States has waged are
police actions in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere
in Asia and Africa. The labeling of those police
actions as "war" was wrong to begin with. It was
through calling a series of police actions part of
a "war" that the Bush administration gave itself a
vast amount of power.
The US media did not
attempt to question that label. Since thousands of
American lives were lost as a result of terrorist
actions, the White House decided it would fight a
"global war on terrorism", much the same way as it
decided to fight a war on poverty during the
administration of president Lyndon Johnson or a
war on drugs under presidents George H W Bush and
Bill Clinton.
The most dramatic aspect of
the terrorist war was the enormous loss of
American lives. That tragedy of epic proportion
not only temporarily numbed the muckraking and
investigative spirit of US journalists, but also
enabled the executive branch to define the scope
of that "war" and, most important, decide what
tactics it would use - regardless of the
constitutionality of those tactics to "fight and
win" that war.
Governmental abuses such as
the cherry-picking of intelligence before the US
invasion of Iraq, the treatment of prisoners at
Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, and
the secret Central Intelligence Agency-run prisons
across the globe cumulatively chipped away all
semblance of legitimacy from the arguments of the
Bush administration that only it has the right to
decide the modalities of fighting the global war.
Muckraking journalists such as Seymour
Hersh might have shaken the frame of reference for
others at America's elite newspapers. Dana
Priest's reporting of the CIA prisons should be
placed under the same category of journalistic
defiance and refusal to accept the executive
branch's self-assigned title of defender of
America's security as well as its liberty. That
notion violates the basic intent of the founders
of America's constitution.
The Bush
administration has since September 11 asked the
media to trust its judgment, its definition about
the boundaries of executive power, its proclivity
to violate international law in the name of
protecting America's security, and its prerogative
to decide which regimes should stay in power and
which should be ousted.
The US media
should question those perspectives. Hard questions
should be ceaselessly asked about which of those
actions fall within the realm of constitutionality
and which violate the constitution. That is the
role of the media. One of great champions of
American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, once stated
that if he had to decide between having a
government without the press or press without the
government, he would opt for the latter.
The Bush administration, on the contrary,
seems to be saying that the US media should accept
the notion - emphasized by autocratic regimes -
that only the executive branch (or the autocrat)
knows what is best for the government and what
action it should take to promote security.
If the history of checks and balance in
the context of the US government teaches us
something, it is that the media are not supposed
to become subservient, a role they have acquired
since September 11. That is not how American
democracy is supposed to work. What should happen
instead is that the White House be forced to
revisit the very definition of whether it is a
"war against terrorism" or a series of military
actions, which should be carefully carried out and
with ample attention to the rule of law.
The United States has to make sure its
citizens are secure and terrorists are caught,
punished or even eradicated. However, no actions
should be taken to violate the rule of law through
which liberty has always been promoted in the US.
Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of
Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based
defense consultancy. He can be reached at
eahrari@cox.net or stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His
columns appear regularly in Asia Times Online. His
website: www.ehsanahrari.com.
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