Craig, it wasn’t Jefferson who made the quote. Here it is:

“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” - Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759

The shocking thing about this piece is how completely the author seems to
have accepted, and even taken advantage of, some of the most unacceptable
and racist parts of the experience her husband was forced to endure.  The fact
that two men were called off the plane after it had boarded is perhaps as
uncontroversial as she presents, only a cause of slight embarrassment - but it
appears just as likely that their detaining was an afterthought, based on no
evidence and no threat but simply the sound of the passenger’s names. 
Maybe this is enough justification to the author, who used the fact of her own
Judaism to try to expedite their experience with the authorities (I suppose that
in order to subvert this entire ordeal that behavior is perhaps acceptable, but
the action isn’t even really addressed here, as if it is perfectly justifiable, almost
common sense). 
I’m guessing that the internment camp example is meant to remove some of
the dissonance the author must feel between her uncritical approach and the
reality of executive power abuse in the US, because the example is such a
reach.  Japanese internment camps were reprehensible, of course.  But they
were actually a less potentially subversive practice than today’s brand of abuse
to the long-term safety of citizens’ basic freedoms.  The context of “war” in
each case is drastically different.  The War on Terror, like other concept wars, is
a war against an ill-defined group, with ill-defined goals and whose practice
could go on indefinitely without any tangible results except for an ever-
increasing pricetag, an increasingly hegemonic expansion of executive power,
and a vague feeling of “security” that I actually think is probably more like a
consistently present feeling of “fear”.  Perhaps the sense of fear, both of the
enemy and of one’s own authorities, is a consistent between the two wars.  The
difference here is how deeply the war is woven into non-wartime civilian
society.  In other words, our military and security apparatuses are at war, but
we are not. 
And as racist as the practice of profiling is, my fear is that the exercise of
executive power, within this peaceful civilian mileu, will actually become more generalizable in a way embodied by
Giorgio Agamben’s writing on “Homo Sacer”.  In other words, creating within
each person the potential to be singled out by the state for punishment, despite
his or her record of transgressions, in the service of “stability”.  It certainly
seems that this is the direction that the war is going in, both domestically and
overseas.

I believe it was Thomas Jefferson who said something
like “Any society willing to sacrifice liberty for
security deserves neither and shall lose both.”

It is hot very flattering that Susan Zakin’s husband’s “only political activism was agitating for payment for his fellow players on a soccer team nearly 20 years”. I am not myself from Lamu Island but from another island, Mauritius, located some distance further from the Kenyan coast. Even then, I am painfully aware of the Somali people’s rage at the time of the “Black Hawk Down” incident, and the horrendous fact, some months before that incident two Dutch soldiers on a UN peacekeeping force had held a teenage Somali boy on a beachside-barbecue-type bonfire, roasting him alive. The picture of their barbaric act had made first-page news in many print media and even on some TV channels. That was around 1991/92. Readers can read about the “Black Hawk Down” incident on the Wikipedia website. By the way, not only is Somalia far more strategically located than Afghanistan as far as the parameters of the Project for the New American Century (check that one also on Wikipedia)are concerned, with bases throughout the country expected to help keep under surveillance the oil assets of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran and the ‘security’ (from Arab oppressors, right?)of Israel, should the military bases located on Saudi soil itself be forced to leave the country, but also Somalia has non-negligible volumes of oil assets of its own. About famine, it has been more than 40 years since Amatya Sen convincingly documented, in his Ph.D. thesis that, historically, it has been conflicts that cause famine, not shortage of food.

A fairly pretentious piece of little substance or contribution.

Zakin is “impatient for the day when we can bring his sons to live in a place where they can grow up without worrying about malaria or periodic political upheaval.” Blah blah! The article is trite vacuous fluff. Style over substance journalism. I live in Africa. Give me Malaria and periodic political upheaval any day, to the constant political oppression of the USA and it’s far
more deadly parasitic diseases of rampant consumerism and voracious globalization.

Hear, hear. Borderline moronic. “.. but because exact dates and times aren’t as important in Africa as they are here, except among the highly educated.” Africa the present continent or Africa of “Tarzan the Ape Man” the 1934 movie?