What if it Was You?

A man is in custody after FBI agents and police raided his apartment recently in New York City. We are told he is suspected of having links to al-Qaeda. We are told little else. We do not know his name, where he is being held, or the particular crimes he is accused of other than "being an associate" of al Qaeda. The crimes he is suspected of plotting, according to authorities, are unclear. If the man is tried before a secret tribunal or in a closed court, we might never know. All we do know is that a suspected terrorist was taken into custody. In these days of heightened paranoia and increased reliance on the government to protect us, that is often enough. I suspect many will be satisfied we are safer now that this unknown man is in custody for plotting unspecified crimes. Many perhaps, but hopefully not all.

What if someday the government comes for you? What if it is claimed that you are plotting a terrible outrage, so terrible in fact that the threat and scale of your plot, and the methods used to thwart it, cannot be revealed lest it inspire other malcontents and evildoers, and help them to evade detection in their plotting? You might be detained and interrogated in secret and your location be unknown to all but your interrogators. You will simply have disappeared. You could neither publicly contest your imprisonment or challenge the evidence gathered lest its existence and the methods used for its acquisition be revealed. Perhaps the verdict would be announced, perhaps not. If it were announced, chances are it would simply be stated that a "terrorist" had been apprehended, tried, convicted, sentenced and imprisoned in an undisclosed location. The public would be satisfied that violence had been thwarted and that they are safer than they had been before.

We are not there yet, but arguments have been made and the ground prepared. It might take only one spectacular outrage to rally the public and push us to the point where the rights of the accused are viewed as obstacles to public safety rather than bulwarks of our liberty. Society is hardly defenseless. It has police and prisons to protect it. The indiviual only has the law and his rights. Unfortunatley, those laws and rights are increasingly seen as burdens when the lives and the safety of our communities are at risk.

The odds are if we surrender our rights, we will never get them back. We need those rights because the individual will always have more to fear from society than society has to fear from the individual. Nevertheless, it seems the era of "Perry Mason" has been replaced by the era of "Law and Order."