A Victory for Liberty

Freedom is now on the march—a march that no longer requires metal detectors. In a unanimous decision issued last Friday, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that city officials in Columbus, Ga. may not require demonstrators gathering for the annual School of the Americas Protest to pass through metal detectors in order to participate. We wholeheartedly endorse the decision and applaud the court for protecting Americans’ guaranteed liberties against the omnipresent specter of security.

The School of the Americas Protest, held peaceably every year since 1990, draws about 15,000 demonstrators annually to Fort Benning to protest the Western Hemisphere Institute for Social Cooperation, a military training camp for Latin American soldiers. Dubbed the “School of the Assassins” by its opponents, the camp has schooled soldiers in counterinsurgency, interrogation tactics and other military techniques.

Starting in Nov. 2002, the city of Columbus required demonstrators to pass through metal detectors on their way to the protest, callously and shamelessly citing post-Sept. 11 security concerns as justification. After a Bush-appointed judge initially rebuffed the protestors appeal for a legal injunction, the Court rightfully found that the city violated the protestors’ Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search-and-seizure by forcing them to submit to a “mass, warrantless, suspicionless search policy.”

In refreshingly strong language from a normally conservative court, the three-justice panel argued that the government must not use the vague threat of terrorism “as a basis for restricting the scope of the Fourth Amendment’s protection in any large gathering of people.” Reminding us of the eternal foolishness of trading liberties for securities, Judge Gerald Tjoflat wrote for the Court that “it is quite possible that our nation would be safer if police were permitted to stop and search anyone they wanted, at any time, for no reason at all.” Such activity, however, would “effectively eviscerate the Fourth Amendment” and render meaningless our Constitutional protections.

As is often the case, it seems clear that it was the protestors’ message, more than anything else, that led the city to tread on their Constitutionally protected rights. To the Court and to us, this emphasizes all the more the imperative to vociferously guard our freedoms, especially against a rapidly changing world—a reality some politicians are far too eager to use to restrict the liberties of the people. As Tjoflat writes, “We cannot simply suspend or restrict civil liberties until the War on Terror is over, because the War on Terror is unlikely ever to be truly over. Sept. 11, 2001, already a day of immeasurable tragedy, cannot be the day liberty perished in this country.”

We wish the other two branches of government would guard our liberties with such passion.