The Price of Security
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"The experts are all but unanimous: There will be another terrorist attack on the United States. When that happens, the opportunity for rational discussion and debate will be over. That's why we feel it's so urgent to address this issue now." — Ted Koppel
Ted Koppel begins his groundbreaking Discovery Channel series with a three-hour primetime special on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11 with The Price of Security. Integral to the special and the live town meeting are interviews with current and former administration members — including Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, former Secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, and Presidential advisor Karen Hughes. Koppel also interviews military and security experts, including the man who oversees the 9/11 detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Admiral Harry Harris, as he explores the dilemma the government faces in the war on terrorism.
The government has been criticized for not doing enough to "connect the dots," but it is also being assailed by civil libertarians for undermining the freedoms on which the United States was founded. Koppel sorts through these critical issues facing Americans and their lawmakers, succinctly bringing viewers all sides of the national debate.
Following the broadcast of KOPPEL ON DISCOVERY: The Price of Security, Koppel will host a live town meeting at Discovery Communications World Headquarters in Silver Spring, Md., with 9/11 family members, civil libertarians, administration officials and members of the 9/11 Commission to discuss what lies ahead for America and the delicate balance between national security and individual liberties.
In Ted's Words
I think if you just stop people in the street and you say to them, what are the biggest changes that have happened to America since 9/11, a number of them might be inclined to say: "Well, security is a lot tighter at the airports, you gotta take your shoes off, you can't carry a pocketknife onto the plane with you. And if you go to certain public buildings, there are these concrete dividers, there are more cops around." They will point to the visual things that have changed over the past five years.
Those are really among the least important changes. This country has changed. Our legal system is different from what it was. We have, after all, been at war in Iraq for three years now. When you look at the issue of what rights or lack of rights detainees have, what can happen to someone who is here on an expired visa or without a visa, the degree to which our laws have been adjusted to accommodate — if not torture, then certainly the violent interrogation of people, it is evident that a profound shift has occurred.
Now it may well be that all of these things are essential to the survival of the United States, but there is another argument to be made, and that is that the bedrock of the United States is the kind of legal system that we have had and enjoyed for many, many years. And when you start tweaking that legal system, when you start calibrating it, you make some changes that can lead to extraordinary ramifications later on in our lives, as well as in the lives of foreign detainees.
So that tension between security, on the one hand, and various liberties, on the other; the manner in which privacy has become more of a factor and less of a factor; the degree to which data mining — which is high-speed computers digging into these millions of pieces of information that exist about all of us and how that information is being used and by whom that information is being used — these are all rather important things that have happened in the United States over the past five years. So that tension is what this program is about.
You have to acknowledge that we, the American people, were pushing the issue of security five years ago, and it's only in the last couple of years that we have begun focusing a little more on the issues of liberties and freedoms and privacy. I don't think there are any real villains in this story. This is a story about America trying to come to terms with a new reality and how are we going to do that. Now is the time that we have to talk about issues of privacy and personal freedom and liberty and whether we want American law — U.S. law as it has always existed in this country — to continue being the bedrock of how we see ourselves and how we are seen overseas.
