July 14, 2006: Cole's List

In reviewing Bruce Ackerman's Before the Next Attack for The New York Review (July 13 issue), David Cole offered his own list of "measures that are legal and appropriate in responding to a terrorist attack and seeking to prevent another attack." Here is the list in bullet format (which Cole did not use) but otherwise in Cole's own words:

• increasing security at borders, airports, and other sites of potential attack, such as chemical plants
• using military force, detentions, and trials, so long as they are consistent with the UN Charter and the laws of war
• investigating potential terrorists pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
• prosecuting those who conspire to engage in terrorist acts or aid or abet such acts
• securing nuclear materials to keep them out of terrorists' hands
• improving coordination between law enforcement and intelligence officials
• increasing aid to foreign communities where poverty and resentment toward the US have been exploited by terrorists
• reducing US dependence on oil to offset the perverse incentives that such dependence creates for American foreign policy
• making progress toward global disarmament

Cole summarizes his list as follows:

Such measures, and they are only a sample, would increase US security without necessarily undermining constitutional principles, and most significantly, without encouraging the rampant anti-Americanism that the Bush administration's disregard of the rule of law has exacerbated around the world.

Personally, I think it is about time that the last remaining superpower show some signs of being a "responsible citizen of the world." I have my own list, which is of the key events that I felt led up to 9/11:

• Refusal to accept or negotiate the Kyoto Protocol
• Refusal to acknowledge the International Criminal Code
• Refusal to acknowledge the riots taking place at key economic summit meetings

Happy Bastille Day!