John Carroll

It's a pleasure to see everyone again at this annual event. Our topic tonight is “Global Security After 9/11”, and I was thinking this afternoon before coming over here as to how that was looking. I realized that I didn't have to leave my desk to have any number of examples of how that is affecting our lives at the newspaper and in this country.  For example, we initially had scheduled our Foreign Editor, Marjorie Miller, to be part of this panel but she, on very short notice, had to rush off to Baghdad on Sunday because the regime there has been very obstreperous in not issuing visas to our reporters.  We've had a tough time with that and, as often happens in these situations, they don't tell you why they don't like you they just don't give you a visa. Suddenly Marjorie, who's supposed to be staying right in L.A, is the one who gets the visa and she rushes off, not necessarily to do much reporting, but simply to persuade the Iraqis to let other people in and then let her go home.  So she's there and not here. 

The second thing that reminded me was a conversation I had yesterday with one of our younger correspondents who has just been through some training that we're providing the people covering wars. I'm an old war correspondent, and I like to pretend I know all the answers, but she presented me with an issue that I had not been familiar with. She'd been taught how to use these suits that you wear to save yourself if you happen to have the misfortune of being in a poison gas attack, and she said that if you're not with an Army unit, where they know how to wash you off and clean you off, you're pretty much stuck in the thing, and I really don't know how to deal with that.  I had no advice at all to offer short of simply avoiding being in a gas attack. 

Then, this morning, we learned that two freelance journalists who were on assignment for our paper in Colombia had been picked up by guerillas and were being held. So that took the better part of the day in terms of trying to figure out how to deal with that. I don't have anything to say about that tonight because we're trying to be very discrete and not cause any difficulties.  We have heard that perhaps this will take a turn for the better but we don't have any confirmation, so I can't really tell you anything more other than to provide it as an example of why this is very much in our minds as it is, I'm sure, on yours.

Let me introduce our panelists.  They are all seasoned journalists, some of the best we have at the Los Angeles Times. I will say right now they have all won tons of awards – truckloads. At this end is Richard Boudreaux, a veteran foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and for other outlets.  He recently became our Mexico City Bureau Chief.  Prior to that he has been our resident correspondent or bureau chief in Rome, in Moscow, and in Managua.  Before that he was a correspondent with the Associated Press in Chile, Bolivia, Mexico City, Argentina and in New York City.  He holds a Bachelor's degree from Northwestern University and a Master's degree from Columbia University in international affairs.  He, like many of our foreign correspondents, is sent to places where he is not stationed.  In the recent year or two he has been, for example, in Turkey and in Israel

Next to him is James Flanigan, Senior Economics Editor and columnist.  Those of you who read the Business pages of the Los Angeles Times have seen his column there for many years.  Before wrote the column in Los Angeles he wrote a column for the New York Bureau and, prior to that, he had an extensive and distinguished career with Forbes Magazine.  He was the bureau chief in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London and Houston and, at the end of his career with Forbes he was Assistant Managing Editor.  And still earlier, he had what sounds to me like the absolute peak of his career at the very beginning: he worked at the New York Herald Tribune and among his assignments reporter in the Paris bureau.  He's a New Yorker and a graduate of Manhattan College.

Next to me is Doyle McManus.  He's our Washington Bureau Chief, a job he has held since 1996. His career in Washington covered many things including the White House, foreign policy and national security.  He has worked in the New York Bureau, and he has been a reporter here in Los Angeles.  Before joining the Times he was with United Press International in the Middle East and was also Belgrade Bureau Chief.  He's a San Francisco native; he is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford, and a Fulbright scholar at the University of Brussels in Belgium. He's the author, or co-author, of three books on public affairs. He may look familiar to you: he's on television a lot, and he is very often on PBS's program, Washington Week in Review. 

And finally, Henry Weinstein, who is our Legal Affairs Correspondent.  He works here in Los Angeles and he has covered general subjects in labor as well as the law. In the Bay Area, he worked for the San Francisco Examiner, he worked for the New York Times as a freelance contributor, and as a staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal. He is a native of Los Angeles, and he has undergraduate and law degrees from UC Berkeley. He is a member of the California Bar and he is our resident expert in the Constitution, on courts and American civil liberties. 

