Pummeling Liberties Only Aids Terrorists : Clinton’s proposal would outlaw peaceful protests and divert law enforcement.

In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, Washington’s otherwise divisive politicians have been remarkably unanimous in recommending that we expand the government’s enforcement and investigative powers to counter the threat of terrorism. They have rallied behind President Clinton’s “Omnibus Counterterrorism Act of 1995,” which until the bombing had been widely criticized for imposing guilt by association and authorizing deportation of immigrants using secret information.

The image of the bombed-out federal building in Oklahoma City makes concerns about constitutional rights seem abstract and arcane, and the common refrain has been that we may all have to give up some of our civil liberties in order to be more secure from terrorists. But the equation posed by that refrain is a false one. While it is true that the legislation proposed would infringe significantly on constitutional rights, it is not true that it would make us more secure from terrorists. Repressing lawful political activities is counterproductive, not counterterrorist.

One of the central premises of the First Amendment is that it provides a safety valve for dissenters. By protecting the right of those unhappy with the status quo to engage in lawful political activity, we promote peaceful mechanisms for achieving social change. Social stability and the democratic process are furthered by guaranteeing that everyone can have their grievances heard and by permitting the minority to organize for political change.

When we suppress otherwise lawful political activity, we do not make society safer; we promote extremism and violence. The proposed counterterrorism act would make it a crime for citizens to support the lawful activities of any organization the President designates terrorist-- a designation not subject to review by courts. It would render deportable as terrorists immigrants who sent medical supplies to a Palestine Liberation Organization-run hospital; donations to Sinn Fein, the Irish Republican Army’s political wing, or school supplies to an African National Congress relief operation. And immigrants accused of such activities could be tried on secret evidence that neither the accused nor his or her lawyer could see.

By rendering peaceful political activity a criminal and a deportable offense, the act would drive groups and individuals engaged in such activity underground, making them harder to track. And by cutting off peaceful avenues for supporting change around the world, the act would support the calls of extremists and proponents of violence. Thus it would promote rather than counter terrorism.

Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said it best in Whitney vs. California in 1929. He wrote that the framers of the First Amendment “knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government, (and) that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies.” If Brandeis was right, it may be precisely because we are such a free and open society that we have generally been spared the terrorism to which other nations have been subjected. The counterterrorism act would take us well off Brandeis’ “path of safety.”

The expansive new restrictions imposed by the act also are counterproductive in another sense: By making so much peaceful activity illegal, they would divert law-enforcement attention and resources from the investigation and prevention of actual violence. The immigration provisions appear to make it illegal to support the lawful activities of any organization that has any subgroup that has ever engaged in even a single unlawful violent act. This would encompass every organization that has ever engaged in armed resistance, from the Kurdish rebels to the Contras to the ANC. To enforce those laws nonselectively, it would take massive resources to investigate and prosecute the tens of thousands of immigrants who send humanitarian aid to groups back home that may have engaged in single illegal acts. Those are resources that would not be directed toward prevention and investigation of actual terrorism.

Counterterrorism makes good politics but bad law. Surrendering our civil liberties may well encourage terrorists and will certainly subject us to more abuse from government officials. If Washington wants to do something that will actually save American lives, it should ban guns, not peaceful political activity.