Land of the Free?

May 8th 2008


Liberty in America is not quite as revered as its leaders pretend

NO OTHER country puts as much emphasis on "freedom" as the United
States. Patrick Henry demanded "liberty or death". The national anthem
calls America "the land of the free". Great reformers from Abraham
Lincoln to Martin Luther King have urged America to live up to its
ideal of "freedom". When a group of French Americanophiles wanted to
flatter the United States, they sent the Statue of Liberty.

And no other country boasts as much about its mission to give freedom
to the rest of the world. Woodrow Wilson thought that he had a
God-given duty to bring liberty to mankind. George Bush regards his
foreign policy as a crusade for freedom--"the right and hope of all
humanity".

But how good is America at living up to its own ideals? A new study by
Freedom House tries to answer this question. The fact that Freedom
House has devoted so much attention to the United States is significant
in its own right. Founded in 1941 by a group of Americans who were
worried about the advance of fascism, Freedom House is now the world's
leading watchdog of liberty. The fact that "Today's American: How
Free?" is such a thorough piece of work makes it doubly significant.

The judicious tone of "How Free?" will undoubtedly disappoint leftists.
Freedom House bends over backwards to give the authorities the benefit
of the doubt. Other countries have recalibrated the balance between
freedom and security in the face of terrorists who want to inflict mass
casualties on civilians. America's recent sins, however, are minor
compared with those of its past. Newspapers have published highly
sensitive information without reprisals. Congress and the courts have
repeatedly stepped in to restore a more desirable constitutional
balance.

But the verdict on the Bush years is nevertheless sharp. "How Free?"
not only details and condemns the administration's familiar sins, from
Guantanamo to extraordinary rendition to warrantless wiretapping. It
reminds readers of its aversion to open government. The number of
documents classified as secret has jumped from 8.7m in 2001 to 14.2m in
2005--a 60% increase over three years. Decade-old information has been
reclassified. Researchers report that it is much more difficult and
time-consuming to obtain information under the Freedom of Information
Act.

Government whistleblowers have repeatedly been punished or fired--even
when they have been trying to expose threats to national security that
their bosses preferred to overlook. Richard Levernier had his security
clearance revoked for revealing that some of the country's nuclear
facilities were not properly secured. Border security agents have been
punished for pointing out that the border is inadequately monitored,
and airport baggage-handlers and security people for pointing to
weaknesses in the security system. The Office of Special Counsel, which
was established to enforce laws designed to protect the rights of such
people, is widely regarded as "inept and even hostile to
whistleblowers".

"How Free?" also has some hard things to say about America's
criminal-justice system. The incarceration rate exploded from 1.39 per
1,000 in 1980 to 7.5 in 2006, driven, among other things, by the war on
drugs. America now has one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the
world: 5.6m Americans, or one in every 37 adults, has spent time behind
bars. Even though prison-building is one of the country's great growth
industries, overcrowding is endemic, with federal prisons operating at
131% of capacity. America is also one of the few countries to ban
felons and, in some states, ex-felons from voting. At any one time 4m
Americans--one in every 50 adults--is disenfranchised because of past
criminal convictions. This includes 1.4m blacks, or 14% of the black
male population.

Freedom House's strictures are, if anything, too soft. America insists
on criminalising victimless crimes such as prostitution. Last week
Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam, committed suicide; the
government had thrown the book at her, including racketeering and mail
fraud, because it really wished to penalise the arranging of
assignations between consenting adults. In her suicide note to her
mother she wrote that she could not "live the next six-to-eight years
behind bars for what you and I have both come to regard as this
'modern-day lynching'."

THE WRONG LEMONADE
The American legal system also seems to have lost any sense of
proportion. Christopher Ratte, a professor of archaeology, recently
tried to buy his seven-year-old son a bottle of lemonade at a baseball
game. He was handed a bottle of Mike's Hard Lemonade, an alcoholic
drink, by mistake. Officials noticed the boy sipping the drink and
immediately whisked him off to hospital. He was fine. But the family
was condemned to legal hell: the police at first put the seven-year-old
into a foster home and a judge ruled that he could go home only if his
father moved out. It took several days of legal wrangling to reunite
the family.

"How Free?" repeatedly argues, even as it dredges through the most
depressing material, that the American system has proved admirably
self-correcting. The response of civil-liberties advocates has been
swift and dogged. The Supreme Court has forced the administration to
extend the Geneva conventions to inmates in Guantanamo and other
military prisons. Congress has reined in warrantless wiretapping. The
press has repeatedly published leaked material.

This is perhaps a little optimistic--the courts have been slow and
Congress half-hearted. But nevertheless the self-correction is now
entering a higher gear. All the current presidential candidates,
Democratic and Republican alike, have condemned torture and rendition
and declared their desire to close Guantanamo. Freedom House's new
publication will be an important contribution to this process of
self-correction.