We will commence with Richard Boudreaux, who will give you a brief overview of the post-9/11 world beyond our own shores.

Richard Boudreaux

Thank you, John.  I'm happy to be here.  I was asked in my capacity as a foreign correspondent for the Times to look around the globe and address the question “Is the world any safer after 9/11?”  So I thought about it real hard and here's my answer.  No.   That's the short answer. The long answer, I suppose, depends on who you ask and I think for most the answer would probably be no.  If you ask people in Turkey, where I spent the first part of this month, a lot of them would say “no” because, like a lot of other countries in the neighborhood of Iraq, they're worried about the fallout, both literal and figurative, from a war in the coming months.  They've been negotiating with the Bush administration for several months but they're reluctant to take part in or back an American invasion, not just out of fear of Saddam's weapons but they're just not sure whether the Bush administration can manage, the consequences of a war in Iraq with Saddam. Iraq might go through a very messy dismemberment right on their border. 

If you ask the French or the Germans if the world is safer since 9/11, I think they'd say “no.” We here, In the United States, may or may not feel more secure against an attack by Al Qaeda.  The Europeans feel far more vulnerable.  If you look at what happened last year to a group of French and German tourists who were killed in an attack in Tunisia or 11 French engineers who were killed outside their hotel in Pakistan, both of those attacks were the work of what's left of Osama bin Laden's gang.  And I think we'd get the same answer from the Australians, especially after the bombing in the Bali discotheque.  “No,” they'd say, “It's not safer out there.  We've become targets, too.”

On the other hand, if you ask people in say, Angola or Sierra Leone, they might say, “Yes, our world is safer.”  Both those countries ended long civil wars last year and you could argue that 9/11 was a factor in pushing the combatants toward peace.  If you ask Colombians they might say, “Yes.”  After 9/11 the United States sent a clear message to the government that the Colombian leaders have a freer hand to take on leftist guerillas. So instead of focusing on peace talks, the Colombians have militarized the conflict with a major boost in U.S. military aid.  It's a very risky strategy, a strategy that's inflamed conflicts in other countries, but so far this hard line has worked because the guerillas have been quiet for several months now.  That may not last.

 If you ask the Israelis and Palestinians, I think they would have to say “No”, and you'd get the same answer from a lot of people in Russia and Chechnya.  Both those conflicts, I think, have gotten a lot nastier since 9/11, and one could argue that this has been in large part a result of 9/11, which I'll explain a bit later. 

But let me get back to Al Qaeda and the threat to Europe.  The first target of Bush's so-called War on Terror was Al Qaeda.  What happened?  We invaded Afghanistan, threw out the Taliban, bombed Al Qaeda's nerve center, bin Laden and his guys got away and since then about 3,000 suspected members of this network have been arrested.  So, is the world safer from a big Al Qaeda attack like 9/11?  I have to say “Yes”, because their command and control is scattered, it's a lot weaker. But on the other hand bin Laden is alive and well, and he has sent out word to his followers that, everyone who can do something should go do it.  Of course, the network is atomized and may be disorganized, but there are enough of these guys out there – young men motivated by a personal sense of jihad that they could do something really nasty. In October Al Qaeda made a very public and specific threat to Britain, Germany, France and Italy. Not long after that, we started hearing about credible threats to gas the London underground with cyanide and then we heard about this discovery of Ricin in London.

My colleague based in Paris who covers European security issues, reports that law enforcement agencies in Europe are alarmed and convinced that Al Qaeda is planning a chemical attack there.  Because Europe is a softer target, it's much easier to get into Europe from outside than it is in the United States, and once you're in Europe you can move from one country to another pretty easily. So the Europeans are feeling a lot more vulnerable.

Let me step back a bit.  I think that it's important to look at the world more broadly and not just from an American or European perspective.  Right after 9/11 when Bush declared war on terrorism he wasn't talking about the kind of terrorism that most of the people in the world live in fear of.  He was talking specifically about Al Qaeda and the threat to America.  If you look around the world, most of the world's terror is very localized.  It's rooted in narrow, parochial conflicts that have nothing to do with the United States, that are part of conflicts which unlike our battle with Al Qaeda, can be negotiated and in some cases are in the process of that.

