Terror fairy tales: a new book preaches to the choir on civil liberties, but it's a heck of a sermon.

• Author: Cooper, Clarke
• Position: Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of Democracy - Book review

Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of Democracy, by Susan N. Herman, Oxford University Press, 296 pages, $24.95

"IF YOU DON'T do anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about." This phrase is destined to be with us for all time, kept alive by the same people who cheerfully volunteer that they are willing to trade some "liberty for security." Susan N. Herman's new book, Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of Democracy, provides a sharp rebuttal to this compliant mind-set that gave the government more power over the rest of us.

Herman is president of the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at Brooklyn Law School. She specializes in constitutional law, criminal law, and terrorism law, and most of her written work since 2001 has dealt with aspects of the still-outrageous Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools for Intercepting and Obstructing Terrorism Act, or the USA PATRIOT Act as its better known. The book is her 10th anniversary present to the Act, an accounting of its achievements in regulating us, which are deplorable, and our achievements in regulating it, which are negligible.

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Taking Liberties is a great catalog of personal injustice anecdotes, with story after story of people who don't do anything wrong yet have plenty to worry about--they get deported, imprisoned without charge, tortured. Charities are run out of business, businesses are run out of business, databases are plundered. Your coworker sees something and says something. For instance, he sees you fixing your car, and he says you're modifying it to carry bombs. You get put on a watch list and consequently suspended from your job. You try to get yourself removed from that list, and there is no procedure for that. You sue the government. It refuses to say whether you're on any list to begin with--meaning you have no legal standing to make your complaint. Case dismissed.

Or maybe your business is served with a national security letter, demanding--without warrant--transaction information on one, or half, or all of your clients. That might not seem so constitutional to you, but it comes with a gag order forbidding you to speak of the letter to anybody else. And you can't take it to court because legally the letter doesn't exist.

Some of these stories will be familiar because they appear in the news cycle from time to time for an afternoon, providing a charge of delicious drive-time...