War on Terrorism policies in America - Essay Example

Throughout its history, the United s has faced many enemies both from outside its borders and from within. A few wars were fought on American soil in the 19th century, but since those times, America has conducted military action for the large part in other countries and abroad. Most times in the past, America and other modern nations fought wars in a traditional manner; that is, with commonly recognized and agreed to tactics and with modernized weaponry. However, there are clear examples of when American forces used "untraditional" or (even "guerilla") tactics to win wars, such as in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. These tactics seem to work in all cases for the more maneuverable, more mobile, more agile, and the less powerful in terms of military strength. Today, however, the United States boasts the largest military in the world in terms of spending and strength. With such an unwieldy imperial force, the tactics the United States employed to win its most storied wars are no longer an option. Terrorism is a problem for the United States precisely because it cannot defend against it, for the same reasons the British could not win the Revolutionary War. The first reason is of course military mobility, with the ability to attack specific targets for the highest effect. The second reason has to do with a strong ideology. Americans in the Revolutionary War were guided by an emotional attachment to freedom and liberty; the British were attached to political goals. This situation could not be truer when it comes to terrorists and American forces today. One is guided by religious ideologies, and the other is guided by political objectives. Because America is not guided by ideology in a fight against its enemies, Americans are rarely willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve the goal of defeating its enemies. In the Civil War, constitutional liberties like habeas corpus were suspended to help the war. As a result, enemies of the president were imprisoned. Although terrorism is a significant threat to the United States, the solution is to create multilateral policy solutions to a complex issue. The concept of terrorism (that is, the causing of fear as a means to coercive political ends) has existed for centuries. In the Western world, Guy Fawkes is seen as the first true terrorist with his effort to destroy English Parliament in 1605 by placing gunpowder beneath the building. In the American colonies, the Sons of Liberty attacked property of the British in the Americas because of their opposition to British rule and the Stamp Act. Through the rest of the 18th and 19th centuries, noteworthy accounts of terrorist tactics moved further East, through Eastern Europe and into the Middle East coming off centuries of relatively stable rule under the now defunct Ottoman Empire. With the Empire's collapse, armed political groups now vied for power through the vast expanses of the Middle East, which would lead to the political instability still in effect. Modern-day Islamic terrorist organizations oppose the Western world culturally and politically, and attempt to defend or promote Islamic culture by means of violent acts. This is characterized by many supporters as a "war" (or "Jihad"), whether as a means of retribution or religious punishment for the West's aggression. The United States, in late 2001, responded to terrorist attacks by declaring a so-called "war on terrorism". Terrorism today, to most Westerners, refers to terrorism inspired by Islam. This radical shift to religious, or cultural, aspects of the terrorist act separates it from the 18th and 19th century traditions of strictly political acts of terror. Although Islamic terrorism certainly has political aspects to it, it is still ideologically justified in the language of the Islamic faith. Tokens like the Quran, Allah, and Jihad are used to create support for what are actually political goals. However, Islamic terrorism exists within many different countries in the Middle East, as opposed to past examples like IRA or the RAF, which existed strictly in Ireland and Germany respectively. The distribution of this new kind of terrorism makes it difficult to defend against, especially as they infiltrate Western societies to both learn from them and to attack them. The Patriot Act, a statute enabling the United States government additional surveillance tactics to "intercept and obstruct" terrorism, was enacted in October 2001. These privileges included eases on restrictions on foreign intelligence gathering, additional powers to regulate financial transactions, and increases in powers to conduct searches on telephone and electronic communication without proper warrants (Chang). By expanding the official definition of domestic terrorism, the Patriot Act created a large umbrella of new powers for combating terrorism on American soil. However, these new powers were created only after severe terrorist attacks. Much like the suspension of constitutional liberties during the Civil War, there was likely no debate about the content of the Patriot Act, which was drafted and passed in the heat of the moment after the most deadly attacks in the history of the United States. Moreover, by allowing surveillance without warrants, the Patriot Act is, in fact, unconstitutional. The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 was a confidential draft legislation made by the U. S. Department of Justice that would have further expanded the federal government's powers. Nicknamed "Patriot II", the legislation would have limited judicial review (the power of the courts to strike down legislation as unconstitutional), and therefore would have removed one branch of government from the process of checks and balances. Among the acts of the 2003 DSE was a DNA database of terrorist suspects, warrantless searches based on foreign intelligence, a larger list of capital crimes, and an expansion of police powers to spy on domestic terrorists (EFF). Reportedly, the 2003 DSE did not pass because it challenged the legal reasoning for already existing surveillance tactics used by government agencies like the National Security Agency. In other words, it would have made officially legal those acts that were already unofficially legal, demonstrating again that, like Lincoln's suspension of the constitution in wartime, making legally questionable decisions in the heat of war is rarely a good idea. Under these enhanced security policies, there were three particularly questionable tactics the government used to engage in counter-terrorism activities. The first was the well-known case of warrantless wiretapping, which was provided for under the Patriot Act. Section 206 of the Act allowed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to issue multi-point surveillance, which means the surveillance (or wiretap) would focus on the targeted individual, rather than his or her device. Although this new direction in wiretaps modernized the process by allowing multi-point surveillance, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court's authority differs from civilian power in that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court need not have a specific place, or even a specific target, to intercept communication before issuing the order. What this means is that the FISC needs only a vague reason, and a vague description of a target without a name, to proceed with a wiretap (DeRosa). The second set of questionable tactics under the Patriot Act includes the