by Robert Kuttner

THE BIGGEST MENACE to the personal security of Americans may not be terrorism but government's response to it.

The administration has already rammed through an antiterrorism bill that allows normal due process and privacy protections to be waived if a prosecutor thinks some potential suspect has some remote connection to terrorism. Now the president has decided that terrorism suspects can be tried before special military tribunals, which do away with the inconvenience of constitutional niceties.

The CIA, which is not supposed to use third-degree tactics itself, has been collaborating with foreign governments all too willing to use torture, such as Egypt and Albania. The CIA has knowingly turned terrorism suspects over to the agents of such governments to keep its own hands nominally clean.

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by William Safire

WASHINGTON -- As soon as German U-boats put eight saboteurs on U.S. shores during World War II, one of the eight called the F.B.I. to betray the mission but was brushed off as a crackpot. Days later, he called again and managed to persuade the F.B.I. he was an authentic saboteur. Partly to keep this embarrassment of bungled enforcement from becoming known, the eight were secretly tried by a military court inside the F.B.I. headquarters.

Unexpectedly, a U.S. Army lawyer assigned to the Germans mounted a spirited defense. Col. Kenneth Royall, citing the landmark 1866 Supreme Court decision of Ex Parte Milligan — holding that martial law could not be applied where federal civil courts were in business — challenged the secret tribunal's legality.

F.D.R. told his attorney general, according to Francis Biddle's memoirs, that he would resist any Supreme Court decision to give the accused saboteurs a regular court trial: "I won't hand them over to any United States marshal armed with a writ of habeas corpus." Confrontation was averted when a cowed Supreme Court unanimously acknowledged the extra- judicial power of a president armed with a Congressional declaration of war. Six of the eight captives went to the electric chair; J. Edgar Hoover was awarded a medal of honor.

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by Ralph Nader

Members of Congress are continuing to play hide-and-seek with their legislative records. Only two congressmen - Republican Reps. Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Frank Wolf of Virginia - have placed their voting records on the Internet in a searchable format easily accessible to citizens. Not a single U.S. senator has been willing to use the Internet in a manner that would give voters an open, accurate and quick way to track their votes.

Thanks to taxpayers, computers equipped with Internet access are available in the offices of every one of the 535 members of the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives. Posting voting records on their websites in a searchable citizen-friendly format would be a simple task.

So, why the reluctance to implement something that would make it easy for voters to understand how their elected representatives were performing their official duties?

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by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Joel Rogers

NEW YORK -- In the aftermath of Sept. 11, pundits were quick to proclaim the American left a victim of the war on terrorism, for two reasons.

The first is that progressives, since Vietnam, have stood solidly in opposition to the use of U.S. military force. This stance could be honorably maintained then and during a host of sordid U.S. military ventures since, but leaves them unbalanced or marginal in today's case, where force seems justified.

The second is that this war is about securing the "open society" that terrorism threatens--a society in which individual and corporate freedoms, resting on secure property rights, can be exercised worldwide without restraint. But the left--in its World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and Genoa, in its opposition to fast track--has been most visible for opposing the corporate domination that naturally follows from such rules. And so, the pundits reason, any left support now for the war against terrorism is at odds with its recent actions. But this reasoning strikes us as wrong. Only the pacifist left has ever opposed all use of U.S. military force; other progressives simply have strong views on when it is appropriate and believe that blank, ubiquitous endorsement of military action does not serve the country. And there is no reason to equate opposition to terrorism, a crime against humanity, with support for a particular program on how humanity should be organized, a matter that remains a subject of legitimate debate.

If anything, the war on terrorism creates an opening for progressives, not closure--indeed, it presents the opportunity of a lifetime.

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