My partner and I Negate the resolution, resolved; The benefits of post 9/11 security measures outweigh the harms to personal freedom To start we offer the following observations: The Con side must prove that the harms to personal freedom outweigh the benefits of security measures or that the harms and the benefits are equal The Pro side must prove that (1) the benefits claimed even exist and (2) they must further show that, assuming these benefits exist, they outweigh all harms to personal freedom Contention 1: Increasing democracy as a security measure increases terrorism
According to Drew Schaub, Department of Political Science, Penn StateThe level of democracy variable is positive and statistically significant. As the democracy score of a country increases by 1 point, its expected number of transnational terrorist incidents increases by 4. 4%. The evidence is consistent with the argument that democracy, by ensuring the political rights of its citizens, gives terrorist groups more freedom in association, reducing the costs of their engaging in terrorist activities.
Now according to, Eric Neumayer, London School of Economics, Journal of Peace Research, A one standard deviation increase in US military aid raises the expected count of anti- American terrorism most by 114%, followed by arms exports and military personnel, in which a one standard deviation increase leads to an increase of 45% and 30%… Their model showed that US military support had substantively strong effects on foreign terror on Americans: a significant rise on the measure of military aid (equal in statistical terms to a one standard deviation change) increased anti-American terrorism by 135 per cent.
The same rise in arms exports corresponded to an increase in terrorism of 109 per cent and of 24 per cent in the case of military personnel. Georgetown University states “Meanwhile the use of military force can exacerbate the terrorist threat by stoking anger against the United States and U. S. policies, largely because of the inevitable collateral damage…We also have already seen such sentiments translate into anti-U. S. violence in Afghanistan in the form of many Afghans who have no liking for Taliban ideology or rule but have taken up arms to oppose American forces. As you can see, an increase in democracy, military aid and personnel, and armed forces lead to an increase of terrorism and more people to join terrorist groups, which in effect not only harms the personal freedom of Afghan citizens by being forced to become democratic, but American citizens are now more threatened than ever that there is more probability of terrorist attacks. Contention 2: Post 911 security measures harm US citizens rights Patriot Act harms peoples rights
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, 18,000 Arab and South Asian immigrants have been interrogated because of their religion or ethnic background, not because of actual wrongdoing, The government is allowed to monitor communications between federal detainees and their lawyers, destroying the attorney- client privilege and threatening the right to counsel, and American citizens suspected of terrorism are being held indefinitely in military custody without being charged and without access to lawyers. By passing the PATRIOT Act, the government has blatantly deprived its citizens of some of these fundamental privacy rights. . Kidnapping and Torture to citizens is unconstitutional due to the Due Process Clause According to American University Law Review, In 1974, the Unites States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluded that the Ker-Frisbie doctrine could not be “reconciled with the Supreme Court’s expansion of the concept of due process” and that a court must reject jurisdiction when a defendant is brought before it through “the government’s deliberate, unnecessary and unreasonable invasion of the accused’s constitutional rights. The circumstances of the case before the Second Circuit included allegations that the defendant was kidnapped in Uruguay, brought to Brazil for interrogation and torture, drugged by Brazilian-American agents, and placed on a Pan American Airways flight to the United States, where he was taken into custody by an Assistant U. S. Attorney. As you can see, kidnapping and torture caused to citizens for being potential terrorists is being committed and it is taking away the personal freedoms of these citizens.
Contention 3: Post 911 security measures are not cost-effective Security concerns that happen to rise to the top of the agenda are serviced without much in the way of full evaluation—security trumps economics, as one insider puts it—and such key issues, as acceptable risk, are rarely discussed while extravagant worst case scenario thinking dominates, and frequently savagely distorts the discussion. This worst case scenario thinking is called Probability Neglect, which states that when emotions are intensely engaged, people’s attention is focused on the bad outcome itself, and they are inattentive to the fact that it is unlikely to occur.
They are then inclined to demand a substantial governmental response, even if the magnitude of the risk does not warrant the response. According to a study done by John Mueller, a professor of Ohio State University, America has increased Homeland Security spending by more than $1 trillion in the decade since the 9/11 attacks through federal homeland security expenditures, federal intelligence expenditures, local and state expenditures, and private sector spending. Homeland Security expenditures have even outpaced spending on all crime by $15 billion.
We have inefficiently spent about 1/14 of the National Deficit, and this spending ultimately affects the people. As we know, the higher the deficit, the larger the consequences for the people, such as increased taxes and increased unemployment. According to Milton Friedman, an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago, “the citizen of the United States who is compelled by law to devote something like io per cent of his income to the purchase of a particular kind of retirement contract, administered by the government, is being deprived of a corresponding part of his personal freedom. In his paper, Capitalism and Freedom, he states that Economic freedom is an essential part of Personal freedom, and so as we can see, the Post 9/11 security measures have not been proven cost effective and have even damaged people’s personal freedom through denying them their Economic freedom.
