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policymakers and African American community leaders have identified education as the key
to future movement toward equality. Some within the black community have also pointed
to aspects of black youth culture as an obstacle to achievement, especially for boys.
Moreover, two of the most cherished goals of the movement for racial equality, residential
integration and school desegregation, remain stubbornly out of reach. While some of the
other pressing problems identified in this study—deficiencies in the electoral process and
the civil liberties excesses of America’s counterterrorism policies, to take two important
examples—can clearly be addressed by policymakers, the solutions to America’s racial
divide are more elusive and appear at this juncture to be less obviously dependent on
government action than was the case in the past.
Counterterrorism and Civil Liberties

There are many reasons to be critical of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism
policies, and these issues are addressed in some detail in the chapter on civil liberties. The
central question of this assessment, however, is the state of Americans’ individual freedom
and the degree to which that freedom has been undermined or threatened by government
actions. Generally speaking, the controversies over counterterrorism policies can be traced
to the Bush administration’s assertion of a degree of executive authority that is
extraordinary even in wartime. A number of specific policy debates arose belatedly due to
the administration’s efforts to circumvent the normal checks and balances provided by
Congress and the judiciary. We want to note the damage that some of the policies could
cause if permitted to stand, but we do not want to exaggerate the extent to which they
have actually affected Americans’ civil liberties in the past few years.
The war on terrorism has resulted in significantly fewer violations of individual freedom
than previous conflicts. In particular, American officials and the mainstream media have
gone to great lengths to avoid demonization of Arab Americans and Muslims, in stark
contrast to the treatment of German Americans during World War I and the placement of
Japanese Americans in internment camps just over two decades later. During World War II,
political leaders and the press routinely smeared the Japanese and Japanese Americans
with crude, blatantly racist remarks. In the current situation, those few prominent
Americans (including politicians, media commentators, and civic leaders) who have
impugned the patriotism of Muslims and Arabs in America have themselves often been
sharply rebuked by high officials from both parties and other leaders.
Similarly, there have been no efforts to curb political dissent in ways comparable to what
transpired during both world wars and the Vietnam War. A series of huge antiwar rallies
have been held since the invasion of Iraq, with no significant obstruction by federal or
state authorities.
It remains to be seen whether evolving approaches to protecting national security will in
the end prove equal to the task of countering the new and more lethal form of terrorism,
and whether the existing body of international and domestic law takes the terrorism
challenge sufficiently into account. Nonetheless, this study concludes that the international
reputation of the United States, and thus its ability to pursue the “Freedom Agenda” that
President Bush has so eloquently articulated in his foreign policy, has suffered a significant
setback due to policies attributed to the war on terrorism. Of particular concern for this
examination of the state of freedom in the United States are those policies that have led to
the mistreatment of foreigners in American custody—including extraordinary rendition of
suspects to countries with unsavory reputations regarding due process and torture, the

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