America Must Avoid Closing Minds

By: After the shock, the bewilderment. Who could these people be? Who hijacks airliners full of innocent civilians and forces them to share a deranged martyrdom by crashing the planes into the towers of the World Trade Center, the walls of the Pentagon, the woods of western Pennsylvania? Who are the human beings capable of meticulously plotting and rehearsing each intricate step of the mass murder of thousands of office workers, janitors, and deli countermen -- contemplate it for months, apparently, with no shiver of conscience strong enough to deter them.

As this is written, it's not yet clear who is responsible for this cowardly barbarism. Sooner or later, that question will be answered. We will know who.

But even in the chaos of the immediate aftermath, we can be sure of one thing: Our perplexity about these terrorists is nothing compared to what their puzzlement was about us. They died, no doubt, profoundly confused about this America: Who are these people who let thousands of ideas contend freely? Who question, even mock, their political leaders without punishment. Who worship all manner of gods -- or blithely deny the existence of a Supreme Being. Who created a government that bends to their whims, and provides information on demand.

As the enormity of these acts of war sink in, as the horrific casualty toll becomes horrifically clear, there will be many good Americans asking themselves the same questions. If we were more of a garrison state, wouldn't we be safer? If government hid more of its operations and kept a closer watch on its citizens, might it be our better guardian?

Early this month, some in Congress tried unsuccessfully to revive an American version of Britain's Official Secrets Act by claiming that published government leaks warned Osama Bin Laden that U.S. intelligence was listening in on his satellite telephone conversations. With Bin Laden a natural suspect in last Tuesday's attacks, the clamor is sure to grow for legislation to make us "safer" by cutting off information to the press and public. Our intelligence agencies clearly failed in this instance. If history is any guide, they will react not with contrition but by demanding even less public accountability.

War tests every society's deepest convictions, so we Americans must take particular care now to affirm our belief in freedom. Liberty and openness made our nation not only the envy of the world but also the greatest economic and military power in history. We will become weaker, not stronger, if we allow ourselves to become more like the totalitarian societies that fostered the closed, fanatical minds that plotted last Tuesday's slaughter.

The impulse to trade liberty for a chimerical but comforting notion of security is not new. Before we were even a nation, Thomas Paine warned, "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."