Commentary: Attack raises questions about safety, liberty

Monday, November 16, 2009 3:00 AM  |  Printer friendly version | E-mail to a friend | By Matthew Leatherman

For the Salisbury Post

Any coach will tell you that losses provide better teaching moments than wins — and that, despite this fact, they always prefer winning over losing.

Nidal Hasan's terrorist attack at Fort Hood amounts to a loss for our law enforcement and anti-terrorism communities, but this certainly is not a game. Learning lessons from this "teaching moment" is not a luxury. Law enforcement at the local, state and federal levels must use this experience to reduce the risk of its recurrence. The Obama administration and Congress must do likewise.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) started in this direction by announcing hearings on the attack in the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee, which he chairs. Distracted by the opportunity for political grandstanding, however, Lieberman chose to focus these hearings on investigating the attack itself instead of on the bureaucratic circumstances that permitted it to occur. Numerous other bodies are rightly charged with investigating the attack, including most prominently the FBI and the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. Note that neither of these bodies involves Senator Lieberman.

Rather than interfering with the legal process, Senator Lieberman would do the country a much better service by asking why organizations chartered by his committee in the aftermath of 9/11 failed to interrupt Hasan's plot. Authorizations for the Department of Homeland Security, the Directorate of National Intelligence and the National Counterterrorism Center all came out of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs committee. The rationale behind their creation boils down to "more is better" — more bureaucrats, more protocols and, naturally, more money. This logic certainly appears faulty at the moment.

While Hasan's attack carries important lessons for the U.S. government, it also marks an important reminder for Americans generally. Although we as citizens are correct to demand better performance from our government for the tax dollars and man hours committed to combating terrorism, we also must not allow our search for improved security to mask the fact that the risk of terrorism can never be fully eliminated. As in many other elements of our lives, we must be able to understand that some degree of risk is inevitable, accept that risk and incorporate it into our lives rather than letting it define them.

Terrorist attacks will always present some degree of risk because terrorism is a tactic available to anyone who chooses it. Threats by individuals or organizations can sometimes be eliminated with total confidence. Under arrest forevermore, Nidal Hasan will no longer terrorize anyone. Similarly, since the collapse of the USSR we no longer have to accept any risk of hair-trigger Soviet nuclear terror.

Yet just as the threat of nuclear war did not end with the USSR, the threat of terrorism does not end with Hasan and will not end with al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah or even homegrown terrorist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan. As long as knowledge of nuclear physics exists, nuclear war will be a risk. As long as terrorist tactics exist, terrorism will be a risk — and a meaningful one, since those tactics are much more accessible than nuclear physics or other high-tech ways of war.

The question then is how our government, and we as citizens, should respond to this risk. What sacrifices in terms of resources and liberty are we prepared to make to reduce our risk? What liberties are we not willing to sacrifice? What costs are too high? Throwing rationality to the wind and pretending there is no trade-off between security on one hand and liberty and wealth on the other will lead only to a point in which we have none of the three.

Such a decision would be obviously irrational, but it would also be self-defeating. To be clear, it would amount to surrender in the face of al Qaeda and others that have mounted terrorist attacks against us. It is exactly in this catch-22 in which we compromise liberty and wealth for negligible security gains that they hope to trap us. Paradoxically, our success lies in accepting terrorism as just another risk in life, no different for its victims than the consequences of crime, catastrophic accidents or natural disasters.

Nidal Hasan's attack is a painful loss for the United States. Our government must learn from it and adapt in a way that reduces the risk that similar attacks recur. We as citizens have a right to demand improvement from our government within the authority that we have ceded to it. At the same time, we also must recognize that the government's purview is limited by design and that we cannot expect perfection from it. Victory over terrorism can only come from us, as individuals, when we refuse to be terrified any longer.

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Former Salisbury resident Matthew Leatherman recently graduated from the Masters in International Affairs program at Columbia University and is pursuing a career in foreign policy and national security. He lives in Arlington, Va.