Knockout punch or wake-up call?

The bigger they are, the old adage goes, the harder they fall. The terrorists who struck the United States last September 11 understood this, and chose their targets accordingly. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, dealing a wicked body blow to the military industrial complex by crashing an airliner into the Pentagon and toppling the ultimate symbol of U.S. global hegemony, the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The damage to life and property was enormous, but something even larger lies beneath the bodies and the rubble: our freedom.

Our freedom, we are told by the likes of U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, is something we’re going to have to set aside for now. To that end, a few weeks ago, Ashcroft announced a sweeping reorganization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, converting an agency conceived to fight organized crime into a domestic espionage unit with, thanks to the PATRIOT Act near-unanimously passed by both houses of Congress last October, unprecedented powers to infiltrate the lives of ordinary Americans. Later, we hear that President Bush wants to create a major new bureaucracy—the Department of Homeland Defense—to better coordinate our domestic safety.

These are difficult times, we are told. America is at war. That may be so, but it’s hard to imagine anyone more ill-equipped to oversee the delicate balance between liberty and security than Ashcroft, an unabashed prude whose religious fundamentalism is on par with the Muslim extremists behind the terrorist attack on America. “Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” Benjamin Franklin said more than 200 years ago. If he were alive today, Franklin might have added, “They deserve John Ashcroft.”

Whether this is what and who we truly deserve is beside the point. It’s what we’re getting. Forget about that pesky Phoenix memo, which demonstrates that FBI agents in the field already have all the power they need to stop terrorism in its tracks, if only their higher-ups would read and heed their reports. Forget that there are already more than a dozen agencies involved in protecting our national security. Forget the fact that these agencies are rarely held accountable for their failures. What we need, what we’re getting, is more cops and less rights. Of course, these agencies need to be in better communication with each other. But Ashcroft, the Bush administration, and the present Congress, if left unchecked, will succeed in turning one of freedom’s most noble projects, the United States of America, into a police state.

Thanks to the terrorists and our failed leadership, America is down for the count. But we’re not out. The test of any true champion comes when lying flat on the canvas. It’s not too late to turn the terrorist’s knockout punch into a wake-up call.

All we have to do is get up. Quickly.