Nuclear Issues

Article in The Nonproliferation Review

There is much to learn from the British: their reticence about disclosing details, their clear expertise in human intelligence, their non-hysterical reaction to very real threats. But how we deal with our immigrant and domestic populations is certainly not one of them.

Nearly five years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, has the government adequately protected its citizens against terrorism and catastrophic disaster?

In the next week or so, Congress is expected to vote on a bill to renew certain expiring sections of the Patriot Act. The debate over this law is a crucial conversation for our country and for how we protect both the security and privacy of a free citizenry.

Since September 11, 2001, much has been said about the difficult balancing act between freedom and security, but few have made specific proposals for how to strike that balance. As the scandals over the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the "torture memos" written by legal officials in the Bush administration show, without clear rules in place, things can very easily go very wrong.

Like every other country, the United States has, in the name of security, made mistakes that we admit only later. What separates us from those regimes we abhor isn't that we never act cruelly. It's that we reject, rather than defend, our departures from our ideals and we actively seek to prevent such abuses from happening again.

Dr. Ashton B. Carter testifies before the 9/11 Public Discourse Project's hearings on "The 9/11 Commission Report: The Unfinished Agenda."

Contrary to popular view, the Patriot Act did not address many of the toughest legal issues Americans face in trying to balance our concern for our freedoms with worries about our safety in the war on terror. What are needed are new rules for a new era.

The collapse earlier this month of the government's case against an alleged terrorist sleeper cell in Detroit is just another example of the Justice Department's failed "arrest by headlines" philosophy in the war on terror.

Until our intelligence agencies place important focus on "who" is in fact doing the gathering and communicating, we will continue to be at a critical disadvantage against our enemies