Posner and Freedom at War Posner and Freedom at War

Peter Berkowitz in a Weekly Standard article: Freedom at War: Civil liberties in the age of terrorism reviews Judge Posner's new book: "Not a Suicide Pact: Civil liberties in the age of terrorism". He starts by reviewing an NYT front page "article" by Linda Greenhouse:

What was truly remarkable about Greenhouse's performance--her lengthy article was not an op-ed column or piece of "news analysis" but a news story of the sort customarily intended to provide a dispassionate and well-rounded account of the facts--was the omission of a single reference to the features of America's national security situation that motivated the Bush administration to turn to the use of military tribunals. In this failure to put national security considerations into the balance, let alone give them their due weight, Greenhouse and her editors at the Times typify the complacency and shortsightedness in thinking about constitutional rights and the war on terror that Judge Richard Posner's trenchant new book seeks to correct.

He then goes on to paint a glowing picture of Posner's reasoning in his new book and includes this excerpt:

[I]n the early years of the twenty-first century, the nation faces the intertwined menaces of global terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. A city can be destroyed by an atomic bomb the size of a melon, which if coated with lead would be undetectable. Large stretches of a city can be rendered uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, merely by the explosion of a conventional bomb that has been coated with radioactive material. Smallpox virus bioengineered to make it even more toxic and vaccines ineffectual, then aerosolized and sprayed in a major airport, might kill millions of people. Our terrorist enemies have the will to do such things and abundant opportunities, because our borders are porous both to enemies and to containers. They will soon have the means as well. The march of technology has increased the variety and lethality of weapons of mass destruction, especially the biological, and also and critically their accessibility. Aided by the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the acquisition of nuclear weapons by unstable nations (Pakistan and North Korea, soon to be joined, in all likelihood, by Iran), technological progress is making weapons of mass destruction ever more accessible both to terrorist groups (and even individuals) and to hostile nations that are not major powers. The problem of proliferation is more serious today than it was in what now seem the almost halcyon days of the Cold War; it will be even more serious tomorrow.