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Former FBI head discusses balance between liberty, security |
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Jim Winkler |
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Oct 15, 2008
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Seven years after the greatest single attack on the continental United States, the nation continues to wrestle with the balance between civil liberties and safety, former FBI director Louis Freeh said at an Oct. 6 College of Law Distinguished Lecture Series program.
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| Former FBI Director Louis Freeh told College of Law faculty members and students that the balance between liberty and security has been difficult to achieve in the post-9/11 era and needs to be re-examined. |
Freeh, who led the FBI from 1993 to mid-2001, said it is time for the country to re-examine its assumptions about dangers posed by terrorist groups like al-Qaeda and have a discussion about the balance between liberty and security and how to protect its citizens from terrorists while upholding Americans’ fundamental liberties.
“We have seen a large expansion of executive power since 9/11,” he said, noting that over the years the pendulum between liberty and security has moved as threats to the country changed. “We must understand that there is a critical balance. It is never perfectly calibrated and continues to be adjusted and readjusted. Democracy has the ability to calibrate and recalibrate that balance.”
Immediately after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration pressed to increase the power of the executive branch. Congress quickly passed the Patriot Act, giving law enforcement broader powers to combat terrorism and allowing greater intrusions into Americans’ lives with electronic surveillance, wiretapping and unlawful detentions.
However, Freeh cautioned that extraordinary powers given to the government in times of crises always must be temporary and subject to the supervision of the courts and the legislature.
“Our liberty interests are critical,” Freeh underscored, cautioning that constitutional checks and balances still cannot be circumvented. “They make the country strong and durable and allow the country to endure crises.”
The principles of security and liberty “are not mutually exclusive,” he stressed.
While the federal government has involved itself in many aspects of American life such as health care and education, Freeh emphasized that the Constitution’s framers felt the federal government must be restricted from some activities and that the FBI is not a national police force. The founding fathers were concerned about the threats to civil liberties posed by a centralized, federal police force and worked to ensure that law enforcement was a function of the states. It was only in 1933 that the FBI gained the authority to arrest people and carry firearms.
Since then, the agency has refocused its efforts away from the much-publicized gangster wars of former director J. Edgar Hoover’s in the 1930s and spy cases of the 1940s to investigations of political corruption, financial fraud, organized crime and civil-rights violations.
It is still hard to know, he said, if the country has not been attacked for the past seven years because the Bush administration has waged an effective war on terror or the threat is not as severe as originally thought.
In response to a question about extraordinary rendition, Freeh said the covert U.S. practice of kidnapping terrorism suspects and secretly transporting them to countries where torture is routinely used in interrogations is “very problematic” because it affects the country’s political credibility and legitimacy, eroding American values and legal principles.
After earning a law degree from Rutgers University in 1974, Freeh went to work as an agent for the FBI.
He became a federal prosecutor in 1981 and also is a former U.S. attorney. In 1991, Freeh was named to the federal bench, and former President Bill Clinton nominated him for the directorship in 1993. He also was an adjunct associate professor at Fordham Law School.
Today, he heads an international legal and consulting-services firm.
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