By J.B. Wogan, Special to JTNews
On Oct. 25, Professor Gad Barzilai of the University of Washington spoke about balancing American civil liberties with national security interests to a packed auditorium at the Stroum Jewish Community Center on Mercer Island.
According to Roni Antebi, adults and seniors program director at the JCC, Barzilai’s lecture was part of a quarterly luncheon that features guest speakers on a range of topics suggested by JCC members. Barzilai, originally from Tel Aviv University, teaches international studies, law and political science.
During his lecture, he recalled a conversation he had with a mentor at Yale in 1989. The mentor said that Barzilai’s academic interest in American national security was pointless. The United States had not been attacked since Pearl Harbor. There was no new ground to cover.
Not so true anymore. Since 9/11, the passing of the Patriot Act, and the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security, Barzilai’s research directly addresses prominent issues in today’s current events.
JTNews caught up with the professor after the event.
JTNews: Do you lecture often?
Gad Barzilai (GB): Not too often, because I’d like to devote much more time to research and teaching. But I give such a lecture once every three months.
JT: I saw some people come up to you after the lecture. What were they saying?
GB: I think most of them were quite concerned about what would happen. But also about this kind of convergence between some kind of national security pressure, and on the other end, what will happen to civil liberties. They were very concerned about the future, which is very interesting because most of them are not very young anymore — people in their 70s or 80s.
JT: During your talk, you said we are living in “a new zeitgeist” because of the convergence of three phenomena. Could you talk a bit about that?
GB: I was talking about technology, social stratification and international organizations of terrorism. The convergence of social stratification with technology, and with international organizations of terrorism produces a new zeitgeist, a new danger to personal and collective security.
During the talk, Barzilai lectured at length about how humanity as a whole, not just the U.S., finds itself in a new historical context. In the past, only nation-states had the budget and manpower to construct weapons of mass destruction. But with modern technology, a handful of people can have the same destructive capability once reserved for those nation states. Though Barzilai has clear reservations about tightening national security at the expense of our civil liberties, he repeatedly called the dangers of terrorism real.
JT: The topic of your lecture implied something that I think many people commonly believe, that limiting civil liberties directly correlates to better national security. Is that a common belief?
GB: This is also a belief that I will criticize, and that I have significantly criticized in the public lecture. But obviously public officials and the general public — and we know it from doing public opinion polls — the general public, the officials, including the justices and judges, do believe, as you say, [that] national security correlates with civil rights.
JT: Where does that belief come from?
GB: This is a topic for a lecture as it is, but in a nutshell: firstly, once you have a security crisis, people believe that only military officers and the political establishment will know what to do. So for example, judges and justices will defer issues of human rights and national security to public officials and the military establishment. Secondly, the general public would like to feel that it’s contributing to patriotism … which we, in professional literature, call rallying around the flag. People would like to rally around the flag of patriotism and they wouldn’t like to criticize the government and the political establishment.
JT: You mentioned that in times of war, citizens’ civil liberties are limited. But what happens when politicians apply war rhetoric to non-traditional ideological battles, like preventing illegal drug use in this country?
GB: Well, this is exactly the point. Politicians are aware of the effect of using national security terminology on insecurities and anxieties. They have an advantage. They can easily leverage that by further minimizing civil liberties and expanding the political establishment.
JT: This is related to the last question. If we involve ourselves in an interminable conflict, as the war on terror may be, then can we afford to limit our civil liberties? Or do we have to live interminably with less rights than before the war began?
GB: There is such a spirit of counter-terrorist activity. It would be very difficult to prevent an infringement of human rights. This is why, under those conditions, it’s up to the public to press hard on politicians to define when and under which conditions liberties are going to be under certain limitations. Last and certainly not least, [the public must] take care of proper judicial supervision over what politicians may do — using in a manipulative way national security terminology and national security ideology. So you don’t have a 100-percent-perfect solution, but at least you make politicians aware that they’re going to pay the electoral price unless they press hard on the political establishment to be more accountable and more systemic.
Barzilai used the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi as an example of how certain basic constitutional rights might be sacrificed in the spirit of protecting the greater good. Hamdi, a U.S. citizen found among pro-Taliban forces in Northern Afghanistan, was considered an “enemy combatant” and therefore did not have the right to meet with a lawyer or speak in a U.S. court. In June of 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that as a U.S. citizen, Hamdi was allowed access to the U.S. legal system.