Most of these conflicts have dragged on since 9/11 as if 9/11 had never happened. They go unnoticed by most Americans, some of them without much intervention or attention from Washington.  But what's interesting about 9/11 is that Bush's focus on terrorism has changed the international climate and therefore has changed the dynamic of these conflicts, some for the better and some for the worse.  In some conflicts it has put the guerilla groups that use terror tactics on the defensive and moved them to the negotiating table or more seriously down the road toward talking peace, not only in Sierra Leone and Angola, as I mentioned earlier, but also in Sudan and Sri Lanka and some other countries. 

On the other hand, the post-9/11 world and the new focus on anti-terrorism has militarized and inflamed other conflicts by encouraging hard-line governments to abandon peace talks knowing that Washington would not disapprove of this approach.  In Russia, for example, President Putin was quick to brand the war in Chechnya against separatists in Chechnya who want to separate from Russia, as a direct extension of the international war on terrorism.  The United States has turned a blind eye since 9/11 to Russian atrocities in Chechnya, and the war there has flared up. We saw the results of that last year when the Russians gassed a Moscow theatre and killed nearly 200 hostages being held by the Chechnyan rebels.

Take another example; Israel since 9/11.  My colleague there, Tracy Wilkinson, who has just finished four years of brilliant work over there, tells me that Israel has been very successful since 9/11 in recasting the debate over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, painting the Palestinians as terrorists and completely eliminating the idea of territorial claims from the discourse.  So in that sense the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is more dangerous because Israel now has carte blanche to use all military force to achieve its aims. The United States has completely backed off and Israeli actions that, before 9/11 would have drawn U.S. condemnation now go uncommented on.  Meanwhile, the Palestinians, under Arafat, have never really fully grasped what 9/11 meant to the Americans, and consequently they never adapted and they're turning out to be the big losers. 

Finally, I would like to mention the country that I report on, Mexico.  If we think about whether the world is safer since 9/11 you have to think in ways other than just conflicts and terrorism.  Let's think back to just before 9/11. President Fox of Mexico was in Washington meeting with Bush.  They had a very good meeting and they agreed to start negotiations on a deal that, as proposed by Fox, would allow millions of Mexican migrant workers into the United States legally to go back and forth, and have jobs, so they wouldn't have to sneak in as they do now.  But 9/11, and now Iraq, has distracted President Bush so any serious engagement with Mexico about negotiating such a deal is off.  In the meantime, hundreds of Mexicans since 9/11 have died trying to sneak into the United States just as they were doing before. So if you ask any Mexican who has survived this kind of trip, they would have to say that since 9/11 it's not any safer, or any more dangerous to get into the United States, but certainly the promise of a safer world for them has been frustrated.

Doyle McManus

As Richard mentioned, the theme we arrived with tonight was the question “Are we safer or not 14 months after September 11?”  Now, I've spent most of the last several months covering the Bush administration and its seemingly inexorable march to the brink of war with Iraq, and so I found myself asking, “How can I talk about what I think is really Topic A and what is surely a topic that is high in your minds and somehow wrestle it around to sound like an answer to are we safer or not! In fact, as I thought about it, there is a direct link between these two questions because the debate over whether we should go to war with Iraq really boils down to a debate between two camps, one which believes that we will be safer in the long run if we overthrow Saddam Hussein and the other which fears that we will be less safe if we go to war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.  So in a sense, one could argue that after 9/11 almost every question does boil itself down in some sense to that question of “Are we safer or not?” 

But you notice I said “the debate over going to war with Iraq.”  Is there a debate over going to war with Iraq? Here I'm going to take very briefly a short  of journalistic detour before saying a few words about the issue itself.  I'm going to ask the question, “Well, is there a debate about war in Iraq or has there been enough debate?”  At the beginning of this week, I was at Harvard talking with a seminar of generals and admirals from the United States and Russia, a remarkable cross-cultural exercise that's been going on since the fall of the Soviet Union – 30 very smart, very tough general officers from the two superpowers, or the former two superpowers, of the Cold War.  I talked a little bit about Iraq and the Russian generals were in an uproar and they said, “You Americans, you're rushing towards war with Iraq and you don't even seem to be debating whether it's a good idea or not.”  Then it was the turn of the American generals and they said, “You folks in Washington, you seem to be rushing toward a war with Iraq without debating whether it's a good idea or not.”

