NEW BATTLE, OLD PATTERN THE WAR ON TERRORISM TAKES THE SHAPE OF THE DRUG WAR

The war on terrorism - despite what you've heard from lefty critics such as
Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn - isn't simply the latest American military
adventure, another Vietnam, Iraq, or Kosovo.

In contrast to earlier armed conflicts, our new enemy is everywhere - in
the deserts of Afghanistan, the supermarket down the street, hiding out in
any country on the map - and the villains include both secret terror cells
and the nation states that tolerate them. Combating terror involves not
just soldiers and spooks sent abroad to shoot and snoop but also new laws
and legions of cops keeping tabs on us here at home.

Most important, we'll never achieve a definitive victory. In a purely
geopolitical war, victory, at least in the eyes of the Pentagon, is
cemented when the bad-guy government is toppled and replaced with a new,
Washington-friendly regime. In this war, we'll always be searching for the
jihadist under the bed.

Really, the war on terrorism is more akin to the war on drugs than anything
else.

Ethan Nadelmann is perhaps the most articulate proponent of this view. As
executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance (formerly the Lindesmith
Center), Nadelmann, a 44-year-old ex-Princeton professor, has spent the
past eight years thinking hard about law enforcement and liberty - and he's
alarmed by the direction this new conflict is taking. We caught up with
Nadelmann, a fast-talking New Yorker, when he came through town last week.

Ethan Nadelmann: For the last 20-odd years, the war on drugs has been used
as the justification and the rationalization for pushing back many of the
civil liberties protections in the Bill of Rights, and similarly, for
pushing back the claims of national sovereignty in the international arena.

In the past few years we've seen the courts and legislators and the public
beginning to say, "Wait a second." Look at the ballot initiatives - on
medical marijuana, on asset forfeiture reform, on treatment instead of
incarceration. We won something like 17 out of 19 of those.

And then Sept. 11 happened, and it gave a second wind to efforts to curtail
the freedoms of ordinary Americans and to expand the powers of the state,
especially the federal state. Now these people are pushing much further,
with things like the [proposed] national database system for all Americans,
which will have our names and identifying marks.

Bay Guardian: Or DNA testing for all felons.

EN: Keep in mind there's been that upside to DNA testing, which has led to
a lot of people on death row and elsewhere being found innocent. But it
leads to that question: Will there be any privacy?

Here's my fear: Imagine it's five years down the road, and no major
terrorist activity happens in the next few years. Imagine that we have a
very substantial counterterrorist bureaucracy that is absorbing billions
and billions of dollars over and above the current law enforcement
institution. Imagine, too, that people are beginning to become accustomed
to the lesser freedoms and higher levels of scrutiny and surveillance, but
they're also beginning to chafe a bit.

And then, of course, the argument will come from law enforcement, "Our
people are getting restless and bored because looking for terrorists is so
incredibly futile, it's hopeless. Why don't we just take these powers that
we're applying to the counterterrorist effort and apply them to that other
war we used to focus on?" What could happen would be a morphing of the war
on terrorism and the war on drugs. I can see a new office five years from
now called the Office of Counterterrorism and Counterdrugs.

And if that happens, it will result in a very fundamental and unfortunate
transformation in the nature of American society.

BG: One offshoot of the drug war is the "gang member" label. You tag
somebody as a gangster - which they may or may not be - and the courts can
hit 'em with three times as much prison time. Now the same thing is going
on with the terrorist label. The legal definition of terrorism is ultrabroad.

EN: What you're seeing with the war on terrorism is people are giving the
police and prosecutors unprecedented powers, and once they become
legitimized in the context [of terrorism], they'll get expanded to other
contexts.

There's another thing about this war on terrorism. In every other war where
the state has claimed emergency powers, there was some way to define when
the war was over, when we'd won the war. How do we know when we've won the
war on terrorism? We don't. We're in a war with no definable end. At what
point do we say, "The state no longer needs these emergency powers"? As a
civil libertarian, I can't come up with an easy answer to that.