Unlikely Alliances Emerge in Debate Over Terrorism and Civil Liberties

Maybe the time has finally arrived for the American Civil Liberties Union to send out that fund-raising letter to the National Review subscription list.

Remember when Atty. Gen. Ed Meese called the ACLU “the criminal’s lobby”? Or when George Bush, echoing McCarthyite language from the 1950s, labeled Michael S. Dukakis a “card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union”?

File it all. In the aftershock of the Oklahoma City bombing, the right is suddenly teeming with civil libertarians.

In the past two weeks, a parade of Republicans and conservatives has warned against overreacting to the attack with sweeping anti-terrorism legislation that infringes on civil liberties. It’s not entirely surprising to hear such arguments from the libertarian Cato Institute. But who would have expected such tender sentiments from dyed-in-the-wool Reaganauts such as Bruce Fein, the conservative legal scholar, and Paul Craig Roberts, a charter supply-side economist? Yet both last week penned opinion pieces in the conservative Washington Times warning Congress against going too far.

Then there was the joint plea for moderation from those traditional brothers-in-arms: the ACLU and the National Rifle Assn. “History is clear,” they wrote in a statement joined by an assortment of right-leaning groups, “that when the nation has overreacted in moments of crisis, the results have been bad for basic freedoms.”

This strange bedfellowing reached its improbable apex when Oliver L. North recently invited onto his radio program Ira Glasser, the ACLU’s executive director. As Glasser warned of granting the executive branch too much authority to monitor dissent, the man who once tried to run a secret war from the White House basement “made all kinds of sympathetic noises,” the ACLU official recalled.

When North and Glasser are pointing in the same direction, it’s time to check the compass.

Two factors are scrambling the political polarity on the terrorism debate.

One is the fall of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, support for surveillance of domestic dissidents was framed as a measure of commitment to fighting communism; to doubt J. Edgar Hoover was to strengthen Nikita Khrushchev. That catechism obliterated resistance to the expansion of government police power from conservatives who fought virtually every other increase in federal authority. Since liberals were more likely to question the nature and breadth of the communist threat abroad, they were also more inclined to challenge the need for intrusive monitoring of dissent at home.

But now, the collapse of the Soviet threat has taken down with it the last pillar of conservative support for big government, and even federal law enforcement is no longer immune to a widening Republican critique of Washington. “Polls show about 40% of the people are afraid of their government and with good reason,” says Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah). “Government has become the oppressor.”

That shift is apparent in the surprising extent to which conservatives--even after the Oklahoma City bombing--are maintaining a steady drumbeat of criticism against the government’s handling of the 1993 siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex., and the performance more generally of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the agency charged with enforcing federal gun laws. Even liberal charges that such attacks encourage conspiracy theories among far-right groups, such as the militia movement linked to the Oklahoma attack, haven’t stilled the conservative chorus. Says Hatch: “I agree with a lot of these organizations that worry there will be a lot more Wacos.”

The focus on the ATF and Waco underscores the second, and largest, reason for the upsurge in conservative concern about reining in government gumshoes: the nature of the targets. With such rare exceptions as the Ku Klux Klan, government surveillance in this century has focused primarily on agitators of the left: communists and socialists in the McCarthy era, the New Left and civil rights groups in the 1960s. That was another reason liberals were more skeptical than conservatives about handing Hoover a blank check.

Now as the focus shifts to groups on the right, conservative politicians are experiencing the same anxieties. At a House Judiciary Committee hearing last week on the Administration’s anti-terrorism package, freshman Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) practically jumped out of his chair when Deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie S. Gorelick suggested that militant tax resisters were one of the groups that could receive increased scrutiny under the Administration’s new approach.

Looming even larger are the fears of gun-owner groups that their members could become the targets of heightened government surveillance as the spotlight shines on the shadowy militia movement. “My concern is that they will go after people who own guns just because they own guns,” says Tanya Metaksa, the NRA’s chief lobbyist. Republicans can no more ignore those sentiments than a pistol in the small of their back: Gun owners cast fully 35% of the votes for GOP congressional candidates in last fall’s midterm electoral sweep.

It is easy to imagine this debate looking very different if the bombing had turned out to be the work of Middle Eastern extremists, as was first thought. But this cross-pressure from liberals still concerned about civil liberties and conservatives newly enlisted to the cause is having a healthy effect as Congress considers its legislative response to Oklahoma City. The pressures have interrupted the reflexive pattern of Republicans looking to toughen whatever law enforcement proposal President Clinton puts forth.

The cautionary notes from Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.), among others, made it easier for the Administration to reach the sensible conclusion of not significantly loosening FBI guidelines limiting the surveillance and infiltration of domestic groups.

And the anti-terrorism legislation introduced by Dole and Hatch strikes roughly the same reasonable balance as Clinton’s proposals; in some instances the GOP bill was even more mindful of civil liberties than Clinton’s. Civil libertarians still have some justifiable quarrels with aspects of both versions, but less than they feared, and the trend in Congress clearly is toward moderation.

If anything, in some areas, Congress may be treading too cautiously. Defending civil liberties doesn’t mean ignoring the threat to civil order. Yet congressional Republicans, hearing the signals from the right, are daily growing more reluctant to express any concern over the militia movement.

The House Judiciary Committee has agreed to hold hearings as soon as next month on Waco and other allegations of government abuse but hasn’t yet decided whether to look at the militia movement, as Democrats have urged. In the Senate, Hatch says he’s “not inclined to get into that unless there is a tie-in (to the bombing) established.”

There are, Hatch says, “a lot of sincere people in those militia movements.” That may be. But the evidence also suggests the movement encompasses considerably less benign elements. It isn’t fair to characterize all of these weekend warriors as threats to the nation’s security. But The Times and other sources have documented numerous examples of threats to government employees from these radically disaffected groups.

In debates over crime, Republicans have long accused Democrats of sublimating protection of the law-abiding to their concerns about the civil liberties of the accused. As the nation explores the risks of home-grown terrorism with roots on the right, Republicans should be careful not to fall down the same well.

Holding hearings on alleged government abuses of gun owners without looking at the risks flowing in the other direction would hardly send the strong signal of congressional support for vigilance that FBI Director Louis J. Freeh requested at last week’s hearings. Protecting civil liberties shouldn’t become an excuse for just protecting favored constituencies.

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Changing Tide on Civil Liberties

In a recent Times Poll, Americans who call themselves conservative were more likely than self-identified liberals to worry that Congress will overly restrict civil liberties in its response to the Oklahoma City bombing. That reverses the pattern found in earlier surveys of public opinion.

1979

Are governments justified “to limit civil liberties to stop terrorism?”

YES NO Liberals 54% 33% Conservatives 67% 19%

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1995

Are you more concerned that “government will fail to enact strong new anti-terrorism laws” or that it will “excessively restrict the average person’s civil liberties?”

FAIL TO ENACT EXCESSIVELY RESTRICT Liberals 51% 36% Conservatives 36% 52% Gun owners 40% 48% White fundamental Christians 38% 48%

Sources: Gallup Poll for 1979 figures, Los Angeles Times Poll for 1995 figures (April)