The American generals, for different reasons were worried about the same question: “Have we spent enough time thinking about the pros and cons? In particular it’s striking to me that those American generals were worried in a sense about the prospect – they didn't use this word, this is my term – were worried about the prospect of a kind of “Vietnam phenomena,” where we might find ourselves in a war that we went into with the best of intentions, and the best of motives, and the best of expectations, but if it goes wrong, and the public feels that we didn't get a chance to think about it and weigh the questions ahead of time, the generals felt that they might be the ones holding the bag and paying the price.

So this crystallized in my own mind the question of whether we had done a good enough job at laying out this debate in our own pages. This is a confession on my part, since I'm one of the people who's supposed to make sure we do that.  I don't think we have done a good enough job and I'll plead guilty with an explanation. We will report on a debate that's out there.  The debate has been slow to come about in many ways because the Democratic Party, or at least the Congressional Democratic Party, decided not to hold a debate on this. But one of the things that we are going to do in the coming weeks is lay out the terms of the debate, lay out the pros and cons of the basic questions at stake here so that our readers get a chance, probably on a Sunday on two open pages or maybe a little less, to have those questions all in one place and weigh those factors.  So what I want to invite you to do, if this is of any interest to you. in the question and answer period is to do a little audience participation and go ahead and tell us which questions you think we ought to be answering in the pages of the Times on this question.

Very briefly let me lay out the terms that are being put forth on both sides.  From the Bush administration: why might a war be necessary? Or, more precisely, why is it necessary to overthrow Saddam Hussein whether by war or, with luck, short of war?  Well, some months ago Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was asked that question at a congressional hearing and his answer was, “Why 9/11?” 

The first time I heard that it sounded to me like a quintessential illogical Don Rumsfeld answer.  Visceral, vigorous but not really bristling with tight logic.  I was unfair to Don Rumsfeld, because I talked to people in the administration who were willing to elaborate a little bit on his terse answer.  His answer really was: 9/11 didn't change the world, it changed our perception of the world.  9/11 didn't invent Al Qaeda; 9/11 didn't invent the phenomena of weapons of mass destruction, but in the view of the Bush administration, and of the intelligence community, it changed our perception of the risks out there.  It meant that the risk of this kind of catastrophic attack on the United States is, and has been for some time, much higher than we were giving credit to and that, therefore, the risks of allowing Iraq and Saddam Hussein to develop these weapons, to deploy these weapons and potentially, but not necessarily, to give them to terrorists groups, is now a risk that we are no longer willing to endure.

On the other side of the issue is the question of risks and costs.  Will a war with Iraq provoke more terrorism against Americans and the Middle East and elsewhere?  The answer is almost surely “yes.”  There's no free lunch in this post-9/11 world.  Will a war with Iraq be difficult and cost casualties both among the American and allied forces fighting it, and among Iraqi forces and probably Iraqi civilians?  The answer is surely “yes.”  We have a new generation of precision munitions in the American armory that, in the view of their proponents, promise an air war that could conceivably be carried out with less civilian casualties than ever before.  That introduces a new element in the moral and ethical question of going to war.  But nevertheless, no one, including those generals I spoke to, is promising a zero casualty war.  Indeed, the American generals I spoke with are afraid that the public may be used to the idea and may be setting its expectations a little too high about how clean a war might be.

Finally, there is the question of the political costs  if the United States goes to war by itself, or with only Britain, or with  Britain and Spain and Bulgaria and a few other allies.  That is a cost that is not easy to quantify, but it is striking to me that the Bush administration does take that cost very seriously.  That's the principal reason the administration decision from the president went to the United Nation's Security Council back in September.  It is the principal reason we are now hearing that they are seriously considering putting off the next debate in the Security Council for a matter of several weeks.  The report, of course, from the weapons inspectors will come, next week, but the debate that follows over whether a resolution or authorization to go to war should occur may actually be put off because the administration knows it doesn't have the support it wants.  It doesn't have the allies lined up, it has not presented enough evidence so we may be in a situation where the crunch point is put off for several weeks.

