We are dedicating this page to the friends and families of those killed or injured during the cowardly attack on an innocent American civilian population on 9/11/01; also to the rescue workers and volunteers who have given so much of themselves to help during this tragedy - some have given all.

"America, America, God shed His grace on thee.
And crown thy good, with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!"

~ Katharine Lee Bates-- 1893~

'Beware the Fury Of an Aroused Democracy' 
Lessons from World War II. 

BY STEPHEN E. AMBROSE 
Monday, October 1, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT 

We yearn for national unity. We are less than a year away from an election that split us 50-50. On Sept. 10, we were evenly split on what to do with the bulging surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund, on whether to raise or lower taxes and how to do it, on the need for a missile defense, and on much else. 

On Dec. 6, 1941, we were also badly divided, although over a much more momentous issue than Social Security or taxes. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the next morning drew us together as nothing else ever could have. That feeling of unity was best expressed in the phrase heard millions of times during World War II--"We are all in this together." 

The attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center 60 years later has had the same marvelous effect. Every American can feel it. The pride we experience in being Americans has come about not through hubris, or conquest, or achievements in space or communications or medicine, but because we are who we are. 


"What kind of people do they think we are?" Winston Churchill asked immediately after Pearl Harbor. This time, as 60 years go, we want to show them. But this is a new kind of war. It will not be fought in great battles, pitting millions of young men against each other. It will not be concluded with an unconditional surrender. 
The continental United States was not a battleground after Pearl Harbor. Sixty years later, we are all targets. That makes us more like the British, Germans, Japanese, Italians, Russians, Chinese and others were in World War II. 

One of the first things you learn in the Army is that, when you and your fellow soldiers are within range of enemy artillery, rifle fire, or bombs, don't bunch up. A sweeping offensive against the terrorist isn't going to happen, as they are so scattered, so well hidden, do not rely on their manufacturing plant to supply them with the tools of war (instead they take those tools from us), have little to nothing to lose (as in Afghanistan) and in most cases not territory or government to defend. 

With regard to Osama bin Laden, recall that the Soviet Union, with its own territory bordering on Afghanistan, could not conquer him or the Taliban. And in the 19th century, the world's greatest military power, Britain, could not prevail in Afghanistan. 

So we must go over, in largest part, to the defensive. That means, first of all, don't bunch up. No one had ever before Sept. 11 thought of a jumbo jet as a weapon, but now it is, more deadly than any other weapon available to terrorists save only the atomic bomb, bacteria and poison gas. No one before Sept. 11 ever thought of lower Manhattan, or skyscrapers in every other big city, as temping targets, but they are. And not just to hijacked jumbo jets or to atomic bombs smuggled into New York's East River in the boiler of a tramp steamer, but to bacteria or poison gas spread throughout the building in the air ducts, or as was done in Japan through the subways. 

In this age of electronic revolution, however, it is no longer necessary to pack so many people and office into such small space as lower Manhattan. They can be scattered in neighboring regions and states, where they can work just as efficiently and in far more security. As things are now, the more sophisticated we get, the more advanced our vehicles, buildings and communication become, the more vulnerable we get. Terrorism is the weapon of the weak, but by using modern forms of jujitsu the terrorists can turn our power against us. 


The modern terrorists have at their disposal what amounts to a nearly unstoppable weapon, in some ways the ultimate weapon. It is the man willing to give up his life for his cause. In World War II, the U.S. Navy took its most severe losses not at Pearl Harbor or on the Atlantic, but in the Philippines and Okinawa. What sank more American ships and killed more sailors than any other weapon was the kamikaze. There was no machine then, and no computer now, that can respond as fast or as accurately as the human eye and brain. Kamikaze pilots are relatively easy to train, damn near impossible to stop. 

We must improve and extend our surveillance. To begin, we must understand what happened on Sept. 11. After Pearl Harbor there were congressional investigations to attempt to find out what happened and why our intelligence was caught so badly off-guard. How on earth could American intelligence, at a time of greatly increased tensions between Japan and the United States, lose the Japanese fleet? Scapegoats were found, improvements in intelligence were made. 

Today, the question that demands an answer is: How on earth could more than a dozen armed hijackers get onto four commercial jet airplanes simultaneously? Further, how could a conspiracy that had to involve terrorist cells scattered across the country, the continent, the world, proceed without being discovered? 



This is a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy. It will be long, requiring sacrifice and pain. We will endure losses. But we will prevail, because in the year 2001 and those to follow, as in the years 1941 through to 1945, we are all of us the children of democracy. And no form of government has ever been as efficient or effective in waging war as a democracy. 
On the day World War II began in Europe, then-Col. Dwight Eisenhower wrote his brother Milton, "Hitler should beware the fury of an aroused democracy." So should today's terrorists. And on Nov. 28, 1947, at the dawn of the Cold War, Eisenhower wrote to Walter B. Smith, "It is a grievous error to forget for one second the might and power of this great republic." That is still true, even though today's terrorists did forget. We won't. 

Mr. Ambrose is author, most recently, of "Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew B-24s Over Germany" (Simon & Schuster, 2001). 

Freedom and Security
We can strike a balance on civil liberties. 

BY LAURENCE H. TRIBE 
Saturday, September 29, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT 

The monstrous attack on America that took the lives of thousands on Sept. 11, 2001, sent waves of anguish through the nation, setting in motion a response whose outlines we are just beginning to sketch. The way we complete that sketch will determine whether the terrorists will destroy, more than lives and towering structures, the very foundations of our freedom. 

