April 7, 2004 - Last week I was at the financial center of the world – Wall Street and Broad – where our taxi snaked through traffic barriers and was searched from hood to trunk and sniffed by dogs to insure no terrorist drove a car bomb to the steps of the New York Stock Exchange. My appointment was at Chase-Manhattan, a sterile tower rising where my ancestor had pastured pigs in the 17th Century. Building security was tight; a system of passes, searches and barriers that insured no terrorist could reach the offices on the upper floors. When I visited Federal Hall, the nation’s first capital and the place where Washington became our first President, the metal detectors screened my person while my briefcase was x-rayed and my lap-top removed to prove it was a working computer and not a bomb.

At Federal Hall the major exhibit memorialized John Peter Zenger and his New York Weekly Journal that had published articles, ballads and false advertisements which Royal Governor William Cosby deemed seditious libel in that the criticism of him, even if true, tended to “arouse the sentiments of the people” against the government. The paper was seized, its press destroyed and Zenger was imprisoned charged with sedition and libel. Truth was no defense to the charge and the principle was that the greater was the truth, the greater was the libel against government. The 1735 trial established the principle that in America, even under British colonial rule, the press was free to criticize government. The point of the exhibit, its central theme, was that a press free to be critical of authority was at the foundation of democracy. It seemed ironic indeed that the news had just moved that Paul Bremer had just closed a Baghdad newspaper on the ground that its articles tended to provoke opposition to the American occupation.

Beneath us lay the web of the New York Subway, its Wall Street Station burrowing beneath the foundation of the world’s financial system. There people passed unimpeded, untroubled by check points or searches or screening. No police were in evidence, no uniformed security personnel of any description surveyed the masses passing here and there and back again. Most of them carried or pulled a trailing computer case. A few, tourists or students, I could not tell which, carried knapsacks all unexamined. Surely, after Madrid, someone could imagine a terrorist using the subway to attack Wall Street yet there was no evidence that anyone had. But in reality the city could not function with the army ants of commerce impeded in their progress by effective security measures. It is a vulnerability that we cannot practically cure.

The acquittal of Zenger and his resumption of the Journal’s publication may have deferred rebellion for another 40 years. We seem to have thoroughly forgotten the lessons of our own history. In Baghdad the closing of the newspaper did not diminish the volume of the voices opposing the occupation. If anything it amplified them until they now speak with the sounds of automatic fire, mortars, and rocket propelled grenades. In Baghdad it was a spark that lit the fuse of revolt.

It is not, as the President would have it, that Americans love freedom and the forces opposed to us around the world abhor it. It is that we are unwilling to extend to all those rights and privileges to which we give lip-service but act to deny to others. Our acts in Baghdad; our willingness to permit the emotional catharsis of retaliation and revenge shape policy; have done more to engender a dedicated and effective renewed assault upon our homeland than all the newspapers circulating in Iraq or the fatwas pronounced in Mid-Eastern mosques. If we truly love freedom then we must assume the risk of extending it to even those who oppose us. Freedom is truly a risky business.