use of warrantless searches on terrorist suspects, particularly by the National Security Agency. From 2001 to 2006, the NSA reportedly collected a list of close to phone call records made after the terrorist attacks on September 11. Although the legitimacy of this database was upheld in court by the Patriot Act (which is itself has been challenged on constitutional grounds), these warrantless searches in phone records were "secretly collected from the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth" (Cauley). Having these companies give third party to the government for money is, however, no different from service or goods providers in any other industry giving consumer information to the government. The precedent of warrantless searches on the part of the government proved that, by giving money in exchange for consumer information, private information is up for sale. Rather than instituting law to protect privacy, the government paid private companies to violate constitutional rights. The most prominent of these constitutional rights being violated is the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures, requiring the judicial sanctioned search and arrest warrants that are supported by probable cause. The Fourth Amendment, however, is contradicted by legislation that leaves it nominally protected and substantively undermined by allowing those in government to sidestep the act of obtaining a warrant to gather intelligence if it is claimed to be for the purpose of "foreign intelligence". The Patriot Act "violates the Fourth Amendment by failing to provide notice-even after the fact-to persons whose privacy has been compromised" (ACLU). The Fifth Amendment likewise prevents government abuses in the judicial system by eliminating the possibility of indefinite sentences by guaranteeing a due process trial. According to the ACLU, the Patriot Act allows indefinite incarceration of persons without due process, and puts those who are associated with political groups that are later regarded as terrorist organizations at risk for deportation (ACLU). The Sixth Amendment, like the previous two sets of rights, relates to federal prosecution. In the Sixth Amendment, the accused are guaranteed the right to a speedy and public trial and to a trial by an impartial jury. The concept of "secret evidence", introduced by late 20th- and 21st-century counter-terrorist legislation, violates the Sixth Amendment right of immigrants to see the evidence against them, which is a crucial aspect of a fair trial. The use of "secret evidence" allows the government to keep immigrants detained for indefinite periods, whether they have substantive evidence to charge the individual with or not. "The Sixth Amendment protects the rights of citizens and immigrants alike to confront their enemies. Reliance on secret evidence violates this right" (Bergen). These provisions are constitutionally problematic and represent the same kind of conflict between constitutional liberty and the perceived need for security (or centralized power) seen in previous times of war. Laws against terrorism either transcend national borders in the form of international conventions, resolutions, and legislation, or they fall within the particular legal frameworks of particular nations around the world. Since 2001, many of the world's modern nations drafted their own particular national or federal legislative measures to participate in the international movement toward collective enforcement of anti-terrorist objectives. India passed the Prevention of Terrorist Activities Act in 2002, Australia passed Australian anti-terrorism legislation in 2004, Canada enacted the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act in 2001, Indonesia adopted Government Regulation in Lieu of Law in 2002, the United Kingdom adopted the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act in 2001, and the United States adopted the Patriot Act that same year (Carters Professional Association). This coordinated movement toward a strategy of counter-terrorism was orchestrated by a UN effort at combating the effects of international terrorism on member states through cooperation. The United Nations, a complex body of the world's powers, has been instrumental in the creation of a universal set of guidelines for participating in the fight against politically-oriented terrorist attacks. Since 1963, the UN has developed 13 different legal instruments to prevent terrorist acts around the world, including the Nuclear Terrorism Convention in 2005 and the 1999 International Convention for the Suppression of the Financing of Terrorism. As recently as 2006, the UN General Assembly voted in the United Nations Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, a central instrument for unifying the efforts of already existing international counter-terrorism channels. The UN Security Council drafted in late September 2001 a binding resolution creating an exchange of intelligence between member states, and the creation of an international Counter Terrorism Committee. These actions caused a majority of the UN's members to adopt national or federal laws to comply with the mandates (UN Security Council). Terrorism in its modern form is a tremendously complex problem, and is one that requires a multifaceted approach. Recent steps taken by the United Nations to centralize every nation's counter-terrorism efforts is commendable, since only by cooperation and collaboration can the United States legally acquire the information and intelligence it needs to effectively fight the enemy. The United States requires intelligence because it is structurally incapable of fighting in the same way as its terrorist enemies, which prefer untraditional, guerilla tactics. In addition, the United States is not fighting in service to some ideology as its enemies are. Since the United States is fighting only in service of some political goal, not the underlying principles of that goal, it is inevitably less committed to victory than its enemies are. Accordingly, the United States must find an advantage somewhere, and this advantage likely will come through unilateral cooperation between many nations pooling their resources together for the common good. Sacrificing individual liberties, like the suspension of constitutional rights during the Civil War, may seem like a good idea during the heat of battle; however, the damage is done when America is forced to sway even farther from its central ideology of liberty, making the American fight even more political and even less principled. In order to use traditional methods of fighting in conjunction with a winning strategy, the United States must maintain the liberty of its citizens while using the resources of the international community not in a war against terrorists, but to enforce international law against terrorist activity. Works Cited ACLU. Surveillance Under the USA PATRIOT Act. 3 April 2003. 2009 . Bergen, Jennifer Van. Repeal the USA Patriot Act. 1 April 2002. 2009 . Carters Professional Association. International Anti-Terrorism Law Resources. 2001. 2009 . Cauley, Leslie. NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls. 11 May 2006. 2009 . Chang, Henry J. The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. 2009. 2009 . DeRosa, Mary. "Roving Surveillance Authority under FISA." 2005. Patriot Debates. 2009 . EFF. EFF Analysis of "Patriot II". 2007. 2009 . UN Security Council. Security Council Calls on All States to Intensify Efforts to Eliminate International Terrorism. September 2001. 2009 . Read More