 Bottom line question -.”Do I think we're going to war?”  I think the answer is that the administration would certainly prefer to get Saddam Hussein out of office without a war.  Imagine the political benefit, if you want to be a political cynic, imagine the political benefit to George W. Bush if he can win this confrontation with Saddam Hussein without a shot being fired.  That would be winning at very low cost.  And we can see in pronouncements every day that the administration is sending messages to everyone possible in Iraq in effect saying, “End this without a war.”  But I am reluctantly convinced that if that doesn't happen, if we get to the end of February, although the timing is hostage to lots of events, and a crack has not occurred in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein is still there, I think at that point we and whatever collection of allies are willing to join us, are probably going to war.

With that, I want to turn the podium over to my friend, Jim Flanigan, who will tell you what some of the other consequences of that might be.

Jim Flanigan

Good evening.  What I can tell you about Iraq and the financial markets, in which you're all involved and interested, and the economies of the world is that for the next month things are muted in anticipation and anxiety.  You see the price of gold going up.  That spells anxiety.  You see the dollar going down.  A lot revolves around Iraq It seems now in the minds of the financial markets of the world or in this other gallery, this important gallery of economic forces, that America really has to get rid of Saddam Hussein.  If things are inconclusive, if Saddam Hussein is there and America seems not to have the will to do what it has boasted it will do, then many countries and nations will see that as a sign that the hand is shaking, as they used to say about the end of the British Empire. You will see the dollar decline, I am assured by economists who know this stuff, and you will see a lot of bad things happen in the world. 

Worse yet, if we go into Iraq and get bogged down, who knows? Nobody ever thought we'd get bogged down in Vietnam.  Then you really have bad consequences.  Then you will see dollars and markets and every other thing go.  February is a short month; before the end of February some kind of answer will be made.  Now, if by some miracle or by assassination, or war Saddam leaves the scene, then objectively there will be, first of all, a bounce in the dollar- but that's not important.  There will be a lot of stuff going on.  Pipelines are already being planned and built to take the natural gas of Iran through Turkey and through Pakistan to India – this all seems rather risky. 

Our administration, our government, and a lot of people in the Middle East are planning for the post-Saddam world of repairing Iraq. This has nothing to do with oil by the way; Iraq is not about oil.  Iraq's oil-producing capacity has declined maybe by 33-40 percent in recent years.  The wells have decayed, the delivery systems have decayed. People say, “Oh, yes.  You're going to Iraq.  There'll be a lot of oil produced.”  If Iraq wanted to produce appreciatively more oil today than it is now producing, it really couldn't do it.  You'd need billions of dollars of investment to repair the fields and repair the piping and all the other appurtenances.  But there is a plan, or at least a vision, of encouraging business in Iraq and around the Middle East.

The Middle East, has 8 percent of the world's population and only 2 percent of the world's economic production.  It has remained resolutely backwards.  It has hurt, and for many years when the price of oil went up everybody said, “Oh, my gosh.  The Arab countries are going to rule the world.”  Well, no, they weren't.  The developed world that uses the petroleum seemed to go along over decades saying, “Hey, you know those people can be backward and their growing population can be ill educated and they can be poor, but they can't hurt us as long as they pump the oil.”  Well, on 9/11 we found out that ignorance and poverty and the kind of things that it breeds – young men who devote their lives to mere scheming and sacrifice for nothing – comes out and backward regions. 

So now there is a resolution, a resolve if you will, in the highest places of our government that we will have economic reform in the Middle East.  There are already funds for entrepreneurs and there's a “Marshall Plan” being discussed  — a Marshall Plan for the Middle East — and there are prominent entrepreneurial people in the Middle East coming to Washington and talking.

I know a man – I was talking to him this morning – Omar Salah from Jordan.  Jordan will be a great beneficiary of the aftermath of this.  So if there is a good resolution in Iraq you will see the world economy pick up and then we can get back to the permanent problems. 

