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COPYRIGHT 2005 Society for the Advancement of Education
THE WAR ON TERROR has forced Americans to examine a painful legal issue. When do the imperatives of national security and war fighting require a restriction on constitutional liberties and an alteration of due process?
We have to get out a balancing scale: The imperatives of war and the values of democracy inevitably are in tension with each other. It can be no other way. War requires discipline, sacrifice, secrecy, mobilization, and restrictions. Only the commander in chief, his top civilian advisors, the military, and much of the executive branch can run a war and run it successfully. War requires that the government be able to move with dispatch whenever there is a perceived threat to the national security and safety. A democracy requires that decisions be made with deliberation, in openness, and with due respect to individual rights. In a peacetime democracy, the legislative branch that is characterized...
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