Editorials

On the future day the national fog of fear lifts, the United States will rationally and confidently confront terrorism while at the same time protecting our rights.

Maybe the 2008 presidential election will carry us along and help the panic subside.

Perhaps by the end of the decade or the middle of the next Americans will look back in bitterness. They’ll angrily accuse the 9/11 leadership of exploiting fear as they betrayed democratic values.

We’ll want to examine the crime scene, wondering how’d it go so wrong: A war in Iraq that increased the number of jihadists intent on killing Americans. The suspension of citizens’ rights to a trial and a lawyer. The leeway to wiretap anyone the government wishes to outside the authority of a court. A break with international treaties and U.S. laws that ban torturing prisoners.

(We could ask recently convicted Jose Padilla about this had, according to his lawyers, the American citizen’s mental facilities not been severely damaged because of his treatment by his U.S. jailers.)

When the nation as a whole performs a version of Constitutional CSI it will discover road markers that warned we were heading down a dark path.

One such warning came Wednesday during a hearing before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. The cases before three appeals court judges concern the Bush administration’s secret surveillance programs that bypass U.S. courts.

In fact, Bush lawyers want to block the courts from going forward with two cases that deal with the administration blocking courts from reviewing warrantless wiretapping and data-mining of phone companies. The lawyers say “utmost deference” must be given in any case the president declares a state secret.

Of course, state secrets are legitimate on occasion. The current administration, though, has exhausted its store of goodwill on this count.

One Ninth Circuit judge, Harry Pregerson, summed up the administration’s argument Wednesday as: “The king can do no wrong.”

That mindset is a nice distillation of everything the U.S. Constitution opposes.

Or as another appellate judge, Damon J. Keith, considering Bush administration insistence on secret arrests and secret deportations of Arab men following 9/11 said in 2002, “Democracies die behind closed doors.”

Americans will wish they paid more attention to these warning from the bench.