Former Senator Gary Hart, speaking to a captivated audience in the Auditorium on Wednesday February 28th, offered a provocative redefinition of national security that addresses the country’s dependence on foreign sources of oil and the increasing danger of climate change along with traditional national security concerns.  Contending that the nature of national security has been altered in the wake of the Cold War and the events of 9/11 by the emerging influence of nonstate actors on the international stage, the former Colorado Senator and presidential candidate further proposed a national security policy that focuses on intelligence gathering and special forces units rather than traditional military methods.  Senator Hart argued that these reforms are necessary to meet the challenges of the 21st century and suggested that it is essential for current presidential candidates to address these issues in order to demonstrate their understanding of our future national challenges.

In his lecture, Senator Hart did not shy away from contrasting his proposals with the national security policies of the Bush administration.  In a scathing criticism of the current administration, Hart suggested that not only does the War on Terror fail to grasp the changing topography of international threats, but it has also lent support to an expansion of executive power, which Hart argued has directly resulted in the unlimited detention of offshore prisoners, the suspension of habeas corpus, and a policy of expanded domestic surveillance.  In Hart’s view, al-Qaeda and other terrorist threats must be vanquished not by unilateralism or traditional warfare between nation-states but by intelligence-gathering and the work of special military forces in conjunction with allies, an approach closer to the model of the U.S. government’s infiltration of the domestic mafia.  Though pressed in the question and answer period that a reemphasis on intelligence and covert military operations necessarily leads to an expansion of executive power, Hart insisted that all such actions required congressional oversight and executive accountability.  He pointed to the reforms that he helped advocate as a member of the Senate Select Committee to Investigate the Intelligence Agencies of the U.S. Government (the Church Committee) in the mid-1970’s to demonstrate that robust covert actions can be implemented without yielding undue power to the executive branch.

Senator Hart, who was first elected to the Senate in 1974 and was re-elected in 1980, currently holds the Wirth Chair for Environmental and Community Development Policy at the University of Colorado at Denver.  He began his political career in the early 1970s by managing George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign and ran for president himself in 1984 and again in 1988.  Since retiring from the Senate, Senator Hart has been active as a scholar and national security consultant, most notably serving on the bipartisan U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, also known as the Hart-Rudman Commission, which was commissioned by Bill Clinton in 1998 to study U.S. homeland security.  The Commission performed the most comprehensive review of national security since 1947 and predicted the terrorist attacks on America. 

During his lecture, which was based on his recently published a book The Shield and the Cloak: The Security of the Commons, Senator Hart imparted the frustration he felt in 2001 when the newly installed Bush Administration failed to make the bipartisan Commission’s recommendations a priority.  In an effort to goad the Administration to adopt some of its recommendations, Senator Hart met with then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, a former supporter of the Senator while she was a graduate student at the University of Denver, on September 5, 2001 to underscore the need to focus on domestic terrorist threats. 

The lecture, titled “National Security and the Constitution,” was co-sponsored by the Chicago-Kent American Constitution Society and the National Security and Law Society.  The Chicago-Kent ACS chapter thanks all those who attended the event, and the national ACS organization for the grant which made Senator Hart’s visit possible.