Because of 9/11 and because we were already going into a recession at the time of 9/11 and because we have upped our spending on defense and on homeland security, our economy is not producing a lot of tax revenues. And as you have heard we have a growing budget deficit.  The White House has announced that that’s going to be a $200 billion - $300 billion budget deficit. The consequences of this, if it goes on over time, it creates rising interest rates, but the outlook for the economy depends on the resolution of Iraq.  After that, then all right so you have budget deficits, let's see if the stimulus plans work and if the economy can get going – get going in its productive capacity, get going in its relationship to the countries of Asia.

Another statistic I like to cite is that 66 percent of the people in the world who are between the pages of 15 and 40, those would be the big market ages-- you know, household formation, child bearing and everything like that, the things that make an economy –two-thirds of the world's people in that age group are in Asia.  In the next ten to 20 years, Asia is the action, and, as anybody knows, China is the action and here in Southern California we are connected in a very real way to China. The way we are connected is that our industry is brainpower. As somebody in the apparel industry here explained tome, we do the designing, the cutting, the color manipulation, the size grading, we do all that stuff, and we beam it by computer through the Internet to factories in Asia and then the cloth is put together and then it comes back in through the ports.  So much of our industry is characterized by this.  All of this kind of thing can grow, and as long as we educate our children we can have quite a prosperous economy -- but all of that depends on going forward.

I think the question you really want me to address is “Will the stock market go up this year?” The stock market has been down for three years and if there is this resolution of this Iraq problem, “will the stock market go up this year?”  I say it will.  Yes, I say that there will be a resolution of the Iraqi problem – that Saddam will go, he can go to Miami for all I care, he can go to Disneyland. You could put him up in a Motel 6 or even grander, but it would seem to me that in an economy of expanding vision, where people sense that we have gotten past something in the world, you could very well see a briskness in the business world and that makes for, I guess, some kind of rise in the stock market.  I am almost never right in that kind of thing, but thank you.

Henry Weinstein

Good evening.  Thanks for having us.  As somebody said, “The question at hand is 'are we safer now than we were on 9/11?  I guess my first response to that would be “Safer from whom and safer from what?”  We all obviously have an elevated consciousness about terrorism.  Anytime you walk into an airport or a government building, you're immediately aware that something has changed in this country.  But elevated consciousness doesn't necessarily mean that we're safer.  I mean, for all we know, there could be a terrorist in this hotel right now or there could be a terrorist on my block, on my quite street in Hollywood. All you have to do is think back a few years to Tim McVey, or people that killed park rangers just because they were trying to enforce animal regulations in a federal park, to know that terrorism comes with many faces.  They just don't look like Osama bin Laden.  And while there's a lively debate still about where bin Laden is and what he's up to, there's also a growing debate about whether our response to bin Laden is perhaps endangering us in ways that people don't really want to think about, particularly people that are Middle Eastern-looking, whatever that means  I might add that that includes a lot of Persian Jews who would be among bin Laden's first targets if he had his way.

Just two days after the terrible attacks of September 11 Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont, who was then the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the United States Senate, issued an important warning.  He said, “Trial by fire can refine us, or it can coarsen us.  If we hold to our ideals, then it strengthens us, but if we abandon our democracy to battle terrorists, then they win.”

So the big question for a lot of people is, “What does it mean to abandon our democracy, How would we draw the line?”  That's a tough question.  At the Times we have to do these self-evaluations, so when I was looking back on last year I discovered that fully one-fourth of the stories that I had written, and 40 percent of the stories that I had on the front page, dealt with civil liberties issues that had arisen as a direct result of what happened on September 11. One of those stories was a project that I did with two colleagues, including one of my best colleagues, Mitchell Lansford, who's sitting in the audience here tonight. One of the things that we learned by reviewing United States history is that there are some recurring patterns, and that all those civil liberties, which are very much enshrined in our constitution, are just as elastic as the stock market that Jim Flanigan was talking about a few moments ago. 

