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Those are the healthy reflexes of a remarkable nation. This country accords more rights to accused criminals than many governments give to citizens in good standing. It is perhaps America's greatest virtue.
But sometimes, as is the American way, we take things too far. People who have committed murders and rapes walk the streets today because they got off on a technicality that had only a tangential relationship to their guilt or innocence. We too often demand police and judicial perfection when a slightly lesser standard would serve.
That obsession, however, seems to have waned a bit in the wake of last month's attack. Congress moved quickly last week to pass laws that would, to a degree that would have been unthinkable four weeks ago, loosen the shackles we place on our police forces.
And it's about time. Swinging the pendulum back in the direction of the victims of crime--as opposed to the perpetrators--has never been more important.
Most of the men who carried out the mass murders on Sept. 11 were in this country illegally. A nation of immigrants, especially one that expends so much energy celebrating diversity, is not stirred to outrage over such "status" crimes. Indeed, illegal immigration is hardly considered a crime at all--even by our own Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Save a random raid on a factory here and there along the border with Mexico, the INS doesn't bother much with enforcing immigration laws. Just a few weeks before the attacks, President Bush was poised to grant blanket amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants that the INS lacked the manpower to track down.
As is typical, the monsters who killed thousands of innocent Americans were able to enter the country--many on student visas--and simply disappear. And there are doubtless many more henchmen of Osama bin Laden still among us.
As John J. Miller writes in National Review, nearly a half-million foreigners enter the U.S. every year, "and the most stringent demand many of them face is filling out a form asking where they're headed; the forms are then shipped off to storage, where they probably won't ever be seen again."
While we should be proud of having the world's most open immigration policy, we should be doing more than the equivalent of an airline ticket clerk's asking, while barely making eye contact, if anyone packed our luggage for us.
Illegals have no right to be in this country, and should not automatically benefit from the liberties of full citizenship. A bill working its way through the U.S. House of Representatives would allow INS agents
to detain illegal aliens for seven days without charging them with a crime.
Shocking? Hardly. Most Americans might be surprised to learn that current law allows the INS to jail illegals for two days before charging them with a crime--a law-enforcement measure not permitted against those with full citizenship.
The House bill does other helpful things, including:
removing the statute of limitations on the commission of terrorist actions--the dumbest restriction on law enforcement imaginable;
making it easier for the cops to monitor the e-mail messages of suspected terrorists; and
loosening wire-tap laws (just a tad) so we can keep up with the bad guys when they change cellphones.
That last one is probably the most important. Currently, the cops have to get a separate warrant from a judge every time a suspected terrorist or drug dealer picks up a different cellphone. This new law would allow the warrant to apply to the suspect.
Rarely has so much common sense been injected into anti-crime efforts all at once. While they're at it, Congress should permit the cops to use technology to break the coded electronic messages that we know are being sent back and forth between terrorists here and their supporters overseas.
These reforms will not usher in an Orwellian nightmare. Every one of these surveillance actions must come through the courts, whose job it is to protect our civil liberties.
Convincing a judge there is probable cause to monitor the e-mail messages of, say, an illegal immigrant with ties to terrorist organizations is a far cry from Big Brother sifting through the "inbox" of a random home computer.
On the day before they flew a plane into the World Trade Center, Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz
Alomari were seen on surveillance cameras laughing it up on a shopping spree at Wal-Mart.
Who knows what they were being so jovial about? But there is nothing funny about enemies of America taking advantage of naïvely written laws and lax immigration enforcement to carry out wholesale slaughter.
Closing those loopholes is now a matter of national security.
JAMES G. LAKELY is an editorial writer for The Free Lance-Star.