[Mb-civic] Time to Ask: Who Are We? - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Time to Ask: Who Are We?

By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, January 8, 2006; B07

President Bush concentrated in recent speeches on answering a question 
key to his war on global terrorism: Who is the enemy? But events and 
institutions conspire now to force Bush and all Americans to address a 
different question: Who are we?

Are we a nation in which the rule of law prevails even in times of 
emergency? Or has the coming of a new millennium, new technologies and 
the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, altered the underlying values 
and norms of American society in ways we have not had time to 
understand, much less codify?

<>Such broad questions peek out of the rising challenges from Congress, 
the courts, the media and others to Bush's insistence on the need for 
greater secrecy and far-reaching presidential powers to counter wartime 
dangers.

The Supreme Court is not likely to address those societal questions 
directly when it decides in the near future on the imprisonment, without 
access to the courts, of Jose Padilla, an American citizen as well as an 
al Qaeda suspect. And newspaper exposs on secret CIA prisons abroad and 
warrantless surveillance by the National Security Agency at home don't 
pose those big thoughts upfront. But the undercurrent of a historic 
identity check runs through those and other recent events.

The sense of a restoring of balance could be glimpsed even in the case 
of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, which in its own squalid way suggests the 
ending of a particularly self-indulgent moment in Washington history.

Eras flash by with startling velocity in today's hyper-connected, 
hyper-informed global society. The first five-year slice of the 21st 
century came to an end last weekend as Abramoff was striking a bargain 
with prosecutors to plead guilty to fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy 
charges. Coincidence? Or a wave of excess cresting and starting to 
recede? Here's why I think it is the latter:

A millennium mentality -- a psychological bubble in which people 
convince themselves that things are suddenly and irrevocably different, 
that old rules and laws don't apply to this particular 
moment/decade/generation -- dominated and helped corrupt the years on 
both sides of the changing of the century. Think of it as the 
too-many-zeroes syndrome.

That attitudinal matrix -- Germans call it zeitgeist -- spread across 
and out of the U.S. stock market and then hung on longer in global 
politics and business, especially after Sept. 11 and the U.S. response 
suggested that the world had spun onto a different, far more threatening 
axis.

Americans demanded that President Bush change the world and the nation, 
with Congress forcing an ill-conceived Department of Homeland Security 
on the administration and passing the USA Patriot Act in a 
whatever-it-takes rush. Bush and Vice President Cheney, it must be said, 
were eager to go in that direction anyway -- and have stayed on it 
longer than many in Congress, the media or the courts seem able or 
willing to sustain in the absence of new attacks at home.

Laws are not immutable. What is reasonable behavior, by the state or by 
individuals, changes as circumstances change. Courts exist to decide 
that. But the acceptance of the rule of law serves to root societies in 
their most innate and entrenched values. In times of significant 
upheaval -- such as these times -- the rule of law anchors what should 
not be changed in haste and superficiality.

The Padilla case is a good illustration of what I mean. Padilla was 
arrested in 2002 under suspicion of plotting to set off a "dirty" 
radioactive device in Chicago. Designated by Bush as an enemy combatant, 
he was held for three years without charges and for much of that time 
without access to counsel.

He turns out to have been a much smaller and less dangerous fish, 
according to charges finally filed against him in late November. That 
the Justice Department did not move much more quickly -- and less 
grudgingly -- to extend him his constitutional rights undercuts the 
administration's claim that it does everything in its power to respect 
the rule of law consistent with national security.

What happened in the Padilla case amounts to disrespect for the rule of 
law -- as does the failure over four years to amend the 1978 federal 
statute that prohibits warrantless eavesdropping.

Such disrespect for established legal tradition is a clear if implicit 
statement from the president and his aides about whom they think 
Americans are becoming in this stressful era of change and danger. But 
it is a question they alone will not get to settle.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/06/AR2006010601484.html
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