Just a few years ago, in 1998, Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote a book about civil liberties in wartime.  The title of the book was All the Laws But One referring to President Lincoln's decision to keep all of our laws except habeas corpus during the Civil War.  The book's essential theme was summed up in a Latin quote that Rehnquist used repeatedly throughout the book, and the quote translated as “In times of war, the laws stand silent.”  In the history of our country there's a recurring theme.  As I said, you go back to 1798 we thought we were going to go to war with France, so we passed the Alien and Sedition laws.  As I said before, Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War; that was later ruled unconstitutional.  In 1917 we passed the law that enabled the United States government to jail almost anybody who raised any questions about our entry into the First World War, including a man named Eugene Victor Debbs who was the head of the Socialist Party and had run for president of the United States four times. We ran another time while he was in jail before Harding pardoned him.

During the Second World War, as many of you may recall, we interred over 100,000 Japanese people. It's still a black mark, I think, on the history of the United States Supreme Court, even though the action was ratified by the Court's two most liberal justices, Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, who rarely disagreed with anything that the man who appointed them, Franklin Roosevelt, did.  Years later it was discovered that those Japanese-Americans posed no threat and they finally got a formal apology and reparations from Congress in 1988. 

In the early 1950s, amidst the Red scare, there was a decision that said basically that if you talk communism, you could be put in jail.  Justice Robert Jackson said in an eloquent phrase that, I think, he later came to regret,  “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.”  A few years later, the court said that the government had overdone it and they pulled back.   

So, what about now?  Just six weeks after 9/11, on October 26, 2001, Congress passed the U.S.A. Patriot Act.  Now whether you like the Patriot Act, or you don't like it, what has happened with the Patriot Act and a number of other enactments since then, is really quite breathtaking.  The government has authorized sneak-and-peek searches conducted without a target's knowledge; it's broadened the government's power to monitor phone and internet communications; and it permits the Attorney General to detain any foreigner believed to threaten national security.  The government also approves secret military tribunals for accused terrorists, wire-tapped attorney-client calls, and is now developing a massive computer system that will monitor every purchase that you make from hospital bills to gasoline.

Now, so far most of the weight of this has not fallen on people like the people sitting in this room, but you don't know.  We're in the very early stages of this crisis, and it's sort of hard to tell how this all happened.  As we know from studying world history, a democracy can go up in flames fast, like it did in Chile, or a democracy can die a death of a thousand cuts.  Earlier this month on our own front page a learned law professor, Jonathan Turley, said, “In less than two years the constitution has gone from an objective to be satisfied to an obstacle to national defense.

We now have court cases going all over about the government's right to deport people in secret and the courts are dramatically split on this.  One judge in Michigan issued a Federal Court of Appeals decision striking down the practice that said “Democracies died behind closed doors.”  Just two months later, another Federal Appeals Court in New Jersey went the other way, saying Well, democracies die behind closed doors sometimes but maybe not as often as they do from open assault or from a military coup. So, eventually the Supreme Court is probably going to resolve this question.  there's a host of other civil liberties questions that have been raised in the past couple of years. There's really not time for me to get into detail, but one of them obviously is the question of whether we're going to create a permanent prison camp for people on the little island near Cuba called Quantanamo Bay.  Now, this may seem like a matter of small moment, but in the increasingly global interdependent world where you might be captured in some foreign country, or a U.S. soldier might be captured somewhere, how do you find the idea of a potentially permanent prison until the end of an undefined war, which the war on terrorism is now?

So, we're just doing our best right now at the paper, at least, to try and write about these things, to go into them in detail.  We've written a fair amount of stories about these subjects and we'll continue to write more about them. Sometimes, after I've written a story on one of these topics I get these anonymous hate mail phone calls and basically the tone of the phone calls, you know, they sort of question my patriotism.  That goes with the territory.  You get nasty calls a fair amount of the time no matter what you're writing about.  But there is something in particular that I would like to say to those anonymous people, if they ever left their number, and that is to remember something that happened in the early 1950s when Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin was falsely accusing a lot of people of being disloyal and being communists.  Edward R. Morrow did a great documentary exposing the terrible things that McCarthy had done, and at the end of the documentary, Morrow said, “We must never confuse dissent with disloyalty.”  I'd like to add my own quote to that which is, “Often, dissent is the highest form of loyalty.”

Thank you.