by Jerry Curtis

Created on: September 15, 2008

The Bush-Cheney administration will be remembered as protectors of the US against terrorism after the devastation of September 11, 2001. George Bush, in particular, will be remembered for his leadership and insistence of a response to those who killed 3,000 innocents in our country by using commercial airliners as deadly missiles. That response was a well-planned, and brilliantly executed attack and overthrow of the Al Qaida's hosts and sponsors in Afghanistan. Our armed forces did in weeks what the entire Soviet Army could not do in years. They ran off a viciously despotic regime and chased Al Qaida to their cave hideouts in Pakistan.

Over the past seven years, the leadership and ability of Al Qaida to operate have been crippled. When George Bush decided not to take further chances with Saddam Hussein, Al Qaida rushed to Iraq in hopes of reestablishing their lost sanctuary and inflicting a Vietnam-like defeat on American forces. After somewhat of a bad start in Iraq, it now seems likely that Iraq will be stabilized and Al Qaida is once more on the run. Significantly, those who groused that our campaign in Iraq was doomed and that the country should be split into three are now complaining that the Iraqi government is not paying its way.

The controversy over domestic spying through phone surveillance and other methods is more a political result of a successful effort that has no doubt foiled many terrorist attacks in the our country. To believe otherwise would be a counterintuitive exercise in self-delusion and a potentially disastrous misreading of the nature of our enemies. In fact, one result of the 9-11 attacks was a breaking down of the bureaucratic "firewalls" between intelligence sharing (foreign and domestic) and law enforcement. Had those "firewalls" not existed in the years leading up to 9-11, it is likely that the Department of Justice might have been able to piece together the terrorist plot.

History may also judge the Bush-Cheyney era as one where anti-terrorism interests trumped the pure application and an overriding concern for the rights of terrorists. There have, of course, been historical precedents. Abraham Lincoln had no qualms about violating the Constitutional rights of traitors, rebels and secessionists. He understood that to do otherwise would be nothing less than permitting the Bill of Rights to be our country's suicide pact.

Other modern presidents have also used the powers of their office, but for more sinister and political reasons. Everyone remembers Richard Nixon's enemies list. More recently there was the Clinton "file-gate" scandal where FBI records of the President's political foes ended up in the White House office of a staff member that the Clintons could not remember hiring. President Clinton has also been accused of using the Internal Revenue Service to harass his political enemies through tax audits.

Whatever surveillance the Bush-Cheney administration applied has yet to be proved political or harming the rights of any innocent US citizens. The potential misuse of the reams of raw intelligence that had to result from this "spying" is something that our judiciary must guard against. In that regard, the American system of checks and balances continues to serve us well.

In any case, as of this writing, Islamic terrorists, who would love to inflict another mass casualty attack on the United States, have failed to bring one off. If they do, one could probably surmise that the first questions asked will be, "Why did our intelligence and law enforcement fail to prevent this?" Hopefully, the answer will not center on an inappropriate concern for the rights of those who planned to kill school children in a Denver Shopping Mall.

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