Sacrificing liberty, wanting safety, getting neither

Most Americans apparently care little or nothing for the Constitution. After all, the United States has been run without it since 9/11 and — with the exception of a few civil libertarians and progressive writers — no one seems to miss it.

Within months of the 9/11 attacks people were already being held without charges or hearings.

On the morning of the attack, Abdallah Higazy, the son of a former Egyptian diplomat, was in his room on the 51st floor of the Millennium Hilton Hotel, across the street from the twin towers. Along with everyone else Higazy fled the hotel after the attack. He would never have come to the attention of authorities except for a lie — either malicious or misinformed — told to authorities.

A hotel security guard told police that he found a radio that could be used to communicate with airborne pilots in the safe in Higazy’s room. They investigated, but they could find nothing to link Higazy to the attack.

Higazy returned to the hotel three months later to pick up his belongings and he was arrested by the FBI as a material witness and placed into solitary confinement. Federal investigators were understandably suspicious, but had nothing that could be called evidence that Higazy was involved in the attack.

In the United States, law enforcement officials are not supposed to lock people up without at least some evidence of wrongdoing.

Higazy could not be linked to the attack, but he was in a jail cell, with no chance of proving that he was innocent.

This was an abuse of the material witness statute by any standard. People arrested as material witnesses are supposed to be witnesses, not suspects. The statute was created for cases where there is a significant belief that the witness will flee the jurisdiction before testifying. There is no crime and the witness is supposed to be treated differently from an accused criminal.

In a criminal arrest, the government has an obligation to provide an arraignment where they must show probable cause that the suspect had committed the offense. The FBI didn't have evidence to prove his involvement, so Higazy was held as a material witness while investigators searched for something to pin on him.

News reports say that an FBI agent eventually coerced Higazy into saying that the radio was his. The agent knew that if there wasn't some kind of admission of involvement the law required Higazy be set free.

That Higazy’s admission was not the truth didn’t matter. The authorities were happy to finally be able to accuse him of a crime. Ironically, they charged him with lying to federal agents when he said the radio wasn’t his.

Then a pilot, an American citizen, walked into the same hotel, looking for the aviation radio he had left behind on Sept. 11. Higazy’s original story — which he had clung to as long as he felt he could — had been the truth. Higazy was set free.

What might have happened if the pilot hadn’t shown up to claim his radio? It's a frightening thought, once again proving nonsense the notion that if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about.

This case isn't the most egregious either. People have been sent offshore to be tortured, been condemned to secret prisons run by the CIA, been put away at Guantanamo Bay and other American military prisons. That's not to mention the people who have died at the hands of American military and civilian interrogators.

Since 9/11, people have been forced to surrender previously guaranteed rights and most time without so much as a nod at the balance of powers. We're herded like sheep through metal detectors, patted down to watch football, under scrutiny by cameras as we shop, drive, eat and live. The left is called unpatriotic for objecting to anything and those who protest are marked for further study by the government.

Meanwhile there is little evidence that all of these measures are doing anything. We're not any safer nor will we ever be. The Republicans who called themselves the party of small government sponsored the creation of Big Brother.

"Those who are willing to sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither," Benjamin Franklin said. Maybe he really knew that those who sacrifice liberty for safety receive neither.