Almost immediately after the constitution became the supreme law its detractors warned that to much unstrained powers had been given to the central government and the result would be nothing short of tyranny. Thomas Jefferson was among those who embraced the constitution but feared that without certain additional clauses the document did not protect individuals adequately from potentially dangerous government interference. The result was a list of ten additional articles limiting the powers of the federal government, after several years of debate the amendments became the bill of rights and they became a part of the constitution. The bill of rights established the bare bones of how it would work these articles added the meat, granting some of the most important protections U.S. citizens still hold today the very protections that many argue are under line as a result of the war on terror.
When members of the radical Islamist Cult al Qaeda flew fully fueled jumbo jets into the World Trade Center on September11 2001, a nation that had until then acted rather complacently about global terrorist attacks suddenly paid attention. Fear gripped the nation and, not surprisingly, people lashed out at fellow Americans who dared to say or do anything that did not follow lock-step with what the administration said or did. The host of the talk show politically incorrect, Bill Maher, responding to the George Bush’s stated opinion that the September 11 events were cowardly acts, said this on the air. We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. According to Bill Maher staying in the airplane when building was not cowardly. This rather obvious technical truth was hugely unpopular and was interpreted as a treasonous slam against the armed forces. The show sponsors, Federal Express and Sears, pulled their advertising and the network ABC pulled the Show. White House spokes person Ari Fleischer commented with these chilling words: all Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This was the death of the first amendment. Some Americans were saying we were sacrificing the very freedoms we were claiming to be defending for fear of being accused of being unpatriotic.
Most Americans feel that in a time of war, the United States should be a model of civil liberties and civil rights protecting individual’s rights under the constitution according to the Bill of rights. Civil liberty since the USA-Patriot Act was to make the country a safer place for Americans citizens by expanding the reach of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It included sweeping changes in definitions and descriptions of what constituted suspicion, denied due process to huge numbers of people, and greatly increase the power of the Executive Branch. It even created new and incredibly ambiguous acts that appear to be intended to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.
Terrorism and the constitution is always a problem of trying to keep a balance of both competing interest of the government and the rights of people protected by the bill of rights and the constitution. Civil liberties the personal guarantees and freedoms that the federal government can not abridge by law. The civil rights the government protected rights of individual against arbitrary discrimination because ethnicity, especially after 911.The Bill of Rights and the fourth teen amendments of the constitution are major corner stones of the constitution and should never be allowed to be subvert in this era of terrorism. The real terror in the United States after 911 is the death of the Bill of Rights.