THE FUZZY WORLD OF TERRORISM

In A War In Which Anything Goes, The First Casualties Are Truth
And Civil Liberties

Our country is in crisis and the voices calling for us to take our
country back again grow louder every day. Homeland security is a hoax.
Our borders are porous, our ports are run by other nations and our
planes and nuclear plants are easily accessible to potential
terrorists. Our public schools are failing, and for a growing number
of young people a college education is out of reach. The gap between
the rich and poor is widening and the wall between church and state is
eroding.

Most worrisome of all, our Constitution is in deep crisis and our
republic may not survive. Our Constitution, the Geneva Convention, the
United Nations and international law are ignored as we are gradually
turning into a police state. People can be imprisoned without being
charged. Our phones can be tapped without a court order. Our
government can check what books we buy or loan from libraries, "sneak
and peek" rules allow the FBI to break into homes without letting the
homeowner know that they have been there. Even our elections, which
are an intricate part of a free society, are subject to fraud.

How did it happen? It all started on Sept. 11, 2001, when we were
traumatized by a horrific sight. Two planes -- first one, then the
other -- crashed into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Both
towers collapsed and disappeared in a cloud of dense smoke. Television
showed this scene over and over again, until it was permanently
ingrained in our brains.

Fear and raw emotion ruled while reason took a backseat. It was this
event that turned Bush overnight into a very powerful commander in
chief, accountable to nobody while Congress went into a coma.

We could have declared Sept. 11 a crime against humanity and promised
that there would be greater security and that those guilty would be
brought to justice. Instead Bush declared a "war on terror," a
historically unprecedented and constitutionally unacceptable term. He
should never have gotten away with it. By declaring war on terrorism,
he essentially declared war on the whole world, more a concept of
science fiction than reality.

Since our president declared a war on terror, dormant sleeper cells in
more than 60 countries have come alive and bombs are going off all
over the world. Ominous warnings by Arab nations that attacking Iraq
would open the gates of hell seem to have come true.

We were attacked before, in 1993, when a truck exploded in an
underground garage of the World Trade Center. Six people were killed
and more than a thousand wounded. It made the news for several weeks,
but nobody declared war.

Many countries from the Philippines and Russia to Britain and Spain
lived with terrorism for years, but none of them declared war. There
have always been wars, but they were fought between nations. Sooner or
later one nation would surrender and that would be the end of it.

However, a "war on terrorism" falls into the same category as a war on
poverty, or a war on crime, or our long and futile war on drugs. These
are wars that have nothing to do with bombers or warships or missiles.

The United Nations has never defined terrorism. It cannot be done
without implicating most nations. And one man's terrorist will always
be another man's freedom fighter.

In World War II, both the Axis powers and the Allied forces terrorized
civilians. Germany used terror when it bombed civilian (as opposed to
military) targets in London, and when its army encircled Leningrad so
that no supplies could get in. That city was under siege for almost
three years, and as a result about one million civilians died of
starvation and exposure to the bitter cold of the Russian winters. The
Allied forces used terror when they firebombed Dresden, Hamburg and
Tokyo. When two nuclear bombs were dropped, one on Hiroshima and one
on Nagasaki, at least 200,000 civilians died. That was terror too, the
kind that will haunt us for years to come.

By accepting the concept of a military "war on terrorism" we subject
ourselves to daily warnings and reminders from our government that "we
are at war," intimating that therefore anything goes. And civil
liberties and truth have always been the first casualties of war.

Hannah Naiditch is a former teacher and a longtime political activist.