To watch Congress take up a complex set of antiterrorism measures with lightning speed, with the usually lumbering Senate passing the whole legislative package in under 30 minutes, is a refreshing change. But institutional checks against intemperate action are there for a reason. 

David Hume, in his "Enquiries," said justice must be suspended in times of war. Our Constitution's approach is different, specifying the few limited areas--like the quartering of soldiers in private homes--for which a wartime exception is made, and treating constitutional principles as otherwise universally applicable. 

The Constitution is written mostly in measured rather than absolute terms. Witness the ban on "unreasonable" searches and seizures. As Chief Justice William Rehnquist has written, "The laws will . . . not be silent in time of war, but they will speak with a somewhat different voice." Given the Constitution's flexibility, there can be no excuse for not subjecting all our wartime practices to its scrutiny. 

That said, some proposals, being overdue and entirely constitutional responses to technological change, must be enacted promptly. Existing provisions dealing with biological threats have not kept pace with bioterrorism and should be broadened. Cell phones have made wiretap warrants limited to particular phone lines obsolete; wiretap authority applying to a suspect personally, and regardless of the phone he uses, is sensible and constitutional. So, too, if search warrants suffice to seize non-voicemail messages, they should suffice to seize stored voicemail. 

New legislation need not be limited to measures that catch up with technology. Asset forfeiture and other provisions of our antiracketeering laws should be extended to terrorist groups. Terrorist offenses should be subjected to enhanced penalties and denied the shield of statutes of limitations. Congress should add preventive steps providing greater security, including federalizing airport check-ins, more armed federal marshals on airplanes and trains, tightening federal controls on crop dusters and other private aircraft, and enlarging the budget for hiring and training counterterrorism infiltrators fluent in the suspects' languages. 

Other proposals should be enacted only after tightening safeguards against abuse. For instance, measures to increase sharing of wiretap and other surveillance information within the intelligence community need controls to prevent a recurrence of the FBI's infamous leaks about Martin Luther King's personal life. 

But when asked to confer open-ended powers of a sort that governments crave, Congress should put on the brakes. The Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001 would, for example, give government sweeping authority to detain without bail, and for an indefinite time, any alien--even one whom there is no basis to deport--citing only "reason to believe" the alien "may" "endanger national security." That language is so vague that the existence of judicial review would seem to provide no meaningful safeguard against abuse. 

In the same spirit, the act renders deportable any permanent resident alien who ever contributed to a domestic group, including one not then designated a terrorist organization, any subgroup of which ever threatened to use a weapon against person or property. That would make resident aliens deportable if they contributed to any of several pro-life organizations, for example. Those provisions endanger freedom of political association and must be narrowed. 

In at least one crucial respect, the response to the terrorist attack shows a regard for human rights lacking in our response to Pearl Harbor, when we interned Americans of Japanese descent, none of whom had been accused of wrongdoing. How different was the sight of New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, soon followed by President Bush, appealing eloquently to Americans not to seek revenge on their fellow citizens who happen to be Muslims. 

Grassroots reactions in this instance have lagged behind our political leaders, as vigilante attacks mount and increasing numbers call for ethnic profiling of Arabs and Arab-Americans. But there is no sound law-enforcement rationale for detention by visual association, for there exists face-recognition software for picking individuals out of crowds far more efficiently and accurately than by the crude use of racial characteristics. Such face-recognition software can and should be deployed--and improved. 

There is, of course, a built-in political check when stringent security measures affect us all equally. When Congress weighs the virtues of proposals that would enable the authorities to seize a suspect's voicemail messages or eavesdrop on e-mail communications, we can be reasonably confident the scales aren't unfairly tipped against individual privacy. But there is danger, far from trivial, that the laws we enact today, in response to yesterday's terrorist attack, will move the baseline of privacy expectations against which the tools proposed to deal with tomorrow's terrorist attack are assessed. 

When the Supreme Court held in June that using infrared technology to measure heat emanating from a home to discover what is inside constitutes a search--and is thus in violation of the Fourth Amendment absent a valid warrant--it circumscribed the "power of technology to shrink the realm of guaranteed privacy." But it also cautioned that once any technology is "in general public use," its employment by law enforcement agencies to pierce personal privacy might no longer count as a "search" at all. In fact, the public's tolerance for just a bit more government surveillance will grow as authority previously ceded sets an ever-moving precedent. Preventing this phenomenon altogether would be a tall order. At least, we should limit the momentum of measures adopted in an emergency by making all the powers we grant temporary, and designed to lapse unless re-enacted by Congress. 

It's possible, of course, that what Congress fails to cut back the Supreme Court will strike down. But even if we could count on the Rehnquist court's misguided belief that it has all the answers, we should act on a theory of "better safe than sorry," and resist the temptation to trust the judiciary to trim the excess. In any event, passing the buck to judges nurtures the undemocratic myth that courts are the sole custodians of constitutional truth. 

It is "We the People" in whose name the Constitution was ordained and established; it is we who bear the responsibility to live by it even when the temptation to set it aside seems irresistible. It might be nice if there were a mast to which we could tie ourselves--as Ulysses did to steel himself against the call of the Sirens--to assure the survival of liberty and equality, but there is none. With or without a Supreme Court steadfastly dedicated to civil rights and liberties, each of us must follow an inner compass that points to the Constitution's true north. 

Mr. Tribe is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. His latest book is "American Constitutional Law" (Foundation Press, 3rd ed., 2000). 

Page 15 - 911 Memorial

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