U.S. Government Behaving Badly

One expects a certain amount of corner-cutting on both procedures and concern for civil liberties during time of war. That's one of the main reasons some of us prefer to avoid war when at all possible, because we know that government power will grow and citizen liberty will suffer. War, as Randolph Bourne explained so persuasively during World War I (called the Great War at the time, which in retrospect seems tragically naive), war is the health of the State.

In addition, as Robert Higgs, now a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, demonstrated rather convincingly in his classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, increased power and authority taken by States during wartime is never given back in its entirety. Some of the wartime powers recede when the war is over, but at the end of a war the government is noticeably and permanently larger and the scope of citizen freedom is notably smaller than before the war – and soon enough this comes to seem normal. In a long war without visible end, as our esteemed leaders hasten to tell us the war on terror is, one can expect the process to be gradual rather than dramatic, but inexorable.

One of the episodes that illustrates how the process of increasing state power and reduced liberty is occurring during the current war is now being played out in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The decision to bring prisoners/detainees/captives from Afghanistan to the long-time U.S. Naval base there may have been done mainly for convenience, because the facility existed. A more disturbing hypothesis, bolstered by the way the Bush administration has chosen to defend its policies, is that it was chosen to at least some degree so the U.S. Constitution would not have to be a factor in administrative decisions. It might be that Guantanamo was used because it can be a law-free zone.